Category talk:Epic Quests

Page Naming Convention

This was brought up and discussed on Category talk:Vol. III. Book 4 Quests when that book was introduced, but I thought I'd revive it here as a more centralized location.

As noted in the past, the naming convention in the game seems to be:

• Volume I:
  • Book #, Chapter #: Title

• Volume II and Volume III (Books 1-3):
  • Book #, Chapter 1: Title (For first chapters)
  • Chapter #: Title (For all other chapters)

• Volume III (Books 4+):
  • Book #, Chapter #: Title

• Instances:
  • No book reference

The convention adopted on the wiki, however, is just 'Chapter #: Title' across the board.

Right now, we have the quest lists for the new books in Riders of Rohan up. In game, these quests follow the book-and-chapter convention. But seeing as we haven't yet started creating the individual quest pages, this seems a good time to ask. Should we stick to the current wiki model for Epic quest page names going forward? Go to book-and-chapter? Or perhaps diverge entirely and go volume-book-chapter? -- JnK (talk) 03:20, 20 September 2012 (EDT)

Obvious quests are:

1. What are the benefits from using "Volume X, Book m, Chapter n: Name" ?
2. What are the drawbacks from it?
3. Why change?
4. Would changing in the middle of a series create less or more confusion?

The questions are not ordered in any way, just convenient if responding to just a few of them.

My personal feeling is to stick with what we have, pretty much to prevent confusion (Q4). But there are more to it:

1. Naturally this would be most informative while just ogling at the page name. It is true that today readers must read the info-box (or find the category at the bottom). It would require a lot less typing at location, NPC, creature, etc. pages as today we must manually add "Volume I, Book 2, " to the displayed quest name. Otherwise there are no other obvious benefits from a change I think, are there?
2. Using Quick-Search would require you to type also the "Volum..." part to minimize the clutter of unrelated possibilities. Related to Q4 it would create some confusion; quote RTC: "I'm a big fan of the Principle of least astonishment."
   I am not sure how quests look like from "Volume II" as I am not there yet, but "Volume I" quests only read book and chapter when looking at the Quest Log, the big right-hand section, the volume is told only in the quest-chain and quest-group parts, and in the group-header in the left-most column.
3. Personally I see no strong reason. is there one? What is wrong with the "leaner approach" we use now?
4. I think more. But it could be worth it if the benefits are strong enough, are they?

Personally I am most pragmatic and in this case I ask myself, and others, why changing a concept that works and that is intuitive enough? Neither do we have to mimic every dot of the game, this is a wiki -- which per definition should be informative, not a mirror. Still, there could be valid reasons to change, but then I think we should change all over the site, not just from Book 4. Massive work, yes, but for the reason in R1 (typing at location/NPC/creature/etc. pages) it could be worth it. However, I suggested elsewhere that quests should be made to emit a "quest-string" that could be transcluded to stakeholder pages, and if that is possible it makes this benefit void (it is still not clear to me if it is definitely not possible).

That said, what do others say? -- Zimoon (talk) 09:13, 20 September 2012 (EDT)