Forum:Sweeping changes

This is probably going to sound slightly insane, but we've been on something of a roll with site-altering changes, so I figured I might as well put some up for discussion.

In-universe headings
I've been feeling for a while that the current heading system of dividing character summaries - "Day X," "After Day X," "Book title," etc. - is not what we should be using. Certainly, it's probably the most convenient, and it does effectively subdivide each article - but it completely ruins any pretense that the character articles are in-universe. The articles are supposed to be written from the perspective that these are "real" people with ongoing lives and histories; just because our windows into their lives are (without exception) twenty-four hour periods, doesn't mean that's how their life stories should be summarized. Plus, the status quo, while well suited to the season/day mapping, really falls apart when it comes to other titled media. Think of how it's going to be when the movie comes out. If it's just called 24, as I suspect, what will we use - "Movie"? "Film"? That's the possibility that really made me realize the need for something different.

As an alternative, I feel we should use a system similar to Wookieepedia: a single "Biography" h2 heading, or some equivalent, which is then subdivided into descriptive, context-aware headings, as necessary. Here's how I imagine this working:


 * For major characters (multiple seasons, etc.), the first subheading would be "Early life and career," containing everything regarding what happened before their first appearance, followed by sections on each major event (read: season) they were involved in.
 * For the most minor or mentioned characters, i.e. Stu, don't use any headings at all - their contribution can be summarized in a single paragraph, so there's no need.
 * Remove any and all references to specific Days or Seasons within the article texts, outside of the Background notes and information section and the sidebar.

The one big gray area I can think of would be characters with large roles in single seasons with not a whole lot of backstory, like Arlo Glass. In those cases, the "Biography" heading should probably stay to keep things organized, but without any subdivisions below that. Then, at the top of that section, a general summary paragraph, like "Arlo Glass was present at CTU New York for the duration of so-and-so crisis."

Here's some example pages I put together to demonstrate how the new system might look: Jack Bauer, Teri Bauer. Notice how the subheadings I chose to use on each of those were specific to the characters themselves - outside of a set few "standard" heading names for the major arcs of each season, I imagine there could be a pretty good degree of flexibility in what individual articles use. For example, it wouldn't make sense to use the "Cordilla virus sting" heading in the article on Alan Milliken; something else specific to that storyline would work better.

Admittedly, something like this system is significantly harder to pull off than at Wookieepedia, for one simple reason: there is no concrete timeline for 24 as a whole, and there's not a single year reference that can be taken at face value. Still, I think it's something that, if done well, will significantly improve the overall credibility of the project. Now, this would obviously be a huge undertaking - if we do this, it would probably make sense to centralize efforts on a project page, showing which articles have been changed over and which need attention. We could even make it a component of the Ultimate Project, along with filling out the IU sidebar info for each character.

More formal citations
Another change I had in mind, which you might have noticed on those sample articles, is the introduction of more formal, Wikipedia-style citations. While the title-in-parentheses system is effective, it doesn't really allow much flexibility in distinguishing different parts of a paragraph that came from different sources or levels of canonicity. The only way to do that is to stick in these giant links in parens in between words, which looks awful. But putting them all at the end of a paragraph, like I did on the Los Angeles page, isn't helpful either, because it doesn't show where each piece of information came from.

My solution is to use a system basically like Wookiepedia's, and use ref tags to link to each source. The "Early life and career" section on the Jack Bauer sample page shows how this would work - this way, as many different sources as necessary could be cleanly cited without cluttering up the text.

This could actually be done pretty simply - we'd just change the ep template from the current version to something like: That way, the current pages that have been correctly cited would automatically change over to the new system; all we would need to do is add the tag at the end of the page.

Okay - I think that's about all I wanted to get to for this post. Thoughts? Ideas? --Pyramidhead 20:58, November 9, 2010 (UTC)