Alright, this is more than likely going to break open old sores and whatnot, but I don't care right now. I know it was agreed upon that every ability needs a page. However, after going through the stubs and seeing some abilities (namely the FFXI abilities...), I'm starting to think that this isn't the right way of going about doing this. A lot of these abilities we can either merge into the correct pages (such as some of the FFXI abilities into the Job pages themselves...where they SHOULD be anyways), or just outright gotten rid of since they're explained pretty much the same on their respective pages (take Find Pits for example. Do we REALLY need a single page for that if it's not even recurring or THAT noteworthy like say....Runic which HAS information for it to deserve its own page?). Otherwise, we'd end up with a bunch of pages that are just stubs (like the FFXI ability pages again....or 1/4 of the ability pages we have...and let's not bring up the FFX-2 Abilities template...). This is more for housekeeping and organization than anything else, but I think that this should be reevaluated again on what to do with them... | |||
8bit BlackMage - Beyond the Sky TALK - Why do chemists call helium, curium, and barium 'the medical elements'? Because, if you can't 'helium' or 'curium', you... um... ._.; - 00:17, May 20, 2010 (UTC) | |||
Similar abilities should be merged whenever possible. Of course, with so many abilities, we have to decide which are "different" and "similar" enough to and from each other. I think a good starter is separating traditional spells from general abilities that have similar effects but are in different jobs and different games. For example, take the spell Holy, a staple of the franchise. Holy should be on its own page and not have any other abilities on it. In FFX-2, there is the Trainer ability Holy Kogoro. This should not be placed on the Holy Page because it is not a spell, specifically not White Magic, and is found in only one game (there are possible other reasons). Now, what we could do is find similar abilities that are lesser-known, job-specific, and appear in one or two games, and mirror Holy Kogoro in the fact that they deal Holy-elemental physical damage. The ability the appears most often should be the page namer; otherwise, we'll be forced to name the page after the most recent (or possibly most "well-known, but that sounds subjective) ability. I cannot currently find another Holy-elemental Physical damage ability... er... I'll be right back. Finish this post later. | |||
Excalibur is Holy-elemental and physical~ But yeah, I do like that idea. The problem is, with so many ability pages here on the wiki, a lot of them would HAVE to get trashed, simply because no other abilities exists in other games that are like those...that's the issue I'm seeing here. That, and like with the Job specific abilities like for FFXI (and Tactics, while we're at it) should be on just their job pages exclusively UNLESS, as you mentioned, another ability exists that's similar to it. | |||
8bit BlackMage - Beyond the Sky TALK - Why do chemists call helium, curium, and barium 'the medical elements'? Because, if you can't 'helium' or 'curium', you... um... ._.; - 01:53, May 21, 2010 (UTC) | |||
You're right when it comes to FFXI, as the FFXI policy states that is how job abilities will be covered (sorry the general ability policy isn't that explicit). I'm not sure if we should extend the "placement of single-appearance job abilities on job articles" policy to other games. A lot of the Tactics series skills are already, um.... not documented. ._.; [[Fire Whip]], [[Rockfall]], Sleep Blade.... etc. And it is true there are a lot of them. However, we set FFXI aside because our scope does not fully cover the game as a whole, not just in respect to its abilities. Therefore I am hesitant to accept that "there's a lot of abilities" is an adequate reason for including Tactics (and perhaps X-2, it's similar volume-wise) in an ability-article exclusion policy. This is open to debate, of course. Perhaps we can start on a project that searches for abilities with similar effects (like the Holy Kogoro/Excalibur pair) and start creating articles for them? That way we can try to gather up what may seem like abilitiy "stragglers" and combine them onto one page. Maybe there won't be so many single-appearance abilities whose effects are completely unique that they warrant a page just for themselves. | |||
The only problem that I'm seeing here with combining some things like Holy Daigoro/Excalibur is that if we include those, we'd have to pretty much include ANYTHING that deals with the same thing as the ability (i.e. physical Holy elemental attacks in general). Seems like a truckload in itself x_x | |||
The FFXI abilities are done like this. Or they will be. — YuanSalve!Acta 07:13, May 21, 2010 (UTC)
Yes...that is exactly what I was thinking should be done! Though I'm no expert on FFXI, so I can't go around fixing things up like that x_x | |||
Old topic is finished, but I read something and thought I must say something. Firstly: All abilities should be on a "List of Abilities" page, or on one of its childs. This wiki doesn't do this at the moment, but according to the old rules decided by an ordinary user, it's what we should do, just because it makes sense. However the structure was never decided upon and nothing happened. It disgusts me still to this day.
- "we set FFXI aside because our scope does not fully cover the game as a whole"
Lies! We cover XI as fully as reasonably possible. And actually, that's just as much as any other game all most. We don't want to overkill the wiki with XI, but we don't have to. XIclopedia makes an article for everything (and is actually a pretty lame wiki when you look past the colossal article count and start to see what it lacks) but the FFWiki does not do that for any game. Are rule is that an item has to have three (? I think I moved it up to four in the cases of armor, weapons and accessories, but items were not discussed) appearances to be an article, or be a rather notable key item. So by not making a page for every item in XI, we aren't "not fully covering it", we are covering it as much as reasonably possible.
Basically, when I was thinking about how to organise XI, I looked at the wiki in a way I've never done before. The wiki has become a collection of lists. To cover all of Xi's content, we needed:
- A List of enemies (had to be split into subpages because there are many) - and creating pages only for genera and enemies that give a title upon defeat (when I came here a while back this wasn't been kept to, and no one cared - surprised I am not). This results in as few articles as possible: however within these articles we are covering every enemy as much as is needed. Each member of a genus doesn't differ that much, makes it easier.
- A List of weapons. These articles are huge - technically we need to split them into more subpages since each weapon should have its stats in a table, each entry anchored.
- And the same as above for armor, accessories, and items. But take note, this is what we do for other games. An XI appearance counts as a +1 appearance just like any other game.
- List of characters. If a character is important enough it gets a page. Like any other game.
- A List of jobs of sorts, and each job gets a page.
- A List of abilities. This is organised differently to other game's but functions in the same way. Enemy Abilities works in the same way.
- And some terminology articles. In fact more than usual since XI is very different.
I don't know if I missed something, but if I did it's the same as other games. Oh, locations. Yup, works the same as other games. Sub-locations go on main locations page under a subheader, just like every other game. Except XI locations are a bit bigger, that's it.
However, XI's coverage is in shambles since our source sucks (that's XIclopedia, not XI, XI's a better source, but takes time), and therefore I can't (or, couldn't) create articles to perfection without certain information. Maybe this means XIV will be much easier to handle. Anyway, the XI structure is pretty much in place. Too much information for a non-playing community to handle.
I've gone far from the original subject. Hmm... 88.108.97.77 14:44, June 11, 2010 (UTC)