User:Brandingopportunity/User blog/Verbosity

Hi folks,

I'd like to talk about a little concept in Pathfinderwiki writing I like to call verbosity. I first encountered the term back in the mid-eighties when I was playing games like the Zork series, Planetfall (my fav), and Leather Goddess of Phobos. While swapping 5.25s I discovered that if you typed the command "verbose" it would give you the full description of a room, even if you had already visited it. Without it, the description of an already-explored room would be shortened.

So how does this apply to the wiki? Well, when I'm writing an article I pay attention to make it make sense all on its own. I pay particular attention when writing a whole series of articles on related subjects.

For instance, let's say I am writing an article on the Shimmerglens. The easiest thing would be to say something like, "The Shimmerglens are a spooky swamp-land inhabitend by the fey and avoided by humans". Although everything would technically be true, a person who knew nothing about the Shimmerglens would receive very little information. In which country is the swamp? Near what city? Why do the humans avoid it? In my opinion, it is important to put a given subject within a greater context, otherwise readers who don't already know some info will have to go searching around the links to figure out what you are talking about.

I am not saying that one has to include all the possible related info on a subject, but I think it is important to put in a bit of "window dressing" in to make it make sense on its own.

Any thoughts/comments?

BrOp

HA, so what you're really saying is that we should be creating liches, not skeletons, yes? —Brandingopportunity (talk) Fri, 11 Sep 2009 17:44:15 +0000

I was thinking the same problem. One way to handle it is to have at least a reference to the greater area (e.g. Katapeshi) within the text. The categories at the bottom of the article is the more typical way, but I think that at least a word in the text is much more friendly.

Dimitris —Dmeta (talk) Sat, 04 Jul 2009 16:11:16 +0000

I've always felt the window dressing is the difference between a stub and a complete article; a stub may include all the relevant information, but unless it's composed in a manner that can be easily accessed by a visitor to the wiki, unless the information flows logically, it's nothing more than a skeleton. And such lower undead are abominations that should not be tolerated in a project such as this; all they do is take up space and occasionally gnaw on new chroniclers.

You make a good observation about articles standing on their own. It's easy to forget that the information we add needs to bear its own weight, especially when many articles begin as nothing more than a red link. Doing so is just as important, if not more so, than ensuring every article is naturally linked to from the main page.

HA —Heaven's Agent (talk) Sat, 04 Jul 2009 22:49:08 +0000

Liches are to busy with their own goals to be of much benefit to the project. We'd need something capable of the proverbial heavy lifting. Vampires might do the trick... —Heaven's Agent (talk) Fri, 11 Sep 2009 19:21:41 +0000