Battlestar Wiki talk:Standards and Conventions

Verb Tense (moved from Battlestar Wiki:Characters)

What about it? Some pages are written in the present tense, some in the past and some switch. I, personally, prefer past tense. That way, in ten years, it doesn't sound like the show just aired. What do others think? --Day 04:24, 31 August 2005 (EDT)

I favor present tense, which is traditional for discussing fictional characters ("Achilles kills Hector in Book 22 of the Illiad, not "Achilles killed Hector in Book 22 of the Illiad".)

The battle summaries would be a possible exception to this - as histories, the narrative flows best in the past tense, but as fiction, the events are "always" occurring every time the viewer watches - but that should be dealt with elsewhere. --Peter Farago 04:29, 31 August 2005 (EDT)

Hrm. Point. I was thinking, though, that when you read, for instance, the Lord of the Rings, "Gandalf said" rather than "says" and "Frodo did" rather than "does." However, this is a concern to more than just character pages... So where do we put it? --Day 05:31, 31 August 2005 (EDT)

When speaking of works of fiction, technically either past or present is correct, as long as one stays uniform. More traditionally, you would speak of a fictional work in the present tense (if you were giving a book report, for example) beacuse the work is considered timeless. If I review The Illiad today, someone who reads my review 50 years from now can read the book. I feel the same applies here.

In response to Day's concern about where to put it, there seems to be no central point for the guideline once it's decided. We could have a general "BSG Wiki Standards" page that would outline the preferred methods for future editors. Anyone else have any thoughts? Colonial one 21:25, 1 September 2005 (EDT)

A good future idea, but I'm not ready to go there yet. --Peter Farago 21:30, 1 September 2005 (EDT)

Okay, I'm game. --Peter Farago 01:24, 9 September 2005 (EDT)

Check this out, then: Battlestar Wiki:Standards and Conventions. I hope no one beat me to the punch. I've not put much on it, but I'll move this discussion to it's talk page, at least. --Day 05:07, 10 September 2005 (EDT)

Image Sizes

I tend to think that images that are whole-screen captures (and thus letterbox dimensions) should be about 300px wide. This is, however, based entirely on how that looks on my browser window, which is pretty large, but not maximized on a 1280x1026 resolution. So that might look horrid on some other screen. Anyway, with that in mind, I resize all my full-screen captures to be 600px wide since that's a nice two times what I think they should be viewed at. Should I be even thinking this way, or should I just be telling the articles to be thumbs and set my preferences for larger thumbs? In the case of cropped screen-caps, though, I think 300px is too wide, or rather, often too tall. How do others think on this? --Day 05:21, 10 September 2005 (EDT)

Yes, use your preference settings for this. FWIW, I'm a fan of judicious cropping. It helps make smaller thumbs more legible. --Peter Farago 12:28, 10 September 2005 (EDT)

If you're trying to illustrate something specific, sure, cropping is needed in most cases. However, for episode pages and, I think, when trying to show a scene, the whole screen is good for its sense of context. I could be wrong. --Day 16:09, 10 September 2005 (EDT)