User talk:Mindedif

Welcome to the Order, Mindedif!

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Feel free to contact me on my talk page if you need anything. Sol Pacificus^(Cyfiero) 13:48, July 26, 2017 (UTC)

Citing to Wikipedia

Hey Mindedif, I just wanted to welcome you to this community and also thank you for replying to my forum post. Our wiki has suffered from a loss in manpower lately, with most people—even the administrators—on long hiatuses, so we could definitely need and would appreciate some new editors such as yourself. :)

Anyways I'm glad that you understood my reasoning for my proposal because I felt like I wasn't sure I was coming across clearly. You're totally right about the fact that citing first and foremost is about explaining and showing honestly where you got information, not whether it's reliable or not, which comes second. While ideally we should always strive to use the most reliable of sources, absent that, we should use the best we can even if it is not a decent source at all. Citing to even unreliable sources, if that is where we really took the information from, allows readers to verify and gauge the reliability of your information in turn. So I'm really glad you understand this. (I'm just going to go ahead and repeat this part in the forum for the others actually xD).

My only concern is that I wanted to double-check if you understand the context behind why the others might not be in support of my proposal since you're new here. You see, technically, the default policy for any franchise wiki (like Star Wars for example), is that every information we take has to be from the official franchise source. We are not allowed to take any outside information whatsoever. This is part of a policy called Attribution. Our wiki doesn't explain our policies too well, so see [w:c:starwars:Wookieepedia:Attribution|Wookieepedia's Attribution policy]] for the same thing, only in Star Wars instead. Just substitute Lucasfilms, Ltd. with Ubisoft and you have the same policy here.

Because for various reasons explained in my forum post, even the admins of this site are making exceptions to this policy. Personally, I think that is fine, but it's an un-codified thing. They want to allow exceptions to the Attribution policy, and yet not clarify to readers they're making these exceptions -_- because they feel like they're violating the Attribution policy if they do. What they fail to understand is that, saying you're taking information from outside sources isn't violating the purpose of the policy; it's taking information from outside sources that's violating the policy. It seems they think that if they take information from outside sources without admitting it to readers, they're not going against the spirit of the policy. At that point, though, they should just modify it. (I'll just go ahead and repeat this in the forum for the others also xD.) Sol Pacificus^(Cyfiero) 13:48, July 26, 2017 (UTC)

Gotcha ;)  I guess I missed (or maybe just disregarded) the part where we shouldn't use any outside information whatsoever. Mainly because I personaly see AC like only a slightly alternative version of the real world, where historical events we know of happened, but slightly differently than we think they did. That's the brilliance of the whole AC concept for me. (Star Wars has like what, some of the same laws of physics and human(oid)s as we do? :D They can do anything they want and nobody complains.) And I think the AC developers and especialy the writers operate like that too, I mean just by listening to them saying how much historical research of actual, real history they do for every instalment of the franchise what else are we to think, right? Thus me, not seeing reason not to use real world info. Thanks for clarifing that for me ;)

My offer to double and tripple check the info still stands though, if not for the real world facts (if it's decided not to use real worl info at all), then for the AC info as I might have part of AC franchise someone else doesn't. And I might actualy try to add some needed pictures to the site ^.^ Mindedif (talk) 14:48, July 26, 2017 (UTC)

Hm, well I don't have an immediate chart of all the articles whose information could use some double-checking on facts on hand though. You might want to check out the Cold War article as I was a bit skeptical about that. On the other hand, there are certainly a lot of articles which could use more pictures. Police is a prominent one. If you have Syndicate, I'd be very grateful if you can provide images of police officers for that article. :) In general, you can check out Category:Articles needing images for a list of articles tagged with needing images. Sol Pacificus^(Cyfiero) 23:15, July 28, 2017 (UTC)

Helping out with the wiki

So this is about your side-note in your post. As I said, it's really nice to have a newcomer ^_^ because my goodness, you can't believe how much more hands we need around here. :(

I understand if you feel nervous about editing. Actually, we haven't mentioned this in this wiki, but if you go over to Wookieepedia or Wikipedia, there's a policy called [w:c:Wookieepedia:Be bold in updating pages|Be Bold] which actively encourages editors to be confident about their edits. It's much more efficient that way so everyone provides as much input as possible. Of course, there's always the possibility of editors being too arrogant or aggressive, but that would be more of an issue of failing to compromise or be courteous. As long as you know when to take a step back and negotiate when someone disagrees, then it's perfectly fine to be bold.

But anyways, I understand if you don't feel the confidence for that just yet, and that's okay! Take your time and edit at your comfort level. I myself sometimes am afraid I'm too intimidating about my corrections of other people's edits.

If you want to help out more with policy and, as you suggested, verifying sources rather than editing, I would actually very much welcome it. Usually the former is more of an administrative affair, but since the admins are mostly all absent, we could use some help in that area. If you'd like, I could give you a list of all the issues we have with policies, and you can lend your thoughts on them or even help carry out some needed changes. Or if you just want to focus solely on verifying information from cases where editors are taking from external sources, that's fine too. Sol Pacificus^(Cyfiero) 14:07, July 26, 2017 (UTC)

I'm usually just not sure what exactly to do with, for example a page that is a stub or is in desperate need of revamp :D

So yeah, send me that list and if you need anything you think I might be able to do, just shout out to me and I'll see what I can do Mindedif (talk) 15:17, July 26, 2017 (UTC)

It would take me a little while to prepare a complete list, but off the top of my head, three policy issues we have is:

1) Plural vs. singular article titles

A lot of our articles, such as mercenaries, eagles, bombs, swords, etc. are in the plural, and this isn't actually proper grammatical convention for wiki. However, some editors maintain that this is better for AC where for example, "mercenaries", "swords", courtesans, thieves, are all common classifications or factions in the AC series. A counter to that is that our wiki is committed to a lore-based approach not a gameplay-based approach, and a lot of these classifications are for gameplay purposes only. For example, even though thieves, mercenaries, and courtesans are the three hirable factions in the Ezio games, in terms of lore, there are a lot of characters who are mercenaries or thieves who aren't part of these gameplay factions. Also, not every game organizes "groups of weapons" or "groups of people" the same. Anyways, our wiki is inconsistent about plural and singular article titles, and it's quite frustrating, but most people can't be bothered to discuss this.

2) Different articles for different regimes

Currently, we usually have one article on each country, be it France, India, Egypt, Japan, etc. The question is, should we have a different article for say the Kingdom of France vs. the current French Fifth Republic (merged with "France"?) This is Wikipedia policy. The article for the current regime for a country is merged with the article or the country in general, but there are also articles covering all former regimes. Our wiki seems to be unable to decide if we should have it like this as well. We don't have an article for Kingdom of France, but just France, which makes it honestly confusing in the context of the French Revolution when referring to France just before the revolution. Yet, at the same time, we have an article on different Chinese dynasties like the Ming dynasty, and we also have an article on the Ottoman Empire.

3) Unknown birth dates

So if you compare the articles Alejandro Ortega de Márquez, Basilisk, and Cyril of Rhodes, you'll see three different formats for the birth dates of characters whose birth dates are unknown. For Alejandro, it gives "unknown", for Basilisk, it only says when he dies, and for Cyril, it abbreviates "died" to "d." Cyril's example is the common Wikipedia standard. We haven't decided which one is the most important. The reason why I and a couple of other editors objected to "unknown" at first is because even though their birth dates are unknown to us, it might not be to in-universe characters, and we're supposed to be writing from an in-universe perspective. However, sources like The Essential Guide uses the (unknown – [insert date]) format anyways.

Hope this isn't too much. :P Let me know if it is. It's weird for me to give so much to a new editor, but anyways just let me know if you have any thoughts or opinions on any of these, that's all. Sol Pacificus^(Cyfiero) 23:15, July 28, 2017 (UTC)