Putting My Foot Down

[Gunmaster45]

Or maybe before you edit a page in general. Wikipedia has a huge amount of warnings and precautions before you can post. While I don't think we need to take as many precautions as they do, perhaps a warning would be nice.

But I figure if we have this message on the front page, everytime someone visits, they can be like "Oh, okay, I didn't know that."

Someone who's too lazy to put any effort in a page to begin with likely won't read all the notices and warning and recklessly upload a crap page anyway, but if its on the front page, they kind of have to read it.

But that's why I brought this up here, we can discuss and exact.

[Vangelis]

Originally Posted by AdAstra2009

I don't think putting it in the special sidebar would be good as the type of people who make crap pages prob won't go there anyways.

People who make crap pages won't read anything no matter where you put it. The trouble is at present the people who want to find out the rules can't find them either, and so make pages which are badly formatted because they're not sure of the right way to do things. Case in point would be a certain editor changing "Double Eagle" to "AMT Hardballer Longslide" because he thought a weapon being based on a specific one-off movie prop overruled it being based on something else as well.

Questions like naming for intent versus appearance ["if it's supposed to be an AK but it's a Norinco, what do I call it?" is the obvious version of that], how pictures should be aligned [and if exceptions should be made if the result looks rubbish as with my not right-aligning the images on the BFG page because the result is huge empty spaces], what format we like images in [.jpg unless it's a very early FPS], guidelines for images per weapon, image content [gore, nudity, content that doesn't reflect the final release, black borders, standing in the exact same place for every single shot doing absolutely nothing, etc] and image size, what a "weapon" is and isn't regarding featuring them ["Should I add the 88s to the Call of Duty series?" / "Do I need to use a stock picture of a molotov?"], what the guidelines for article tone are [I personally don't see a problem with a humourous caption versus a useless one; "Character X fires his rifle" under a picture of character X firing his rifle seems rather redundant when the section is about that rifle and probably already says it's used by character X, but this is a better summary of that], why we don't have an article for Halo or Gears of War, if we have a spoiler policy and if so how it applies to a weapon shown only at the end of a movie during a critical plot event, and so on...

At present, someone trying to contribute has to guess most of that, and hope their flailing isn't interpreted as vandalism. Also needs some words on standardisation of article names: for example, all the H&K guns have "Heckler & Koch" spelled out, but the M134 article has "GE" instead of "General Electric" and the MG42 doesn't mention Metall und Lackierwarenfabrik Johannes Großfuß AG at all. It also contains the MG3 section even though that's made by Rheinmetall-Borsig and is essentially a different weapon with some parts commonality [which meant I couldn't find it with a search and only did so by accident when I encountered a movie which linked to that section]. Similarly, the M61 is under "M61 Vulcan" which doesn't mention General Electric, Martin Marietta, Lockheed Martin or General Dynamics. But even if it did, which one would the article use?

[Gunmaster45]

A lot of that stuff was built before I even came on the site, so your guess on these things is a good as mine.

I agree in full titles should be changed to fill out the full gun names (except maybe the makers of the MG42, because no one ever mentions that.)

And I definately know what you mean on format troubles. The rules and regulations for the site is a long page with too much to read and no easy way to read it. I say we build a "get started" guide, including images of what to do, how format should look, and the sights rules. Every user who logs on will be given this message. Maybe anonymous users should just be forced to see it everytime until they join. Who knows...

[AdAstra2009]

Maybe if it would be possible for the {{incomplete}} template to automatically be added to every article that is created and that you would delete it when the article is complete.