Forum:CT:Layout Guide restructuring

Forums > Consensus track archive > CT:Layout Guide restructuring
This page is an archive of a community-wide discussion. This page is no longer live. Further comments should be made in the Senate Hall or new Consensus Track pages rather than here so that this page is preserved as a historic record.
The result of the debate was Support proposal. 1358 (Talk) 14:01, 28 March 2022 (UTC)

Following Forum:SH:Layout Guide restructuring, I am bringing this up for a formal vote.

The Layout Guide (LG) and the Wookieepedia:Manual of Style (MoS) are easily the two most important article policies. However, the Layout Guide (and the MoS, to an extent), which originates from the early Wookieepedia/Wikipedia era of 2005, has always been the type of policy where more stuff is added all the time and nothing is ever removed or restructured. While parts of the policy are well written, comprehensive, and updated, others are messy and outdated. I came across this while thinking of an LG amendment to implement reference support in Quote templates and realized the LG doesn't just need updating—it needs restructuring. Another big problem is that the main LG page hosts both general rules AND in-universe article specific rules, and the OOU LG duplicates much of the information on the main LG.

Therefore, I've attempted to restructure much of the LG, without really rewriting much at all.

  • Restructuring the Layout Guide(s) into five distinct sections: to provide some basic structure, I've taken the liberty of inventing four main sections
    1. Article header: everything before the infobox
    2. Article infobox and introduction: everything between the infobox and before the first heading
    3. Article body: everything between the first heading and the first heading in the indexing section (Appearances for IU articles, Sources for OOU articles)
    4. Article indexing: this part encompasses everything used for verifiability/citation purposes, i.e. Appearances (IU), Sources (IU, OOU), Notes and references (IU, OOU), and External links (IU, OOU). The succession box must be placed before the Notes and references section due to technical constraints.
    5. Article footer: everything after the contents of the last section
  • New Layout Guide for in-universe (IU) articles: it makes much more sense that there exists three different Layout Guides: one for general rules, one for IU articles, and one for OOU articles. Therefore, I've moved all IU-specific stuff to a fresh page, and the OOU-specific stuff to the OOU LG.
  • New sections for de facto practices
    • Nomination templates: CAN/GAN/FAN templates have been placed in random orders in the past, and while this is no big deal since they are temporary, it's good to have the Official Order written down somewhere.
    • Table of contents: since virtually every article has a Table of contents (TOC), we might as well note this in the LG. I've also moved the notoc=1 rules from the Top template section here.
    • Sectioning: this is probably the most significant addition of my restructuring so far. However, everything I've added is basically de facto already a rule through precedent.
    • Navboxes: apparently, the navboxes have not been covered in the LG until now.
  • Other Minor Changes
    • Some sections have been moved around: I tried to order the Quotes, Images, and Stub sections in some sort of more logical way.
    • Examples have been updated and added: sections that lack real examples have received one. Existing, outdated sections have been updated
    • Miscellaneous section removed: I realized this is also in the Manual of Style and I feel like it fits better there.

This CT approves the following three items:

  1. Replacing the existing Wookieepedia:Layout Guide with the contents of this page (diff)
  2. Replacing the existing Wookieepedia:Layout Guide/Out-of-universe with the contents of this page (diff)
  3. Approving the creation of Wookieepedia:Layout Guide/In-universe with the contents of this page

Support

  1. 1358 (Talk) 21:26, 18 March 2022 (UTC)
  2. OOM 224 21:28, 18 March 2022 (UTC)
  3. Full support, great work, Ecks! LucaRoR Sigil of House Serenno (Talk) 21:28, 18 March 2022 (UTC)
  4. Samonic Thrawns Chimaera (Talk) 21:30, 18 March 2022 (UTC)
  5. Imperators II(Talk) 21:31, 18 March 2022 (UTC)
  6. VergenceScatter (talk) 21:32, 18 March 2022 (UTC)
  7. Awesome! Now let's get rid of meetings.... JediMasterMacaroni(Talk) 21:34, 18 March 2022 (UTC)
  8. Great work as always, ecks. Ayrehead02 (talk) 21:38, 18 March 2022 (UTC)
  9. —spookywillowwtalk 21:39, 18 March 2022 (UTC)
  10. 01miki10 Open comlink 21:56, 18 March 2022 (UTC)
  11. Looking forward to snowball this bad boy and move on to referenced quotes! NanoLuukeCloning facility 22:02, 18 March 2022 (UTC)
  12. SilverSunbird (talk) 22:34, 18 March 2022 (UTC)
  13. Lewisr (talk) 22:59, 18 March 2022 (UTC)
  14. I'm sure Lew meant to say pog here, so I'll do it for him. Pog. NBDani (talk) 23:19, 18 March 2022 (UTC)
  15. DarthRuiz30 (talk) 23:28, 18 March 2022 (UTC)
  16. Wok142 (talk) 23:30, 18 March 2022 (UTC)
  17. Manoof (he/him/his) (talk) 02:09, 19 March 2022 (UTC)
  18. Braha'tok enthusiast Hello there 03:12, 19 March 2022 (UTC)
  19. This has been something I've been wanting for some time. So happy for it to take off. MasterFredCommerce Guild(talk) 11:15, 19 March 2022 (UTC)
  20. GalacticRepublicEmblem-Traced-TORkit Winterz (talk) 13:21, 19 March 2022 (UTC)
  21. Jedi Order ImpacticForce (Talk) 14:40, 19 March 2022 (UTC)
  22. Rsand 30 (talk) 15:32, 19 March 2022 (UTC)
  23. IFYLOFD (Talk) 16:04, 19 March 2022 (UTC)
  24. Green Tentacle (Talk) 11:27, 20 March 2022 (UTC)
  25. grunny@wookieepedia:~$ 14:58, 20 March 2022 (UTC)
  26. Commander Code-8 Hello There! 10:56, 21 March 2022 (UTC)
  27. Immi Thrax RainbowRebellion2 (she/her) (talk) 08:29, 25 March 2022 (UTC)

Oppose

Discussion

  • Reading through the proposed page updates, there are a few areas where there could be some cleanup, such as with some outdated examples. One thing in particular that stood out, though, was on the main page with the "hide" parameter of the {{Top}} template. The problem with that one is that it's intended to separate canon and Legends pages which have the same title, even though the naming policy already says that if canon and Legends pages are competing for the same title, canon wins and the Legends page should have a disambiguator. I think it might be prudent to remove that parameter and reword things to make it clear what's what. SilverSunbird (talk) 21:57, 18 March 2022 (UTC)
    • You're absolutely right that there are parts of the Layout Guide that are outdated. That's why this restructuring exists in the first place. The idea with this initial restructuring is to set the groundwork for a modern, up-to-date Layout Guide, not to fix everything in one sweep - and that's not what I set out to do. That's why I did not include a rewritten Quotes section in this proposal. Updating the Layout Guide will take a lot of work and probably plenty of CTs, and this is just the first one. 1358 (Talk) 22:32, 18 March 2022 (UTC)