UESPWiki:Community Portal/Archive 52

This is an archive of past UESPWiki:Community Portal discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page, except for maintenance such as updating links.

Help recovering a lost 2016 interview with Lawrence Schick

Almost a year ago, in late July, Lawrence Schick participated in a second interview with op-cast.com (after this one). It included a number of small lore details that I had hoped to add to several pages, but I never got around to it. I finally remembered the interview in recent days, but I found out that the site that hosted the podcast is gone and I'm having trouble finding any copy or archive of the interview elsewhere. It also was never transcribed at UESP like the first interview. This is the original URL where the podcast was located: http://www.op-cast.com/eso-rp/special-zos-lore-master-interview-with-lawrence-schick

All I have left are my brief notes on the podcast, which I've posted to pastebin. The obvious problem is that without that podcast at hand, none of my notes can be properly sourced or verified. If anyone can provide a copy of the podcast, I would be very thankful. Croaker (talk) 23:26, 15 June 2017 (UTC)

Ah, that's a shame. Might be worth trying to contact the creators? —Legoless (talk) 23:39, 15 June 2017 (UTC)

I'm digging into that now. So far, it looks like the podcast's creators not only shut down their site, but also deleted their profiles from the ESO role-playing forum where they were advertising their podcasts. Croaker (talk) 04:51, 17 June 2017 (UTC)

Here is a link to a copy of the interview, courtesy of Acer and Emmy on Discord. Now is the time to transcribe it, if anyone has the inclination. —Legoless (talk) 00:41, 26 June 2017 (UTC)

I can. I'll get on that soon. Echo (talk) 01:10, 26 June 2017 (UTC)

Thanks, Legoless! I was at a loss and about to concede that maybe the internet does forget some things after all. And thank you in advance, Echo, for the transcription. Croaker (talk) 02:57, 26 June 2017 (UTC)

(←) Before I forget, the transcription is done (it still needs links and probably some error correction for some ESO names that I am unfamiliar with). Should it be added to the previous entry's page, or given a new one? Echo (talk) 20:21, 1 July 2017 (UTC)

Excellent work. Probably best to go with a new page for it, especially since the previous one featured both Lawrence Schick and Jessica Folsom and this one only has Schick. According to my bookmark, this interview's titled "*Special* ZOS Lore Master Interview with Lawrence Schick", so maybe that can serve as the page title, minus the asterisks (unless we're fine with asterisks). Croaker (talk) 21:01, 1 July 2017 (UTC)

That works, if there are no objections. It'll need some info for intro text though (date especially). Echo (talk) 04:11, 4 July 2017 (UTC)

Online:Ancestral Tombs

I've seen that a few people have been adding red links to Online:Ancestral Tombs, which means that there is demand for such a page. I'd like to create it, but I'm not sure how to approach it, as the ancestral tombs fall into a few categories:

• The named and accessible tombs that are related to certain quests; some of them have a loading screen, while others don't.
• The named and accessible tombs that are not related to any quest (for example the Llando Ancestral Tomb)
• The 30 named and inaccessible tombs that are relevant for the Ancestral Tombs Hunter achievement.
• The unnamed and inaccessible tombs that are decribed in the article Online:Unnamed Locations in Vvardenfell#Ancestral Tombs.

Should the article include all of these categories? Or just some of them? --Vordur Steel-Hammer (TINV1K) 11:01, 17 June 2017 (UTC)

Not sure about the last one, but definitely the others, with probably the achievement ones first. --Enodoc (talk) 16:39, 17 June 2017 (UTC)

Card Art implementations

This may not be the ideal location to discuss, but I didn't really know where else to do so. Anyway, I've stumbled upon, and have been uploading, a lot of Legends art, and adding card art to their card articles has been largely done through a gallery, with short descriptions.

I wanted to refine the gallery concept, since getting more art could make these a bit awkward considering layout and descriptions. I tried something different and added pixel size in the description in lieu of a written description such as "cropped version of larger resolution" (see this page for an example). I think this makes it a lot clearer as to what the image actually is, because you can tell from the thumb whether it's cropped or not, and "high(er) resolution" is simply unclear.

However, there has been negative feedback on this concept, so I'd like to discuss this before adding all these images to the articles. Any other ideas or suggestions? ~ Dwarfmp (talk) 00:03, 25 June 2017 (UTC)

On layout alone it looks horribly overcrowded. I tested it with a NewLine and though the whitespace is almost as bad it is to me more preferable. I also found a 1500px square quality copy of the full image (the 512px) with better focus (you can see the buildings behind the dust to the upper center-right), so there should be a better version of the widescreen one somewhere, or find a copy without the false copyright claim attached to it that was on the one I found. Silence is Golden^{Break the Silence} 01:02, 25 June 2017 (UTC)

I don't really see the benefit of having numerous copies and crops of the same picture. All we need is a single picture, that being the highest res and most complete version. --Enodoc (talk) 15:14, 25 June 2017 (UTC)

Cropped images wouldn't be necessary no, but the problem is afaik there are no high res full art versions found anywhere, as for now at least. The cropped versions I've uploaded are from a higher res art, so I figured that is better than nothing ~ Dwarfmp (talk) 15:47, 25 June 2017 (UTC)

Imperial City Storyline

I've done up the IC storyline for TIL. All the material is there to create detailed walkthroughs. My time is very, very short at the moment and I'm using it to get the raw material to produce the Wrothgar story, so if you leave it up to me I won't be adding it to UESP before August. https://www.imperial-library.info/content/imperial-city-0— Unsigned comment by Xui'al (talk • contribs) on 28 June 2017

Confirmed Users

As most of you probably know, new users are limited in what they can post, as a spam-reduction measure. This has, occasionally, led to issues with new users who want to post things that happen to involve external links on their user pages or large sandbox edits as their first few edits. One or two edits isn't bad, and they can often go to other users to help out, but when it gets to be several in a row, it can be seriously annoying, as one of our new users recently discovered.

Because autoconfirmed status is based purely on an algorithm of X days and Y edits (in our case, 4 days and 10 edits), there's nothing administrators can do to override this currently. We can manually do pretty much the same thing, though, by creating a group and granting users access to it as needed until they get their autoconfirmed rights. I'm thinking of simply adding a "Confirmed Users" group that any administrator can add a user to upon request. Given that it really grants no significant rights, we could even give Patrollers the ability to grant this permission if we want, as a way of easing them into the idea of granting rights, should they become administrators later on. This would require a bit of server work, and changing some of our spam filters to match, but it's really not that big of an effort, so I think it's a worthwhile thing to do to make our wiki more welcoming to these users, even if it's not an issue that comes up all that often.

Does anyone else have any thoughts on this? – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 20:14, 1 July 2017 (UTC)

That sounds like a very good idea to me. We do the exact same thing on the forum, in fact: it normally requires them to be a member for a week and have 10 posts before they can post links, send PMs, etc, but if we know that a new user is an actual person and not a bot, we can add them to "Confirmed Users" manually. ~ Alarra ^{(talk • contribs)} 20:28, 1 July 2017 (UTC)

Frankly I don't see the point, people should just learn to have patience and understand why certain things are needed before they go wailing off to whomever they can that the universe and it's nasty big brother want to hurt them. Ever since I gave up on a free internet without paying and getting a vpn, almost every site I don't allow cookies from thinks I'm a bot and I have to go through a captcha, but I don't moan because I can actually access the site afterwards. Our very basic system is very important and shouldn't be compromised for the sake of a few editors who don't have the patience to "suffer" for 4 days/10 edits in order to free themselves from the shackles of oppression. In my very humble opinion anyone who doesn't have the patience to survive this extremely long period isn't going to stick around and benefit the wiki in the long term, and prostrating ourselves before them will only cause unneeded and possibly damaging effects that far outweigh the minuscule benefits that might come from it. No editor of substance has ever been harmed by this practice, and none ever will. Silence is Golden^{Break the Silence} 21:13, 1 July 2017 (UTC)

The only point of the edit count and timer is to filter out spammers and spambots because we can't tell whether new accounts are real people or not. If it is clear that they are through other means, then the restriction is pointless, so we might as well override it if possible. --Enodoc (talk) 10:42, 2 July 2017 (UTC)

Being a real person does not mean they are not a spammer. There have been plenty of users whose sole reason for creating an account and a user page is to advertise their work elsewhere, be that a Youtube channel or simply their fan-fiction. There are also users from TIL and others such as the Unofficial Patches people whose sole/main concern is their own interests (UP happens to be in our interests too). The only way to gain access to unrestricted* external linking is by becoming at minimum a user patroller, so bypassing the autoconfirmed is fairly pointless. I would much rather a user showed they were of benefit to the site before we allow them to benefit other sites. I've just gone over all the documentation on the edit filter, and unfortunately there is no known way to limit the amount of filters a single edit will make a user experience, nor does there appear to have ever been an attempt at it or even desire to see such coding. I'm not sure anything can be done to remove any possible overlap between our filters, and wikipedia far outstrips us with 168 active filters (though about 1/3 of them would only tag or log an edit, ie no warnings). Again I see no point in compromising the most basic anti-spam filter, despite the fact that almost every single spammer before the edit filter was enabled was autoconfirmed (not sure about stats since then). Silence is Golden^{Break the Silence} 12:47, 2 July 2017 (UTC)

Our vandalism page does say "Adding links that advertise a personal Elder Scrolls-related fan site is usually inappropriate, but not necessarily vandalism". While it's a broad statement, in practice, we've never tried to forbid or limit someone from advertising the other things they do. My personal interpretation of it based on what I've seen over the years is that it was intended to cover people who only post an ad link on their page and don't contribute to UESP in any other way.

Bypassing autoconfirmed for specific users would still give them a warning for YouTube links, yes, but it would eliminate several other spam warnings and, more importantly, eliminate a couple of disallowed edits. We've had the situation come up several times where a user joined initially to work on a specific page, and they were already savvy enough to want to work on it in a sandbox. Of course, when they try to move it, our bulk spamming feature kicks in and disallows the edit, possibly along with a user spam disallow even when they cut and paste in small steps, and warnings for a few other issues. It becomes at best a hassle for them to work on their intended project, at worst, it's disallowed outright unless they break links, etc. That's hardly a productive way to edit or a welcoming environment for a new user. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 18:31, 2 July 2017 (UTC)

(←) Okay, this should now be set up. Confirmed Users (confirmed in the user rights editor) don't quite have the same rights as autoconfirmed users do in that they can't edit semi-protected pages or move pages. I focussed instead on the common new-user issues like bulk copying to a sandbox and user pages with external links on them. Once users have hit autoconfirmed status, they'll have all these rights and more, so can be removed from the Confirmed Users group. For the time being, only admins can add/remove people from the group, but it's easy enough to open up to patrollers if we want to. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 22:23, 13 July 2017 (UTC)

Sidebar Redesign, Again

Stemming from a comment on Discord ("we kind of choke the life out of the mod sections since they aren't linked on the sidebar" --AKB), and given that there are so many different versions of the sidebar (depending on which gadgets you've got turned on, or what custom code you have), it's hard to remember really what the default is. So I would like to propose a new default for the sidebar that is based exactly on what is listed at All Content, since that is what I believe the sidebar should reflect. The current sidebar is inconsistent with what it includes (SR and OB add-ons, but not MW ones; TR, BM, and SI, but not DB, etc), while All Content is consistent throughout. I know there were numerous arguments before about KotN/SI and DG/HF/DB, so the proposal here is namespaces - yes, other DLCs - no, exactly the same as All Content. Granted that will make it quite long, but for the benefit of not hiding stuff away, I think that's a reasonable trade-off. We could even make the collapsible feature active by default to make it a bit shorter.

Open Here

Lore
Books
Elder Scrolls Online
    Morrowind
    DLC
Skyrim
    Dragonborn
    Official Add-Ons
    Tes5Mod
Oblivion
    Shivering Isles
    Official Add-Ons
    Tes4Mod
Morrowind
    Tribunal
    Bloodmoon
    Official Add-Ons
    Tes3Mod
Daggerfall
Arena
Spin-Offs
    Legends
    Redguard
    Battlespire
TES Travels
    Stormhold
    Dawnstar
    Shadowkey
    OBMobile
General

--Enodoc (talk) 21:04, 5 July 2017 (UTC)

I bring this up every time, but if we link to Dragonborn in the sidebar we must also link to Dawnguard and Hearthfire. Our choice to make a separate namespace for it doesn't take away from the fact that it's only one of three DLC. The current "Skryim Add-Ons" link works fine, but if we want to have a collapsible menu then we may as well take advantage of it and do it right. —Legoless (talk) 21:21, 5 July 2017 (UTC)

That's fine, but then we must also add them both to All Content. You do then get the argument for adding KotN as well, due to it being on its own level between ShIsles and the other OB DLCs, just like Hearthfire is a lower level DLC than DG and DB. --Enodoc (talk) 21:55, 5 July 2017 (UTC)

We should also add general namespace to the sidebar, same reasoning. --AKB ^{Talk Cont Mail} 04:37, 6 July 2017 (UTC)

Oh, did I forget General? Yeah that should be there too. I put it at the bottom for now. --Enodoc (talk) 08:44, 6 July 2017 (UTC)

All Content should have links to Dawnguard, Hearthfire, and Knights of the Nine because these are some of the largest additions to the game. It's purpose is to provide a directory to the major content portals on the wiki. As for the sidebar, it already has a link to All Content, so in my opinion it should be a more condensed version.

That isn't to say the sidebar is perfect right now. I agree with Enodoc that Elder Scrolls Online needs links to Morrowind and DLC. However, for Skyrim the Official Add-Ons page already includes DG, HF, and DB. The same goes for Oblivion's Add-Ons page, which has Knights of the Nine and Shivering Isles. The only reason we have Shivering Isles on the sidebar is because like Tribunal and Bloodmoon, it is a full expansion (ask Legoless). The Morrowind Add-Ons are really too small to justify a link; if not for KotN, we wouldn't have it for Oblivion either.

There is also little reason to have all four TES Travels games because the main page already has them in a nice summary. These games are hardly ever played so to have five links is ridiculous. General is also rarely used, so the same argument applies. Keep in mind these are already on All Content (don't forget Canceled Games under General if you want everything). I'm all in favor of grouping Battlespire, Redguard, and Legends under "Spin-Offs". This removes any breaks in continuity for the main series (and Daggerfall is probably played more than Battlespire and Redguard combined).

Considering how this discussion started because of the mod spaces, it's fair that these need a link somewhere. The problem with Enodoc's format is that ESOMod is not there. Since four links is a lot to add for little gain (similar to TES Travels), my solution is to create a page simply called "TesMod" (other names are welcome). Without a namespace, this page would be very much like "TES Travels" and transclude all four mod spaces. We can put that link at the bottom. Here is my revised table:

Open Here

All Content
Lore
Books
Elder Scrolls Online
    Morrowind
    DLC (Online DLC?)
Skyrim
    Official Add-Ons (Skyrim Add-Ons?)
Oblivion
    Shivering Isles
    Official Add-Ons (Oblivion Add-Ons?)
Morrowind
    Tribunal
    Bloodmoon
Daggerfall
Arena
Spin-Offs
    Legends
    Redguard
    Battlespire
TES Travels
TesMod

—Dillonn241 (talk) 21:47, 13 July 2017 (UTC)

Completely agreed on adding DG, HF and KotN to All Content. If All Content is going to stay in the sidebar, then I agree the whole sidebar itself can be shorter; my suggestion for having the sidebar equal to All Content was to avoid having to click through to All Content in the first place. I'd be fine with wiping off the individual TES Travels entries and just keeping TES Travels itself (that's how the default sidebar works anyway). I do think though that if we're having SR Add-Ons and OB Add-Ons in there, then MW Add-Ons needs to be there too, for completeness.

I don't actually know why Canceled Games has its own entry on All Content, since it's just one page of many in General. I intentionally excluded ESOMod because I don't actually know what use it is. You can't mod ESO, and I don't see why we'd ever bother documenting random UI add-ons. But if that's something we're going to do at some point, then yes, it would need to be somewhere. The separate modspace index is a nice idea, but I wonder if that would still leave them hidden too much. If that idea is supported though, I would suggest "Mods" as the page name, as it is simple and easy to understand.

--Enodoc (talk) 00:04, 14 July 2017 (UTC)

(←) The sidebar and All Content are completely separate things with their own necessities and rules regarding inclusion. All Content is seemingly focused purely on namespaces, whereas the sidebar is focused on accessibility for users to find the content they are after. This makes the sidebar much more fluid and often appears in conflict with All Content, specifically in regard DLCs. Cancelled games are a pure exception to the namespace focus of All Content, as without a single page for them all each one would be entered, which is less ideal. ESOMod is about much more than user mods, it contains (or at least should) all public knowledge on the workings of the game, which is useful for modders, only one of the reasons the other modspaces exist. ESO DLC is the DLC that is locked behind additional payments, be that ESO Plus or outright purchase, which includes Thieves Guild and Dark Brotherhood.

The fluidity of the sidebar allows Morrowind under ESO, as it did for Dawnguard and Hearthfire when they appeared for Skyrim, and could well have seen links for TG and DB added at the relevant times, even if eventually goes. On my sidebar there are currently no DLC except the general page under Skyrim yet KotN appears under Oblivion. Even if no-one wants to admit it, Dawnguard is a "massive" DLC, where Hearthfire is a "minor" one, as is KotN. The standard DLC for the sidebar should include Dawnguard and Dragonborn and exclude KotN. If we went back and re-evaluated Tribunal, it might likely end up in the Morrowind namespace for the same reasons Dawnguard did not get a namespace, but it would still warrant a place on the sidebar due to its size. KotN usually survives any culls because there is a nice symmetry to having two DLC listed per game, but it really isn't comparable in size to the Dawnguard or Tribunal. The official addons for Skyrim and Oblivion should also be submenus like the Morrowind one which links all the remaining DLC.

Due to the fluidity it could even be argued that Legends could be given a more prominent status than relegated to the "other games" section. There is no logic to the suggestion that that section can be split with the spinoffs getting a submenu while the travels are not given the same treatment. We've also had enough arguments trying to confine those seven games under those two headers that are not strictly correct for some of them; leave them at "other games" under the sidebar.

So in short the sidebar should resemble the All Content page as it stands, with the inclusion of Dawnguard, keeping the merged other games, and including the General namespace at the end (without a link to the canceled games on the sidebar). Hopefully it also goes without saying that all these menus should start collapsed, which means that it will only have the addition of General to lengthen its default size. Also, the All Content page needs the description of the modspaces revised because those spaces are about so much more than third party mods. Silence is Golden^{Break the Silence} 23:04, 16 July 2017 (UTC)

I tried to ascertain the greatest common denominator between all the suggestions, and came up with this:

Open Here

Lore
Elder Scrolls Online
    Morrowind
    DLC
Skyrim
    Dragonborn
    Hearthfire
    Dawnguard
    Add-Ons
Oblivion
    Shivering Isles
    Knights of the Nine 
    Add-Ons
Morrowind
    Bloodmoon
    Tribunal
    Add-Ons
Daggerfall
Arena
Other Games
    Legends
    Redguard
    Battlespire
    TES Travels
Books
General
Mods

--Enodoc (talk) 14:52, 25 July 2017 (UTC)

Works for me. It may even be appropriate to move Books down. —Legoless (talk) 20:27, 25 July 2017 (UTC)

How far down? Books • General • Mods sort of thing? --Enodoc (talk) 21:48, 25 July 2017 (UTC)

Sounds good, if no one objects. —Legoless (talk) 01:13, 26 July 2017 (UTC)

I've added that change into the suggestion above, and also shortened the whole thing a bit by linking to only the parent pages for Mods and Travels, just in case anyone doesn't have JavaScript, as that being non-collapsed would have otherwise been quite long. --Enodoc (talk) 21:05, 26 July 2017 (UTC)

I fully support Enodoc's compromise for the sidebar changes. —Dillonn241 (talk) 21:23, 26 July 2017 (UTC)

Hearthfire doesn't need to be listed under Skyrim. I still disagree with reducing the "TES Travels" games to a single entry, but the least compromise should be a secondary submenu with the other games under that header, as it still leaves it "tidy" while including them. We don't have a Mods parent page, and again there is no reason not to have it as a submenu, though really there is no reason not to include the mod links under the parent games, mods are after all one of the reasons the game series has been been so successful and we shouldn't be stingy about their inclusion. In either case the Add-Ons entries seem a under-informative without the game name prefix, "Official Add-Ons" would make sure there was no confusion with the additional Mod links. Silence is Golden^{Break the Silence} 01:43, 27 July 2017 (UTC)

(←) The sidebar includes All Content, so the other links should be a useful subset of that page. Keep in mind that All Content still needs an update with links to Dawnguard, Hearthfire, and Knights of the Nine. Hardly anyone plays the TES Travels games, so having five links is not at all useful. I have to side with Silencer on not including Hearthfire based on this usefulness principle. I'm not too concerned if we keep it, but it's really not much bigger than three Oblivion house plugins. Like Silencer said in an earlier post, it also creates a nice symmetry of two major add-ons per game.

I don't know why not having a Mods parent page is an issue. We'll just create it by transcluding the main page of each mod namespace, similar to TES Travels. The reason I proposed this idea in the first place is because of usefulness. This page would have all the links of each individual page and shorten the sidebar. Assuming we stick with this plan, there is no need to put "official" in front of "add-ons", but I don't care much either way. —Dillonn241 (talk) 02:32, 27 July 2017 (UTC)

The purpose of not having a TES Travels submenu or Mods submenu is to keep the Sidebar as short as possible while still being useful to the majority of visitors. Remember that we're considering the average user here, and the default sidebar doesn't collapse (although the original proposal does suggest making it collapsible by default). Sub-submenus might end up taking that collapsibility too far, and looking messy rather than useful. TES Travels links to all the necessary pages anyway, as would Mods when it is created. Regarding "Add-Ons" vs "Official Add-Ons" (etc), maybe it would be better if we scrap the internal consistency for naming these and use the official names instead, then it would make more sense. If I remember rightly, these were "Plugins" for Morrowind [1], "Downloads" for Oblivion [2], and "Add-Ons" for Skyrim [3]. --Enodoc (talk) 11:14, 27 July 2017 (UTC)

The default sidebar should be collapsed as it is already, and Morrowinds additional addons is already a submenu including all the remaining ones (eg Helm of Tohan, Siege at Firemoth) so the others could follow that example or else for consistency that is removed. That way there is no additional length created except via the addition of General and possibly the Mods. Making it collapsed means it becomes much more useful because of the amount of links we can put in it, without it being overfull, and without tripling its length. I don't see what use a Mods page could be beyond having links to the "sub" pages, nor do I see much use for it when there is no need to not include the links in a collapsed submenu under either that header or the games. The argument against using the official name (DLC etc) is that a person on our site knows where to go for each game, and we have redirects for all the terms anyway. Silence is Golden^{Break the Silence} 12:16, 27 July 2017 (UTC)

The current default sidebar doesn't collapse, and the current default sidebar doesn't have all the Morrowind plugins in it. Those are both features of the "collapsible sidebar" gadget in Special:Preferences. I would like to make the default sidebar collapsed, but we must also consider the case with regards to missing/broken/disabled JavaScript, as an uncollapsed sidebar with all that in it would be very long.

The mods page would exist as an introduction to modding and an index of each game's modspace in one place. I guess the benefit of that over having each modspace listed separately under the games is that it provides focus on mods as an important and distinct part of the TES community in its own right, as opposed to just sub-section of each game. --Enodoc (talk) 13:57, 27 July 2017 (UTC)

The only thing I'd like to add is don't make the sidebar collapsible! Doing to is taking a massive risk with discoverability for average users. Some studies claim discoverability of content is cut almost in half by hiding a website’s main navigation. If the impetus of this thread was to make the General namespace more visible, this course of action could result in the opposite for the whole site. --Jimeee (talk) 15:32, 27 July 2017 (UTC)

I didn't realise there was an option in the gadgets, just going to that page shows the real one. The idea Jimeee is to have the submenus collapsed, not the sidebar as a whole. I don't consider disabled Javascript as our problem, anyone who does it knows that some parts of sites won't work as they are intended, and the vast majority of visitors won't be affected. Though in the interests of over-indulgence the secondary submenus for the addons can be dropped. My proposal actually decreases its size then, while improving its functionality and the accessibility it offers. Links to every game should take priority over links to subsections of some of the games (ie a link to Stormhold should be prioritised over a link to Oblivion's mod section), as the mods may be what helps make the series popular, but without the games the series would not exist. At the very least we could trial it, and should it prove unworkable we can try the condensed version proposed. If someone can write the codes for the versions then we can try to move towards an accepted version. Silence is Golden^{Break the Silence} 17:19, 27 July 2017 (UTC)

(←) I find it weird to "hide" Legends in the end of the list as it is the latest Elder Scrolls game, even if it does not belong to the main series. Also I suggest to write names of the games as TES3: Morrowind and TES5: Skyrim, this way we both make a distinction between ESO: Morrowind and TES3: Morrowind and don't have to make an additional line for "Other Games".

Open Here

Lore
TES Legends
TES Online
    Ch.1: Morrowind
    DLCs
TES5: Skyrim
    Add-Ons
    - Dragonborn
    - Hearthfire
    - Dawnguard
TES4: Oblivion
    Add-Ons
    - Shivering Isles
    - Knights of the Nine
TES3: Morrowind
    Add-Ons
    - Bloodmoon
    - Tribunal
TES2: Daggerfall
TES1: Arena
TES Travels
Redguard
Battlespire
Real life books
General information
Modding

Like this. I renamed "DLC" to "DLCs" and added "Ch.1" before "Morrowind" chapter under ESO. Also you can see that I suggest a second bullet to list selected add-ons under ALL add-ons. Also I would suggest to rename "General" to "General information", "Mods" to "Modding", and "Books" to "Real life books" or "Printed books" to further distinct them from the in-game books. Phoenix Neko (talk) 23:50, 27 July 2017 (UTC)

One small comment on that: the sidebar only supports one level of indent, and even that's only because we modified the code to allow it. I recall the code being a bit of a hack, so I wouldn't suggest we try to allow multiple levels. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 01:49, 28 July 2017 (UTC)

Thanks RobinHood, nice catch! I guess it doesn't have to be a level of indent per se, it could be any divider - a hyphen, for example, would work just as well. I've edited my suggestion to reflect it. Phoenix Neko (talk) 02:12, 28 July 2017 (UTC)

"TES"ing everything and adding secondary bullets is probably unnecessary; this is a TES wiki, and the list is supposed to be light and easy to read, and that's just adding extra characters for no real benefit. "General Information" could work, as it would be more descriptive than "General". I don't see the benefit of "Mods" to "Modding", but perhaps "Mods & Modding" is the way to go, so neither is excluded. If we want to distinguish from in-game books, perhaps "Novels & Guides" or something, but I was trying to keep to the actual page names as closely as possible. Adding "Ch.1" to Morrowind is incorrect, so I can't agree with that. "DLCs" is bad grammar, but "DLC Packs" per a suggestion further up would work. --Enodoc (talk) 10:32, 28 July 2017 (UTC)

(←) How about something like this? Another option is creating a new portal for all the spin-off games, and simply adding a link to "Other Games". The gadget version of the sidebar could retain the expanded submenus for the main series games, with links to all of the minor add-ons, and all spin-offs under "Other Games".

Open Here

Lore
Elder Scrolls Online
    Morrowind
    DLC Game Packs
Skyrim
    Dawnguard   
    Hearthfire
    Dragonborn
    Other Add-Ons
Oblivion
    Knights of the Nine
    Shivering Isles
    Other Add-Ons   
Morrowind
    Tribunal
    Bloodmoon
    Other Add-Ons
Daggerfall
Arena
Other Games 
    Legends
    Redguard
    Battlespire
    TES Travels
Published Books
General Information
Modifications

Alternatively, we could condense it even further by having small "add-ons" links next to the name of each game. PS: In regards to name spaces, I'm of the opinion that the Mod namespaces should be merged (there are only about five articles total in each, if that) and that expansion namespaces should be merged (they have too much overlap with the main game namespaces anyway). I expect this isn't a popular opinion though, and also probably suited for its own topic. --Dorsal Axe (talk) 10:07, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

The sidebar doesn't support multiple links in one line. An Other Games portal could work, as it would save having one thing in the sidebar be a non-link, but it might not see much traffic as it's not as explanatory as All Content, which includes all those things anyway. --Enodoc (talk) 10:48, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

Edit Break

This discussion has been dead for a while, so I'm going to propose that we make some small changes immediately and figure out more controversial ones in the future. The only changes I wish to make are the following.

• Add "Morrowind" and "DLC" under Elder Scrolls Online
• Add "Dawnguard" and "Dragonborn" under Skyrim
• Add "Knights of the Nine" under Oblivion
• Add "Morrowind Add-Ons" under Morrowind

More uncontroversial changes from Enodoc:

• Move Books below TES Travels
• Add "General" under Books
• Add "Mods" under General (most important)

Here is the sidebar redesign I hope we can agree on:

Open Here

Lore
Legends
Elder Scrolls Online
    Morrowind
    DLC
Skyrim
    Dawnguard
    Dragonborn
    Skyrim Add-Ons
Oblivion
    Knights of the Nine
    Shivering Isles
    Oblivion Add-Ons
Morrowind
    Tribunal
    Bloodmoon
    Morrowind Add-Ons
Redguard
Battlespire
Daggerfall
Arena
TES Travels
Books
General
Mods

At a minimum, we need to make the first change. ESO is the biggest Elder Scrolls game right now and only has one link. —Dillonn241 (talk) 10:16, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

Agreed. I would suggest Having the following:

• Online
  • ESO: Morrowind
  • Elder Scrolls Online DLC (or, to fit with existing naming, Add-Ons).

If spaceing is an issue, then perhaps Oblivion could be merged to Oblivion > Oblivion Add-Ons; and Morrowind's section could become Morrowind > Morrowind Add-Ons. This would then gain us the two necessary "spaces" required. Timeoin (talk) 11:05, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

EDIT: For clarity: I mean Morrowind, then an indented bullet link for Morrowind Add-Ons. Timeoin (talk) 11:12, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

I completely agree with your additions – although they need to be ordered consistently – and I believe it was also uncontroversial to add a link to General and to move Books to near the bottom. Beyond that though, the proposal absolutely must include a link to the Mods and Modding portal or the individual modspace pages, as visibility of Modspaces was the entire purpose of this discussion in the first place. --Enodoc (talk) 12:49, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

All right, I moved Knights of the Nine above Shivering Isles. I know someone will have a problem with this, but it's better than introducing another change. According to the more recent comments here, none of the other additions you mentioned are controversial. I added them to the proposed sidebar. Because of how much discussion we've already had (and no real opposition to the proposal on 25 July), I expect to have some consensus on this redesign fairly soon. —Dillonn241 (talk) 15:02, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

I really dislike the earlier proposed change to the Legends namespace, because it is the newest game so people will come to the site looking for it (I am probably biased, but still). I think the newest list from Dillon looks great. --Ilaro (talk) 18:34, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

^ What Ilaro said. I don't see any problems with the newest version, but would not support burying Legends in a submenu. --FioFioFio (talk) 18:39, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

I have made all of the changes above except adding Mods below General, the only reason being that it doesn't exist yet. In Discord, Alarra suggested changing Morrowind to Chapters when another gets released, and I agree with that. Enodoc was working on a Mods page before, but never actually created one outside a sandbox. For now, it may be best to simply transclude the four mod pages without any fancy formatting and link to that. —Dillonn241 (talk) 05:28, 26 October 2017 (UTC)

(←) I chose not to comment because too many people assume disagreement with part equals disagreement with the whole, and the sidebar really needed updating. First, for consistency, either DLC needs changed to ESO DLC, or preferably the namespace parts of the Add-On links for the others needs to go (its redundant). I still don't see the need for a singular mods page, so the links for each modspace should go under the namespaces. This also helps prevent confusion that we don't yet have modspaces for Arena and Daggerfall. I also still think that those extra links should be turned into drop-down menus for each game, to shorten the section and make it appear more user-friendly (an overabundance of links has been proven to be a turn-off for users trying to find what they want). Lastly, the TES Travels link should be either be made a drop-down menu with those games, or changed to Other Games and move Redguard and Battlespire into it (Legends should go there eventually, but not yet). You know most of this will happen in the future when more games come to make the sidebar even longer necessitating the need to shorten it even more, so why not prepare the ground now and at least appear forward-thinking. Silence is Golden^{Break the Silence} 10:08, 26 October 2017 (UTC)

It turns out removing the namespace parts (Skyrim Add-Ons -> Add-Ons or Official Add-Ons) causes problems with MediaWiki. RobinHood made a change to the sidebar in December 2015 to fix this with an edit summary, "Names must be unique or MediaWiki generates invalid duplicate ids". Therefore, the only option we have is ESO DLC. I don't have a strong preference for either, so if some other people agree, we can rename it. I support collapsible menus because all of the indented links can be reached from their respective game portal. This is on the condition that Battlespire, Redguard, and Legends remain not indented. If we have collapsible menus then certainly we can add the four TES Travels games and possibly modspaces under each game as well. You're right that we need to keep the future in mind. TES VI will be hard enough, but what about TES VII? The sidebar will have no space if we don't collapse non-essential links by then. —Dillonn241 (talk) 01:00, 27 October 2017 (UTC)

The other option to remove the namespaces from the add-on links is the one I mentioned above; use the official names, because they're different for each game. "Plugins" for Morrowind, "Downloads" for Oblivion, "Add-Ons" for Skyrim, and "DLC Packs" for ESO. --Enodoc (talk) 23:01, 27 October 2017 (UTC)

I would certainly support a return to plugins for Morrowind, since that was the term used by the developers in every instance for that game. —Legoless (talk) 14:55, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

Assistance Required

Vandal requires blocking. Thanks! --Enodoc (talk) 10:47, 17 July 2017 (UTC)

The vandal has finally been blocked, thanks to Dwarfmp. It seems Dragon Guard, Fullerton, and I agree that we need more blockers. —Dillonn241 (talk) 12:06, 17 July 2017 (UTC)

Huh, I totally intended to put this on AN. I guess the current events threw my concentration somewhat, but I also agree that we need more blockers and will be putting myself forward this afternoon. --Enodoc (talk) 15:40, 17 July 2017 (UTC)

I've given Enodoc blocker rights. —Legoless (talk) 16:32, 17 July 2017 (UTC)

Great, thanks! --Enodoc (talk) 16:50, 17 July 2017 (UTC)

(←) This is only partially related, but after noticing that vandal's username, I happened to remember that the account User:Example has not been registered yet. Should someone register that account before it's potentially used for vandalism? It would be less than ideal to have to put a block message on that account when its userpage and talk page are supposed to be free for testing purposes. Forfeit (talk) 20:20, 17 July 2017 (UTC)

That and Administrator should probably be included in the Titleblacklist mediawiki page. Variants of Administrator should be disabled, while only that singular Example should be prevented. If I remember correctly the ban can be overridden by anyone with tb-override privileges. Silence is Golden^{Break the Silence} 20:58, 17 July 2017 (UTC)

Done. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 00:23, 18 July 2017 (UTC)

Online Non-Relevant NPCs

Someone had to bring this issue up and since Morrowind has been out for a while, I figure now is an okay time. The problem, of course, is that this wiki has over 15,000 pages about people in ESO, despite a large percentage of them having no relevance or importance at all. A similar situation exists in TES III with many NPCs having no unique dialogue, related quests, etc. The only difference between them and a generic NPC is their name.

Therefore, I propose that NPCs with no unique dialogue, related quests, services, or conversations with others (possibly more things?) should NOT have a page. These links still need to exist, of course, but as redirects to a page listing their names and stats. We can follow TES III's format in almost all cases. I'm quite certain this can be accomplished using a bot. Every page converted into a redirect should get the category Online-Non Relevant NPCs.

The main obstacle I see with this change is a massive collection of NPC images. Fortunately, a lot of these are incomplete for non-relevant NPCs, but we shouldn't just delete all that hard work. Because we would have pages like Morrowind:People in Balmora, one solution is to add the images for the listed NPCs in a gallery below. The purpose of this post is to start a conversation; I'm not going to plan out every detail because we need consensus first. I hope we can all agree that the current method of documenting Online NPCs is crazy and impractical for both users and editors. —Dillonn241 (talk) 00:16, 18 July 2017 (UTC)

Sounds good to me. Anything that reduces the number of pages in Online space is a good move. We should have a look at what else can be composited into tables as well; all those provisioning and alchemy products and ingredients, for example. --Enodoc (talk) 00:27, 18 July 2017 (UTC)

Being an advocate of reducing the number of Morrowind non-relevants, I must oppose this. The main problem is where to draw the line. The line for Morrowind isn't a good one, as evidenced by the number of supposed non-relevants that are actually not when looking closely. I won't argue that a number of NPCs in Online are little more than moving physical objects, but most of them can talk with others and have their own schedules (they don't just randomly walk around). The only line for relevancy should come at interaction. If you can do anything with an NPC, talk, steal, kill, they should have a page, but I don't support any line at all. Even most named enemy NPCs in Online have a story, which would go untold were they reduced to a line on a table. The only negative to the amount of pages is the random page button which only selects from full articles, but Online far outstrips every other game in every area (books, places, quests, NPCs), that the benefit of removing at best a few thousand articles would be negligible. PS Should this folly be undertaken, the gallery of NPC images is a good idea, I would like to see it for Morrowind so long as there exists undocumented NPCs. Silence is Golden^{Break the Silence} 18:08, 18 July 2017 (UTC)

I agree with Silencer. --AKB ^{Talk Cont Mail} 20:10, 18 July 2017 (UTC)

I agree; where do we draw the line when it comes to relevance? We already have all the articles. I don't see the point in tabulating them at this stage. ESO is a big game and will never be fully documented (e.g. the pre-Update 6 NPCs which are now lost). I think we should be more concerned with trying to document info in the simplest way possible, and drawing arbitrary lines in the sand as to what NPC gets an article seems like unnecessary work to me. If we end up with empty stubs because of it, so be it. I don't see that as a major concern for ONspace or the wiki. —Legoless (talk) 20:17, 18 July 2017 (UTC)

I'll just repeat what I said on the Discord: Do these NPCs have unique dialogue (I haven't played ESO that much)? Because if they all really have some unique feature going on, then I agree with Silencer. However, if most dialogue and interactions are just pulled from some large randomized database, then I don't really see the point and will side with Enodoc and Dillon. ----Ilaro (talk) 20:43, 18 July 2017 (UTC)

If NPCs have schedules in ESO, then they should all be documented without question. This immediately makes them much more relevant than the non-relevant's in Morrowind as characters in Morrowind don't have schedules aside from randomly wandering around their spawning location or standing still. Because of these schedule details, the article will actually be able to have some substance, whereas for a Morrowind non-relevant your best case scenario still looks completely empty like this. Aside from this, the appearance of characters in ESO are much more unique than the characters in Morrowind, where there were only a handful of options for the faces of characters and even clothing options were usually pretty similar (a lot of unremarkable Dunmer hostile bandits all wearing netch leather for example). Forfeit (talk) 21:18, 18 July 2017 (UTC)

While I actually very strongly support reducing the Online page count, and trying to boldly improve this namespace, I think the opposers bring up valid points. Summarizing my thoughts:

I would not mind tabulating and I'm positive that finding where to draw that line would not be that complicated either. Editors who work on these pages likely already have a similar idea about where the line goes, because there are, practically, not so many different ways to go about this

For me Justice Neutral (aka killable/stealable) and a schedule are not valid attributes for deciding the relevancy for Online NPCs because these are very generic/limited in ESO. The Justice Neutral aspects are easily and neatly documented, as we can see on individual pages already. Regarding advanced schedules, I do not believe I've seen many, if any? They usually repeat quick, simple things like walking back and forth, walking and sitting, then standing up. I mean, this is hardly even a schedule. And ESO NPCs do not have a daily schedule with sleeping/awake timers, do they? Anyways, if the NPC-s can be talked to or have any inter-NPC dialogue, they would deserve their own page. That's about it. (I should maybe also point out that, if you DO add Justice Neutrality and those small limited schedules to the "relevancy", then you will end up with very, very few NPCs in your "non-relevant" category. That eliminates the whole purpose of reducing page numbers.)

However, the practical part of how to create and fill the tables is a much bigger concern for me. Adding to this, filling in these small NPC pages is quite quick. And most of the pages are already created. These are the main reasons why I'd support the opposing side right now.

Still, I need to point out one problem which annoys me, namely that the big NPC categories are very large and thus more or less useless if you for example want to work systematically with pages that are missing information. For example "NPC stubs", "NPc needing images" or "empty NPC". I've worked a bit on the empty creature/place/quest categories, and also creature/place/quest images, but the NPC equivalents are just impossible. Well, you might find this a minor issue, but I just wanted to mention it :) Tib (talk) 21:41, 18 July 2017 (UTC)

(←) Just for the sake of example, here's a completely random useless NPC: Anatole Thenitte. There's thousands of pages just like that one, with basically no information and little more that can be said about them (apart from, in that particular case, their Reaction, which would go in the infobox anyway). We can keep all the relevant information from that page (the stuff that's in the infobox) by putting it in a table, which would take up considerably less space than an entire page for the same info:

Name	Home City	Race	Gender	Health	Reaction
Anatole Thenitte	Daggerfall	Breton	Male	227	(?)

And with a table you'd be able to get a glance of all NPCs in the city at once, rather than having to pop into each and every page, which is useful if, for example, you were looking for all the people in the city with a specific Pickpocket difficulty or Profession. --Enodoc (talk) 22:07, 18 July 2017 (UTC)

I'm not really a fan of the idea of tabulating the NPC data. One thing I'd like to point out is that there are NPCs who might not have unique dialogue but are notable in other ways, like being mentioned by other NPCs or books, or being someone important. A good example is Sibyl Augustine Viliane: she does not have any dialogue and doesn't even move much, but she is the Sibyl of Dibella, and was featured in Loremaster's Archive. I'm afraid that if we arranged NPCs into tables, such info could be lost, and the NPCs would lose their individuality. Another thing is the pictures: with separate articles, I can easily check out what a NPC looks like (if a picture exists); browsing a gallery full of NPC pictures to find a concrete one would feel rather messy. And with the amount of effort that such a rearrangement would require, I really can't see the point. --Vordur Steel-Hammer (TINV1K) 22:36, 18 July 2017 (UTC)

When I read the opening post, I pretty much agreed with the proposition of recducing NPC pages and tabulating certain NPC data. This began to change when I read the valid arguments in the opposing posts. Now, after spending quite a few hours of observing "non-relevant" NPCs, I am opposing the idea completely. We should be very cautious about destubbing NPC pages, marking NPCs as having no unique dialoge or categorizing them as being "non-relevant".

The amount of (named) NPCs who actually just say "Hello", "Hm", "Yes", "Greetings" etc. is comparatively small. Most of the green, friendly NPCs have a dialogue option and therefore unique dialogue. More than half of the JN NPCs also have a dialogue option, and many of the other JN NPCs have dialogue that comes from a database, but it's far from being randomized – it's a fixed selection of dialogue that follows certain parameters which we still need to understand. Factors are race and occupation, then there are variations which can be described as friendly, annoyed, flirtatious etc. Instead of just calling all these dialogues "non-unique", we should do the uesp thing ... Collect the lines, find out the underlying mechanics and create a page like Skyrim:Guard Dialogue.

Also, most NPCs have "schedules". They don't just stand there or walk around randomly or use animation markers indistinctively. Their locations, the groups they gather in, their walking paths, the items they use, the NPCs they observe and talk to – it's all part of their story and the story of their environment.

Some NPCs have greetings as the player passes by, some are muttering to themselves, some can be heard shouting to the public from afar. I have observed quite a number of NPCs without unique dialogue suddenly starting a unique conversation with another NPC, and most of them haven't been mentioned in their articles. One of the few scenes that I found documented was the conversation between Climbs Trees and Molwen. It can be assumed that there are many more of these conversations that just haven't been discovered and documented yet. As we have no way of checking the game data for such convos as we had with the CK, this means a lot of in-game double-checking and verifying, keeping in mind that JN NPCs can be killed by other players so that they might not be around for a while.

Presenting NPC data in table entries also reduces the chance to actually find the NPCs in the vast ESO cities. If an NPC cannot be found in an interior location and is not a vendor at his stall, the information “can be found in <city name>” is not helpful, it's just not enough. These sentences should be extended so that they specify the location by pointing out a nearby house or city gate – or the NPC's schedule/route.

Of course, I'd also like to see a light at the end of the tunnel, and I'd like to mention at least one way to reduce the number of needed NPC images: I think the extension of pages like Daggerfall Guard is unnecessary. Do we really need images of all gender and race variations of unnamed NPCs? --Holomay (talk) 22:58, 20 July 2017 (UTC)

Ha, Holomay expressed my concerns much better than I did in my post myself. I completely agree! --Vordur Steel-Hammer (TINV1K) 01:02, 21 July 2017 (UTC)

After reading all of these replies, I think it's clear that the term "non-relevant" is unclear, and the task of determining who fits the definition I first proposed may be futile. Since we're obviously keeping all the NPC pages, I agree with Holomay that they need more detail on location and behavior.

On a somewhat related note, we still need tables of people on place pages, similar to Online:Bleakrock Village. As Tib pointed out, the current categories are almost useless with the number of pages. —Dillonn241 (talk) 03:02, 21 July 2017 (UTC)

(←) Well hold on now! I will never in my life support that we should document more of these NPCs than what we already have done. That's going into a detail that is just nonsensical.

Holomay, to meet your comment with an example, let's take Belkarth. Belkarth has a full list of documented NPCs, including images, attributes and dialogue. (Looking back, I see that a few details, like who is simply standing, and who was actually drunk dancing are missing). So feel free to use Belkarth people as a sorts of an example; we can also pull some rough numbers from there. We have 94 entries in the Online:Belkarth#Belkarth People section (counting guards as only one entry). Of these 94, quickly glancing over I'd say between 20-25% are ones with no dialogue. And no, they do not have any interesting schedule. So I would support that we mark these NPCs in that table with italics, and I really do strongly think that this documenting is sufficient. Anyways, 20-25% is not that small section - of 15 000 NPCs that would make 3000-4000 pages. (Add single-line dialogues and traders/merchants - like guild traders who almost always do not have unique dialogue, as we have seen-, and you will end up with maybe 10% of NPCs who actually have a bit of depth :P) Tib (talk) 09:19, 21 July 2017 (UTC)

I think this is a pretty good example for what I had in mind! - If my count is right, of these 94 there are 27 NPCs without unique dialogue, and there are even many generic lines listed. Their location is specified, there's a description of what they're doing, what group they are part of, where they are patrolling, or even that they have a certain number of fixed begging spots. Of these 27 NPCs, 7 are guild traders, so we end up with 20 NPCs without any "function" or unique dialogue, but why should they be marked with italics? Petronius Libo is the tavern's bard, Orenwen is a member of the Star-Gazers, for example - which brings us quickly back to a discussion about where to draw a line. Isn't it sufficient to mark the vendors and quest-specific NPCs as we do now instead of marking "unimportant" NPCs? (Btw I'm afraid I don't understand your number of "10% of NPCs who actually have a bit of depth". 67 of the 94 NPCs have unique dialoge, so I think that does give them a bit of depth!?) --Holomay (talk) 10:11, 21 July 2017 (UTC)

I would much rather find any way possible to reduce the total number of pages, but if the pages are all staying then there's no point whatsoever in italicising some entries in the table, as that distinction is specifically to identify pages which do not exist. The pages which would not exist were to be exactly those for non-relevant NPCs, so if all pages are staying, the "non-relevant NPCs" distinction does also not exist, and there's therefore nothing to italicise. --Enodoc (talk) 11:29, 21 July 2017 (UTC)

Responding to older post here, but there is technically nothing stopping npc tabulation. If they are important enough to be page-worthy, they can still have their own page (much like Morrowind does). One other point i'd like to make - if we make it tabled, two distinct ESO sections i'd recommend: Loottype and pickpocket difficulty. Timeoin (talk) 20:36, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

(←) Not exactly the same, but related topic: ESO hirelings. There is the whole category listing the hirelings like Uraviin Dres who do not really appear in the game in any other form than mail messages with shipments of crafting materials attached. Some of those hirelings only send a couple of messages, rather than a whole hundred, and their messages are often interspersed with messages from their partners/rivals (Uraviin Dres and Veesk-Olan being a good example). I thought it might be better to move the whole collection of such messages to appriopriate hireling page (e.g. Hireling (Enchanting) would contain all messages from all enchanting hirelings - Abnab, Ezdab, Melina Cassel, Valgus, Gaereleth, Sixul, Valyne Hlan etc.) to reduce the number of separate pages as well as retain the chronological order of the whole correspondence, but The Silencer suggested that such comprehensive pages would be too long and thus unwieldy. BTW, there is another wiki doing exactly what I wanted to do: [4] but it is in French. I'd like to hear more opinions on this matter. Szymon (talk) 13:01, 10 October 2017 (UTC)

On the inclusion of linebreaks in ESO dialogue

So, after an inconclusive debate on the Discord server, I'm going to put a vote on here for editors to voice their opinion and to hopefully reach a consensus. Linebreaks are a common feature in ESO dialogue, and a clash recently came about over if linebreaks should be used or not on the Midyear Mayhem quest page.

These two examples below are to help you visualise the problem:

Is that what this crowd is doing?

"Indeed! Shortly after we parleyed with your commander, Her Reverence began giving her blessings.
It’s quite popular! All the soldiers want double rewards for their efforts on the battlefield."

The above example uses a linebreak, between blessings. and It's. Whilst the example below does not feature a linebreak, it instead uses a space to replace the linebreak. The example below is what is currently on the quest page:

Is that what this crowd is doing?

"Indeed! Shortly after we parleyed with your commander, Her Reverence began giving her blessings. It's quite popular! All the soldiers want double rewards for their efforts on the battlefield."

The main reason why I want to make this point is that linebreaks are featured in the game files (en.lang), and if, as a wiki, we are to truly catalogue the dialogue that is found in-game, I believe that it would be best to respect the formatting choice that the game uses by featuring the linebreaks, alongside the text and punctuation that is featured too. This is sticking true to what is seen in-game [5] which I think should take precedence over not including linebreaks for the sake of making the articles seen as more compact with less lines, and because of this, I think that the linebreaks should be consistently included in our articles which quote dialogue. In addition, discussion on the Discord found that linebreaks were often used instead of commas and were commonly featured to separate points being made by the NPC. Regardless of qualms over the potential lack of commas that could have been used instead, the linebreaks serve a purpose to make it easier to read and understand for the player, so it is not a worthless or trivial aspect in that sense, and I believe this can very much be reflected on our wiki pages. Furthermore, by omitting the linebreak in favor of a space, then as a reader we would never know if there was originally a linebreak at all, whereas if we were to record the dialogue with the linebreaks as shown in the files and in-game, then it is clear where linebreaks have been used.

This is an example from the Beggar Matthew NPC page, which shows the linebreaks being used similarly to commas, highlighting how they have a purpose:

"Murder! My friends are already dead, but the watch doesn't care. What's one less beggar? We're nothing to them.
But if someone found the killer...."

Where should I start looking?

"Start in the trade district alleys. That's where Old Gianne was murdered just yesterday.
Maybe Lieutenant Dubois will give you a reward if you do his job for him."

Whilst dialogue is featured on some ESO pages already, I find it often to be incomplete and not filled in from the en.lang files. I believe that coming out of this with a concrete policy on if linebreaks should be used or not would be better for editors to understand contrary to a case-by-case basis, and hopefully avoid future conflicts from editors who have differing thoughts, but if there was a page where the dialogue would somehow seem incompatible with featuring linebreaks, then that can be discussed between the editors and staff to settle a possible exception. Before large quantities of ESO dialogue are recorded on the wiki, I believe it is also important to overcome this issue before too many articles have dialogue sections that need amending.

So, ultimately, I am for linebreaks to be used if they are part of the dialogue featured in-game and in the files, and should be included wherever relevant dialogue is quoted on the wiki, whether that be on quest articles that feature it, or if it is on the NPC articles themselves in the dialogue sections. Let me know what you guys think, and if you support or oppose this notion, so we can hopefully come to some sort of consensus. Thanks! - KriHavok (talk) 20:43, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

I replaced your NewLeft templates with correct coding, as NewLefts are not used for that kind of separation and may cause your post look different to what the pages would look like with your examples. I vote against using linebreaks. In other games "line breaks" are done through more common subtitling, and in the data a lot of dialogue is split between separate entries, yet spoken one line after the other. When it comes to writing this on our pages we just write it as one big long line of dialogue, as nothing in writing can replicate that empty space that is sometimes left for effect when lines are spoken. And while we are an encyclopedia, we do not follow a line where we replicate the data as closely as possible, our purpose is to turn the data into understandable and digestible text. Silence is Golden^{Break the Silence} 21:09, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for the input The Silencer! Perhaps it is just a subjective thing, but I actually think having the linebreaks makes more for understandable and digestible text, as is what I believe was ZOS' intention of using them. In my opinion, having the big long line of dialogue is not as neat as having the dialogue broken up into smaller consecutive chunks, where each chunk is where a different point is made by the NPC, usually (see the use of linebreaks instead of potential commas above). I think having the longer line of dialogue makes the dialogue less easy to read and doesn't flow as well as having the text structured with linebreaks, as if we are talking about quoted dialogue here, then personally to me as a reader, it is easier to read down shorter lines rather than along a longer line, but again this might just be subjective to me. And I agree in the majority of cases, we do not intend to replicate data as closely as possible, but in the case of where dialogue is usually featured, it is quoted (a lot of the time word-for-word), on quest pages, and moreso on NPC pages where it is listed in a separate section with the editor making comments on how/where the dialogue can be heard, and if it is related to a quest or not, etc. So what I am saying, is that this may be one of those scenarios where we do replicate the data as it is displayed in-game and in the files but, it is then our job to make the comments about the dialogue and give the necessary contextualisation. That way, we document like an encyclopedia, but we also foremost comment on and contextualise the dialogue just like a wiki, whilst (in my opinion) also making it easier to read on the eyes and allows the dialogue to flow in the way the developers wanted it to. KriHavok (talk) 17:56, 1 August 2017 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Personally I generally prefer the dialogue in-line, for ease of presentation over accurate recreation of the in-game formatting. This is easier to apply to any dialogue format, whether that be the conversation approach or the prose approach, whereas broken dialogue, particularly in prose, would look very odd. I think linear dialogue also flows better conversationally, as your eyes don't have to keep dropping lines, and on narrow screens the number of line breaks could very quickly result in numerous part-length lines, unnecessarily extending the page.

Incidentally, if anyone's looking for the previous discussion on dialogue formatting, it's here; broken vs. linear dialogue was mentioned but never expanded upon. --Enodoc (talk) 21:15, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

I prefer having linebreaks for the reasons KriHavok pointed out. It's similar to how I'm adding dialogue for Redguard NPCs; each subtitle gets its own line as you can see here. The main advantage is to keep the dialogue readable, instead of a large block of text. —Dillonn241 (talk) 03:01, 3 August 2017 (UTC)

I much prefer having linebreaks, also due to the reasons KriHavok's already mentioned. —Fullerton ﴾talk﴿ 03:41, 3 August 2017 (UTC)

(←) It doesn't really matter much in my opinion. We seldom have longer monologues, which means omitting line breaks makes little difference to how the text looks visually. The dialogues are short, not prompting any special need for format. As Silencer and Enodoc point out, there is no real value to strictly replicating this part of the data. If anything, I'd perhaps keep the line breaks because they're already used... However, I havent used "br", but been writing them like this:

Your line.

"NPC line 1.

NPC line 2 including the break."

Your line.

Tib (talk) 20:45, 4 August 2017 (UTC)

Online Quest Project

Hi everyone! Today I've created a new project for the wiki, the Online Quest Project. Basically it's just a project to create and complete pages for all quests in ESO. If you have any feedback or suggestions on what could be added to the project page please don't hesistate to tell me! AlphaAbsol (talk) 02:30, 12 August 2017 (UTC)

Looks good! It might be worth splitting the writing tasks (and associated categorization) into three sections, so it's clear what still needs to be done;

• Quick Reference (this would include both the Quest Header and Quick Walkthrough)
• Detailed Walkthrough
• Quest Stages

When I'm starting with a bunch of undocumented quests, which either have no page at all or an "empty" quest page, my primary objective is to get a Quest Header and Quick Walkthrough done for as many quests as possible; a bit of documentation for everything is better than full documentation for only some. After that, you may well have different people who would be interested in writing the detailed walkthrough or finding the quest stages, so if it was split into three you wouldn't get one person thinking they had to do everything, and you would also get a better idea of what each page needs. --Enodoc (talk) 15:54, 12 August 2017 (UTC)

I'd just like to ask for a reconsideration of the abbreviation for disambiguation from our Oblivion projects. Oblivion has a mix of "O" and "OB" abbreviations for it's projects, and any future ones should be "OB", so all ESO projects should either use "ON" or even "ESO". It's not a major thing but the abbreviations are used outside of the individual namespaces so it would be helpful to avoid potential confusion. Silence is Golden^{Break the Silence} 16:49, 12 August 2017 (UTC)

This is a great initiative, AlphaAbsol. I've got some rough tracking of the quests in Craglorn, Thieves Guild, Dark Brotherhood and Morrowind in my sandbox - if you need, feel free to use that information. I *might* try to write some walkthroughs of the shorter quests, but apart from that I'll likely work on the other parts of the quest pages, as I've done so far. Tib (talk) 16:58, 12 August 2017 (UTC)

I am severely disappointed in your lack of a project ribbon :P You should check out this site for some good, free ribbons to use. :) Jeancey (talk) 18:34, 12 August 2017 (UTC)

(edit conflict) I agree with The Silencer, ESOQP or ONQP would be a better acronym to avoid confusion. The project itself looks good though! Might want to make the link to Template:Online Journal Entries more prominent, since that's probably the most complex templating involved. There's also no mention of quest images and how to handle them (e.g. galleries vs Detailed Walkthrough section). —Legoless (talk) 18:37, 12 August 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for the feedback, everyone. I'm going to rename the project to ONQP, and I'll also find a ribbon! As for images, that is one thing that I did forget to add, which I realised later on when I wrote a page.

Also Enodoc, that's a really good idea; after all it's probably more important to finish all the quick references before moving on to the detailed walkthroughs. I'm going to rework the page and template to add that in. AlphaAbsol (talk) 21:26, 12 August 2017 (UTC)

(←) I propose Enobot rename the template and update the pages. Jeancey (talk) 22:31, 12 August 2017 (UTC)

I've put in a bot request to rename all the templates. If Enobot gets approved it can do it as its first project! AlphaAbsol (talk) 07:39, 13 August 2017 (UTC)

Ad Feedback Needed

We've been using the Curse ad network for the past two months and I'd like to get some feedback in order to see if we should keep using it. Besides general feedback a few specific answers I'm looking for include:

• Have you noticed any change in the ads in the past 2 months?
• Have you seen any ads with inappropriate content?
• Have you encountered any auto-playing or auto-scrolling ads?

Any other feedback on the site's ads is welcome. -- Daveh ^(talk) 20:05, 16 August 2017 (UTC)

I haven't noticed a huge change but I've been inactive on the wiki for a bit so I wouldn't have noticed. I haven't seen any with inappropriate content, and while I've seen a few auto-playing video ads at the bottom of pages, they don't have audio and aren't very distracting. — Unsigned comment by AlphaAbsol (talk • contribs) at 18:39 on 16 August 2017

I still keep my adblock on because every time I've tried turning it off since I was aware we were switching, I've gotten ads pulling me to the bottom of the page every minute or two that auto-played a video with no way to mute or pause them. Last time I know for sure tried without was July 15th, and it was so bad it was to the point I couldn't edit. (Might've tried again on the 29th but I don't remember for sure.) I've turned adblocker off today after seeing this post and so far so good, maybe I've just been lucky though. Looks like someone on the Facebook page also reported in a comment that they'd still been getting auto-playing ones too. ~ Alarra ^{(talk • contribs)} 05:36, 17 August 2017 (UTC)

In theory we have a better reporting mechanism for bad ads now. If any does encounter a auto-scroll or auto-audio ad you can post details of it here or e-mail me directly (dave@uesp.net) including the destination of the ad when clicked. -- Daveh ^(talk) 14:17, 18 August 2017 (UTC)

Like Alarra, I've started using private browsing to get rid of the ads, as they were constantly producing auto-scrolling, auto-playing ads with no way to pause or mute them (what were you expecting from an ad network called 'Curse'? :D). For me, however, this provides a benefit: I don't have to worry about drive-by viruses (much); before, I would always move my cursor around an ad to keep it from playing and giving me viruses and adware. Using private browsing does, unfortunately, mean that I can't see things like Twitter feeds built in to web pages (this is only a problem for one site I visit; I, otherwise, don't use 'social' networking (more like antisocial)). Even if we do go with a different ad provider, I'll probably continue using private browsing; it just makes the wiki look so much nicer. — Unsigned comment by AutismFanaticism (talk • contribs) at 10:29 on 16 September 2017

The auto-playing ads I've seen have all been embedded Twitch videos I believe. No risk of viruses from that. —Legoless (talk) 15:40, 17 September 2017 (UTC)

Adding MultipleUpload Extension

Evening. I think adding the MultiUpload Extension would benefit UESP by being able to upload multiple files at the same time. This would be especially useful for us users fleshing out ESO NPC pages, where we'll often be uploading multiple images for multiple pages that retain the same categories and copyright information. Uploading Clockwork City loadscreens was a bit tedious earlier due to uploading them manually.

What do you all think?

Vyraesi (talk) 19:14, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

Sounds like a good idea to me. That would have been very beneficial back when I was uploading hundreds of screenshots and maps together, and I was surprised it wasn't an option. I'm sure such a situation is likely to arise again as well, be that after an ESO update, or once a new single-player TES comes around. Being able to group images like this and not having to do the same categories and licensing repeatedly would cut down time taken to upload multiple images by a good deal. --Enodoc (talk) 19:29, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

This is a good idea. However, that extension is not maintained and seems to have some serious compatibility issues starting with at least mediawiki 1.18, as well as some browsers. It is also listed as "broken" on the category page for multi-upload extensions. There are three alternatives listed; UploadWizard which seems to require another extension, MsUpload which lets you upload while editing other pages, and SimpleBatchUpload, the basic option. Silence is Golden^{Break the Silence} 19:58, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

As someone with Wikia experience, I can tell you, i was VERY surprised to find you didn't have it. Its extremly useful to have, as a lot of images are very similar. I.e. numerous furnishing images, etc. The only thing to remember is to make certain you have the copyright summary included. Anyways, just my thoughts here. It'll really help out to have it. Timeoin (talk) 20:31, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

I fully support this, but like Silencer said, maybe one of the other extensions would be more preferable. --Ilaro (talk) 19:05, 16 October 2017 (UTC)

Online:NPC Combat Classes.

Is there a page listing the combat classes of NPCs? If not - should there be one made? Timeoin (talk) 21:47, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

There's an NPC Classes section on Online:Classes; is that what you're after? --Enodoc (talk) 14:17, 27 September 2017 (UTC)

Depending on how many their are in the end. (The ones mentioned in Patch notes not being the only ones thar exist.) Timeoin (talk) 20:58, 27 September 2017 (UTC)

Online Character Images

Okay, so this morning on Discord a few people were talking about Npc images, as some were being uploaded. The general consensus reached was that for ESO npcs, full-body shots are not required in order to avoid the "clearimage" template, providing that the image is clear and concise. This would make it significantly easier to obtain images, as a lot of npcs are interactible, and you can get a non-UI screenshot easily. Anyways, if you disagree,state argument here, or further discuss if you wish? Timeoin (talk) 21:10, 3 October 2017 (UTC)

Addendum:Created a post a) for future reference (apologies that this isnt extremely well structured) and b) because not everone is on Discord, or at least not all at the same time. That said ... there were half a dozen people discussing it, all in agreement, so consensus mauly have been reached already. (I believe it has been). Timeoin (talk) 21:10, 3 October 2017 (UTC)

Consensus has already been reached on this. For ESO full-body shots are not required where none can be obtained, and face-on images take precedence over full-body shots that can only be obtained without showing the face. For future reference, consensus can only be achieved on the wiki. Also, for reference, any of the recent images I edited with this requirement were purely correcting the use of the template, not my personal opinion on whether or not a full-body shot was needed or possible. Silence is Golden^{Break the Silence} 21:55, 3 October 2017 (UTC)

Apologies, silencer. Blame newness to being here? I Didnt know (but now do) r.e. consensus. Please feel free to close/archive/delete this portion. Timeoin (talk)

Maulborn Nostrum

Starting a discussion post about Maulborn Nostrum. Reason being is that this is actually a different instance of Nostrum Breva, triggered by another player. Starting a discussion here to query as they supposed to be two separate pages? One linked to the other, etc. I am unsure what the precedent is in this circumstance. (There are numerous follower-based instances like this, too. Not sure what happens with those, either, but I believe that likely has been discussed previously. If it hasn't what happens with those as well). Timeoin (talk) 00:42, 4 October 2017 (UTC)

Online:Daggers Mercenary is an example page you can copy. We really ought to start compiling a list of all these follower replacer NPCs somewhere... —Legoless (talk) 23:13, 4 October 2017 (UTC)

100% Agree with that. However, THIS isn't a follower. Its an ENEMY duplicate (maybe a bug?) Timeoin (talk) 00:33, 5 October 2017 (UTC)

Oh, interesting. I think I saw similar "alternate enemy" NPCs in a house in Mournhold when I accompanied a friend, but it's been so long since I did that content that I haven't a clue what the name of the quest was. I wonder if it's just a Deshaan thing or if it happens in other zones too... —Legoless (talk) 23:35, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

Yeah, it's really odd. And I think it might be Deshaan-specific (or at least not everywhere because in the short time it took me to write down the names of the enemies in Kudanat Mine, I had about 4 different instances of the same thing spawn, as various other players had come through, killed those named enemies, and gone on with that quest. (Also, if there was an easy way to determine follower duplicates, that'd make life easy). Timeoin (talk) 00:04, 12 October 2017 (UTC)

Lego, I'm pretty sure the quest you mentioned would be Vengeance of the Oppressed, as this is the only quest in Mournhold that involves fighting inside a house, as far as I can remember. --Vordur Steel-Hammer (TINV1K) 06:33, 12 October 2017 (UTC)

No, theres a few other quests-in-houses. Theyre VERY limited though. (There's one in Auridon, against Veiled Heritage. Mathiisen I think?) Timeoin (talk) 06:39, 12 October 2017 (UTC)

I meant quests involving fighting in houses in Mournhold specifically, as this is what Legoless mentioned. --Vordur Steel-Hammer (TINV1K) 06:43, 12 October 2017 (UTC)

(←) Oh, right. Then I retract my comment.Timeoin (talk) 07:36, 12 October 2017 (UTC)

Yeah, that looks to be the one. I'll have to see if I can dig up the screenshots I took of the enemies - I seem to recall they had very generic names. I'm also not sure which branch of that quest the other player chose... —Legoless (talk) 23:03, 12 October 2017 (UTC)

Protected Pages

The recent spate of vandalism, the discussions about it, and about confirmed users, had me thinking about protection of the site, which side-tracked into semi-protection. Semi-Protection protects pages against edits by any non-confirmed user, that is anons and brand-new accounts. However, some of you may remember the further back discussions where it was found that the vast majority of spamming accounts had been auto-confirmed via email.

This isn't a huge problem, except that we use semi-protection to guard our most vulnerable templates and pages (i.e. the ones that either break the wiki if messed around with, or our "front" pages. As a technical exercise I asked Robin if another level of protection was possible. He confirmed that it was, and also suggested that it be a "user right" along the lines of blocking, so it could easily be added to any user group (admin of course, patroller, autopatrolled, etc) and that a new user group could easily be set up for those who are good at template writing but don't qualify for any other user groups (a good idea).

There is a chasm between the 1334 semi-protected pages and the 25 fully-protected pages (and 4 files) on the site. This new level of protection would help to bridge that gap, providing extra protection to those few templates and pages that require heavy protection but also need to be open to editing. Also, unlike full-protection, which is limited to 19 accounts including the abuse filter, the Portuguese AF, and mediawiki's sysop, this new level could be open to any account (given the right), not just Patrollers, User Patrollers, etc, there would be a lot of people able to edit the pages, but all of them trusted. This is especially important if no action can be taken to limit the ability of spam accounts to become confirmed users. I can see this level slotting neatly between our existing two levels at just "Protected", where "Semi-Protected" is less than normal, and "Full-Protection" is more than normal.

If a new user group was set up (probably needs to be as template writing is a rare skill), I suggest it be set up like User Patroller and Blocker, where someone just needs to ask, and an admin give it to them if they agree. It should also be safe to give the right to all our user-groups safely (User Patroller, Autopatrolled, and up). The protection level is to keep them safe from deliberate harm, so it should be apparent if the applicant is suitable.

An alternative measure, or even in conjunction, would be to open up Full-Protection pages for Patrollers to edit, and use it more liberally than it is currently. There are a couple of current fully-protected pages that Patrollers should not edit content-wise, but then admins shouldn't either (e.g. general disclaimer). That would also include the Main Page. As I write this it seems more like a bad idea, as there are pages we really want to limit editing on, but I'll leave it in for thought. Silence is Golden^{Break the Silence} 01:25, 14 October 2017 (UTC)

I think part of that problem comes from the auto confirmed via email. Its easy to make fake emails for trolls, (you can make 10 a day or something on an ip on hotmail, for instance, or something similar). Maybe making it a timer, before which it could be approved manually by staff of some sort (patroller/admin etc), if its possible. (Similar to how forums typically work). That my fix some problems. Having said all of that, though, I believe that the level of vandalism is currently very low? Timeoin (talk) 02:23, 14 October 2017 (UTC)

Furnishing Materials

Do we have a page listing these? Because the materials themselves come up a fair amount, but they dont appear to have a page. Should they? (A group page, probably - I dont think they necessarily require individual pages). Wondering what others think? Timeoin (talk) 04:39, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

Mentioned-Only Characters

Earlier today, I noticed that there are a number of Mentioned-Only characters currenyly in the "People" category of games. Really, they should have their own category, I believe. I had a quick discussion on Discord about it, and a few people agreed, so I thought I should add it here, too, for permanency and more formal discussion. Currently - the entire Online:People category is Mentioned-Only Characters, but other games have some also. Timeoin (talk) 21:43, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

Sure, sounds good. --AKB ^{Talk Cont Mail} 23:19, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

I support this notion. Traditionally, the use of the [namespace]-People category is to group NPCs by region/location, typically towns, cities, settlements, etc. It would make sense for ESO to follow this trend to help keep consistency, as well as the separate category being named more appropriately. KriHavok (talk) 23:23, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

As an added benefit - pages can then be made for massive cities like Vivec, Anvil, Kvatch, Abah's Landing etc, and have a list of all the people there. Timeoin (talk)

As per this discussion, I've begun adding transclusion lists for people in the major cities. Timeoin (talk) 05:23, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

Legends projects and New expansion

Clockwork City Is announced for The Elder Scrolls Legends, so I thought it would be a good idea to give an overview about which projects our Legends UESP editors are working on and what is still on our wish list. The Legends namespace did have great improvements the last couple of months and we’ll try our best to make it the best source for Legends information available. What are we working on?:

1. Audio files: Some people probably have seen the uploads of Legends audio files. In the next couple of weeks/months we will add these files to each card page were you can listen to the ‘enter play’ and ‘attack’ audio of the cards. Here is an example page on the content3 server: Content3 server (use show preview if the audio player doesn’t show up). Daveh will install the TimedMediaHandler extension to the wiki if there are no further complications, which allows the use of the audio player on the normal server.
2. Story lines: We will try to get all story line pages (in particular The Fall of the Dark Brotherhood) up-to-date before the new expansion is released. This means that Quest Headers are added and enemy decklists will be verified and updated.
3. Spoiler list: With the new expansion, there will be new cards spoiled. We’ll try our best to keep this as much up-to-date as possible (we are already falling behind though) and maybe we’ll see a UESP exclusive surprise.
4. Re-uploading card images: Some cards do have buff/nerfs or other modifications while we still use the old card image on the wiki. However, this is something that would be better to postpone till after the expansion. There might be some big changes to cards during the expansion patch. There is also the promise from the devs that they will upload high quality card images to their own site, but this could still be months away.
5. Deckbuilder: When Daveh has time after all the stuff he needs to finish first (ESO Clockwork City, TimedMediaHandler, baby, etc.) he might take a look at a possible Legends Deckbuilder in the same vein as the ESO Builder.

This is a lot of work, but we are working hard to get it all completed. Please tell us if you know other improvements or if you have feedback/critique. I hope this post will pique the interest of some other editors to help us out with the workload. Of course there are also a lot of smaller projects and improvements that can be made that have nothing to do with the projects listed above. --Ilaro (talk) 18:58, 1 November 2017 (UTC)

Cite Book and Book Link

I started this topic on Template talk:Cite Book and added it to active discussions here, but either no one saw it or everyone silently agrees (it's been over three weeks). Rather than make the change with only TheRealLurlock's support, I want to get some consensus because the change affects most lore pages.

Right now, we have two similar templates: Cite Book and Book Link. The only difference in content is that Book Link includes the saved description along with title and author, whereas Cite Book has just title and author. However, the italics for Cite Book are opposite that of Book Link. To fit with the italics style of most of the wiki, we should be italicizing book titles and not authors. This is also consistent with typical use of italics.

To illustrate the desired format of Cite Book:

Holidays of the Iliac Bay — Theth-i

—Dillonn241 (talk) 15:27, 25 November 2017 (UTC)

I think that for consistency, both of them need to follow the same style. I agree with Dillon that the we should have the titles italicizes and not the author. Most official citation styles I know follow this format. --Ilaro (talk) 15:34, 25 November 2017 (UTC)

The templates are used in different sections for different purposes. The book link is for the purpose of adding links to books with a description of the the book, while the cite book is for easy linking in the reference section (see Lore:Hircine for both uses). It is important to remember that italicizing titles is a style choice, not a rule. The previous debates established the current style on the cite book because it was easier to read and looked better. On the example above, the author of "Legend of Haman Forgefire" is somewhat lost in all the same format text following the book title. If it were possible I would have something more helpful to spot the author in that text, but three styles of text in one line is a bit overkill. I'm going to drop a big quote now:

"Here's the secret: in the end, all these rules are arbitrary anyway, and different style guides have developed their own nuances for what should and shouldn't be italicized or put in quotation marks. If you're writing something formal, remember to double-check your style guide to make sure you're following their guidelines. Remember, though, that ultimately, the only purpose for these rules is to help the reader understand what the writer is trying to communicate. Do you italicize book titles? Whatever you're writing, whether it's a dissertation or a tweet, be clear and consistent in the way you indicate titles."

This essentially means we can choose a style and put it in our style guide, then stick to it. Which means I should support using one style for both templates, but what about the other pages that have book titles, like the Lore Books pages. They are no different to the others in that they give the book title, author, and description, separated by table pipes rather than hyphens. One style for all isn't actually feasible is it, because each usage is different in purpose, some requiring a need for clarity, others abundantly clear by their setting. If the "big" grammar commentators can't agree, why should we pretend they hold any authority on the subject? Silence is Golden^{Break the Silence} 17:40, 25 November 2017 (UTC)

Yes, I agree that the style is completely arbitrary. I don't really care that much which style is used (I would still prefer italicizing books over authors though). However, I don't really understand why we shouldn't be consistent between Cite book and Book Link? Cite Book will not lose any clarity when changed to be consistent with Book Link. It could even be argued to make authors bold to have them stand out more in the lists.

And yes, I would also argue that Lore Books should follow the same style as the others. The largest obstacle would be large lists that do not use templates, but from what I saw, those are already in the style Dillon proposed. The other Lore Books can just as easily be changed by updating {{Lore Book Entry}}. --Ilaro (talk) 18:52, 25 November 2017 (UTC)

[Comment Deleted by Poster]

That's just not true, unless you mean that as your opinion on the matter. There are no rules against it in grammar, so we can do it if we want that style, which is why we have done it. Differentiating the author by italicizing their name when not italicizing the book name makes it easier to read, and clearly separates the title from the author in text. Silence is Golden^{Break the Silence} 19:41, 25 November 2017 (UTC)

(←) Book Link does have three styles of text: linked, bolded, italicized for the title; linked for author; and plain for description. But this topic isn't about changing Book Link or about readability. There is no improvement or decline in readability when the italics of title and author are swapped in Cite Book. It's simply to be consistent in how we treat book titles. Book Link and various other pages (every Skyrim place page containing a skill book) italicizes book titles and not the author. There's no reason Cite Book shouldn't do the same. —Dillonn241 (talk) 23:14, 25 November 2017 (UTC)

I meant three styles as in one for the title, one for the author, and another for the description. I'm actually trying not to argue against it, but not for it either, just trying to point out that making these two templates similar won't be an encompassing change to the way titles are displayed across the site as there are other templates and lists that do not italicize them. It does undermine an argument to use one template as an example when others do it different just because it does it the way you want to change it to, as the other templates can then be used as examples as to why it should not be changed. The reasons for the change are actually quite strong on their own, and would probably be the first stone in the avalanche if they go through. Silence is Golden^{Break the Silence} 01:07, 26 November 2017 (UTC)

I agree that titles and authors should all be displayed consistently, and while it shouldn't be a primary concern, italicizing the title would have the added benefit of being consistent with Wikipedia's various cite templates (authors are in plain text, article titles are plain text with quotes, book/periodical/whatever titles are in italics). Silencer brings up a good point about the author getting lost in the current book links, but I think that's best solved by other means, such as parentheses, multiple dashes, explicitly stating "author: whomever" somewhere...whatever. We'd probably want to play with it a bit to see what we think looks best. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 17:31, 26 November 2017 (UTC)

There isn't a rule to say consistency must be maintained when the context of the template is different. Book Link servers one purpose, Cite Book serves another - and neither is under any obligation to conform to the other. I prefer the formatting the way it is, so I'd be against reversing the italics on Cite Book. --Jimeee (talk) 12:20, 29 November 2017 (UTC)

I was going to make the change with no strictly opposing comments, but now I'm not sure that would be acceptable. Jimeee, I don't understand what context has to do with italicizing book titles. Almost every page on the wiki I've seen italicizes book titles, except for instances of the Cite Book template, which does it reversed. The context of the Cite Book template is lorespace and italicized book titles are present throughout the actual content there.

More important than any consistency, this is a grammar issue. There's no reason whatsoever to italicize an author just because it's an author. There is an argument to be made about leaving italics off book titles, but since we italicize them everywhere else (as most style guides recommend), we should simply flip the italics.

So far there are 4 yeas (counting TheRealLurlock) and 1 nay. 5 if you count the deleted post. I'd rather not turn this into a vote, but UESPWiki:Consensus states that stylistic preferences are often not able to reach a compromise. In this case, it's really one way or the other. —Dillonn241 (talk) 16:42, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

After thinking some more about it, I'd say okay lets try it. Maybe I'm just so used to how it has been since forever that I'm biased. It might actually work better. By context, I meant book italics in the body of a paragraph may be for a specific reason (such as its easier to spot at a glance) - while book italics in a list of refs or a book list may not necessarily require that same distinction. In some cases it might require a totally different approach that flies in the face of consistency. --Jimeee (talk) 11:03, 4 December 2017 (UTC)

I made the change to Cite Book. —Dillonn241 (talk) 20:10, 5 December 2017 (UTC)

Centered Images Anything Not Displaying in Chrome

I don't know how long this has been a problem, but I noticed that images with the "center" parameter no longer display in Chrome browsers, e.g.: Online:Stonefalls_Treasure_Map_II. The same page displays properly in both Firefox and Edge browsers, but not in Chrome on 2 different computers. Is there a fix we can do for this? Or should we de-center all of the treasure/survey map pages so that they're supported by all browsers? — TheRealLurlock (talk) 16:30, 28 November 2017 (UTC)

After some testing and discussion on Discord, we narrowed down to a specific version of Chrome: 61.0.3163.100. This version is only 2 months old, so it's surprising that it doesn't work. I can update, obviously, but until we know how many other people might be affected by this, I think I'm going to keep this version around for testing, because it might not be just me.

Also it is not just images that are affected, but also text or anything else using the <div class="center"></div> tags. Oddly, the <center></center> tags work fine, as does <div style=text-align:center></div>. Not sure if that helps narrow it down? — TheRealLurlock (talk) 18:51, 28 November 2017 (UTC)

How do these look? These are the only things the center class seems to add, as far as I can see, so play around with them and see if you can get things to appear or disappear and narrow it down.

Center only	Test 1
Center plus margins	Test 2
Center class	Test 3

– Robin Hood  ^(talk) 03:43, 29 November 2017 (UTC)

Your examples both work fine. I added a row showing one that doesn't. The "Test 3" text does not show at all in this version of Chrome. — TheRealLurlock (talk) 03:53, 29 November 2017 (UTC)

Any difference now with Test 2? If not, then there's no substantive difference between them that I can see, so probably nothing we can do. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 05:43, 29 November 2017 (UTC)

They still both work and look the same to me. Test 3 is still not visible. — TheRealLurlock (talk) 06:44, 29 November 2017 (UTC)

Proposed Sidebar Updates

As brought up in Discord, we don't really need the "Chatroom" link anymore at this point: the IRC is fairly inactive and hasn't been moderated for probably about a year, and we don't really need to have it there as if it's one of our main features anymore, so shall we just remove it? There was also question as to whether the Discord link in the sidebar should point at the Discord itself (as it does now) or to our Discord page on the wiki. I think it's fine as-is; I think the link itself probably brings more people than putting an extra page/click in their way, and besides we have a link to the wiki page at the top of every page in the form of the "chat" link.

Dillon has also suggested that we rename the Elder Scrolls Online "DLC" link to "ESO DLC" to make it align more with the other Add-Ons links where it lists the game names, which I agree with. Thoughts? ~ Alarra ^{(talk • contribs)} 09:04, 21 December 2017 (UTC)

My belief is that the "Discord" link should point to our Discord, and the "Chatroom" link should point to UESPWiki:Discord. This is because people who already know what Discord is will simply need an invite to our server, whereas people who have never heard of the program will need to learn how it works first.

I agree with Dillon about renaming the link. baratron (talk) 10:40, 21 December 2017 (UTC)

It makes sense to have the Discord link go to Discord and the Chatroom link go to UESP:Discord. If there's a suggestion to rename "DLC" to something else, then I'll drop the same proposal I always do when this comes up; we should use the official names for all of them. "Plugins" for Morrowind, "Downloads" for Oblivion, "Add-Ons" for Skyrim, and "DLC Packs" or "DLC Game Packs" for ESO. --Enodoc (talk) 19:34, 21 December 2017 (UTC)

I support changing the link at the top (chat tab) to directly link to the discord channel, changing the Chatroom link to point to the Discord UESPWiki page, but leaving the Discord link as it is in line with the other social media icons and links. It's been long enough now that Discord has replaced IRC as our chatroom. It isn't that hard to figure out the basics to join the channel and chat, our page is more for policy related issues and more complicated/involved participation. Silence is Golden^{Break the Silence} 20:46, 21 December 2017 (UTC)

I edited the sidebar to change our Chatroom link to UESPWiki:Discord. Seems like a non-contentious change, given that our IRC goes almost unused. —Legoless (talk) 21:45, 21 December 2017 (UTC)

ESO Quest Dialogue: How much?

This is a discussion that has been going back and forth on Discord for a while without reaching much of a conclusion. The main point of contention is how much dialogue should be included in walkthroughs. On the one hand, the style guide says "Key quest-related dialogue should be quoted as part of the walkthrough. In particular, if there is information from an in-game dialogue that would otherwise need to be paraphrased as part of the walkthrough, it is generally preferable to quote the dialogue instead of paraphrasing it. However, the walkthrough should not attempt to include every piece of dialogue that you hear during the quest." The Online Quest Project, however, says "In ESO, there are generally a few paragraphs of dialogue that must be gone through to advance the quest. While there is often other optional dialogue that can be read afterwards, only the dialogue needed to advance the quest should be detailed."

The debate has been whether all the dialogue needed to advance the quest is considered "key" dialogue, and whether including all dialogue needed to advance the quest buries the rest of the walkthrough. Obviously we don't want pages to just be dialogue dumps like To The Clockwork City. But should the dialogue in A Faded Flower (formatting issues aside) not be added at all? I think that it's both necessary to advance the quest, and is actually interesting, and that by paraphrasing, you lose most of the actual story. I also think that it's essential to note that you need to Intimidate or Bribe the Nord - the original walkthrough just said "After some convincing", you could get info from him.

So tl;dr - how much dialogue should we be including on ESO quest walkthroughs? Is including all of the dialogue needed to advance each stage of a quest burying more essential info? --FioFioFio (talk) 00:26, 24 December 2017 (UTC)

I think the baseline should be to follow the same layout as used in other namespaces. Dialogue that is essential and noteworthy should be there, but most other dialogue shouldn't. Take Bleak Falls Barrow, for example. That page includes important exchanges between you and Arvel, as well as the theatre scene with Farengar and Delphine, but doesn't have all the dialogue between you and Balgruuf/Farengar at either end of the quest. With the specific example here of A Faded Flower, I would say most of that dialogue is unnecessary for the quest page, as it doesn't help advance the quest. (Advancing the quest is, after all, why someone would be reading the walkthrough.) I agree that the Intimidate or Bribe stuff is important, as that is part of advancing the quest, but I don't think the full dialogue from Velsa is necessary. It doesn't add anything specific to the quest, and therefore just repeats the exact same stuff that should be on Velsa's own page (but isn't yet).

The only dialogue that I think could be included in full on the quest pages is theatre scene dialogue, because it might not work very well on the NPC pages. --Enodoc (talk) 01:16, 24 December 2017 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Every quest should do its utmost to not use quotes, thus making any embellishment with them more prominent. A Faded Flower is a terrible quest page (without even passing judgement on the spelling and formatting), almost every line should be swept off the page onto the NPC pages, and instead actually explain how to do the quest. As it is such a short quest, a few lines would then be used to push it from 2 to maybe 4 paragraphs allowing the 3 extra images to stay without lots of whitespace. So to repeat myself somewhat, every time you write a quest page you should aim to not have a single quote on it, so that when you do eventually add the necessary (and most times necessary dialogue isn't necessary for repeating in a walkthrough) and the truly interesting, they don't make it look like a dialogue dump. PS, to expand on a point, most times you only need to refer to the dialogue option to choose, not quote the response. Silence is Golden^{Break the Silence} 01:22, 24 December 2017 (UTC)

The only issue with this is that the bot-added formatting for npcs says to add dialogue to quest pages. Timeoin (talk) 02:52, 24 December 2017 (UTC)

(←) I think for quest dialogue, any text in the text box, ie words that you as the player say directly to NPCs and vice versa are important enough to go on the quest page itself. Any other dialogue, such as in cut scenes etc. Should go on the NPC page instead, as well as miscellaneous dialogue like "Let's get this done before talking" style greetings when attempting to talk to NPCs who are busy. Contraptions (talk) 04:35, 24 December 2017 (UTC)

Broken table

Hello, there is a broken table in Template:Clarification needed/Doc#Parameters. Someone other than me would probably have an easier time to sort it out. --79.222.134.173 21:45, 28 December 2017 (UTC)

Honestly that template is pointless, you should use {{Verification needed}} which is far more useful and not incorrect if the right question is asked with it. I'm also no template expert but as far as I see it just copies the other template with a few tweaks for the name, and could just be turned into a redirect to use the same coding under a different name. Either way I've cleared up the reason it came to your attention. Silence is Golden^{Break the Silence} 22:14, 28 December 2017 (UTC)

Yeah it seems redundant. Might as well change up its one use to {{vn}} and then just delete it. --Enodoc (talk) 22:21, 29 December 2017 (UTC)

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