Forum:(from CP:Talk) Standards and Conventions

(From Talk:Jenka)

I think it would be a good idea to adopt "American English" as opposed to "British English" or "Australian English" as the de-facto standard for the wiki. The reason, very simply put, is American English is the standard in Girl Genius itself; if the Foglios wrote the thing using British English, that would be my preference for the standard. This entails talking about "colors" rather than "colours," "defense" rather than "defence," giving double quotes (") precedence over single quotes ('), and so on. It's not a big deal, but attempting to achieve some consensus should deter picayune edit wars later, when the contributors aren't so congenial.  Opinions? -- that old bearded guy 15:10, 27 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Sounds reasonable. I should point out that in the case of the KDLers, the spelling is part of the proper name of their group, so it'd be exempt, journalistically speaking. --mnenyver 15:20, 27 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Certainly. The same principle applies: cite/describe things in the dialect in which they are created.  Klaus Defence League must be correct. -- GB, briefly doing business as 128.165.144.60 18:47, 27 February 2008 (UTC)
 * My habits will undoubtedly cause much mid-Atlantic slippage here. I ask forgiveness in advance.
 * Corgi 10:35, 29 February 2008 (UTC)


 * I concur, but I'm an American, Western American even, living just one or two (counting Jefferson) states down the freeway from the Foglios, so it's easy for me. Hy don't tink ve should tek usselves too seriously, doh, dis ain't vikipeedonya.  Vell, Hy guess dat Jaegersprecht falls in de "dialect in vich dey iz created" rule. Zarchne — 00:48, 28 February 2008 (UTC)
 * That may be the case, but if anyone actually writes an entire article in Jaegersprecht they deserve either a medal or to be locked in a room with Bang. Possibly both. -- Acacia 00:59, 28 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Ho, dun't tempt me. (Und ussing translator vould be cheating.) — Zarchne 01:20, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

I am starting to think it would be worthwhile to cooperate with the apparent Wikia (MediaWiki?) convention/expectation (e.g., pages being deprecated as dead-ends) to try to link to other pages in the GG wikia in the main text of an article (which would imply creating pages for nearly everything, then applying the stub template) and use references for links to outside sources (even GG itself). Given how the yahoo discussions go, I can even imagine one page of wikia (especially as Forum topics) for each page of GG. (My goal is not to replace other sites but subsume index them.) — Zarchne 01:20, 28 February 2008 (UTC)
 * I'm not totally sure what you're saying here, other than "turn outside links in the text into references listed at the end", which does sound like a good standard to use. Other than that, don't we already have the articles interlinking? We just haven't got all the articles yet. - Acacia 01:30, 28 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Sounds like a good practice. I'll start checking my links. We really could use a friendly style guide for this site too. --mnenyver 01:40, 28 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Personally, I would prefer to see the outside links remain in the text. That "apparent Wikia convention/expectation" doesn't necessarily require encyclopedia-like referencing.  This isn't an encyclopedia we're writing here, and doing it with embedded links, rather than references at the end, allows extra opportunities for clever wit, biting sarcasm, subtle irony, and all that good stuff.  I don't think that dead-end or orphaned pages will be much of a problem once we get this thing close to fully constructed; for that problem, patience is the solution. -- that old bearded guy 01:42, 28 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Hmm. You have a point. Eh, I'm easy. I'll go with whatever everyone else decides. :D (Helpful, ain't I?) --mnenyver 01:44, 28 February 2008 (UTC)