Battlestar Wiki talk:Characters

Naming

On purely aesthetic grounds, I'd prefer for us to use First Name Last Name without middle initials for article titles. I call myself Peter Farago in real life, not Peter A. Farago, anyway - it just sounds more natural. The articles could begin with the full name in boldface, to introduce them with more formality. --Peter Farago 04:10, 31 August 2005 (EDT)

I concur. I didn't really give it much thought when making Anders' new page. I'll go fix it now. --Day 04:13, 31 August 2005 (EDT)

Helo

The pages that aren't Agathon, Karl C. need to be deleted in order for him to be moved. In light of this page's creation, i'm going to remove the "Moving" section of my User page since this list supercedes that one. Tomorrow, I may merge my pictures to be added and character pages to be formatted, if someone doesn't beat me to it. Should we make one of these for Episode pages? Maybe also a Category for all project pages? How does making a Category even work? --Day 04:12, 31 August 2005 (EDT)

I have a few projects going on here now, so I'd like to finish this one before taking on another. Spencerian and Colonial one have been active on the episode guide pages, however. --Peter Farago 04:19, 31 August 2005 (EDT)

Day left me a note on the standardization (about time, too--got tired of that). I dived in to fix the Billy Keikeya page, the hard way (bring up current page, bring up redirect page from link there in separate browser, cut and paste content into preferred page, save, add redirect link into old page, save). We should be able to do this with Helo's page as well without deleting them (not that I know how or if this can be done by anyonoe other than Joe). If time allows me this afternoon, I'll take a stab at it and fix each redirect first, which will make things circular for a bit. Are we looking into applying similar formatting to differentiate the TOS and RDM episode pages? Spencerian 12:23, 31 August 2005 (EDT)

The problem with moving things the way you just said is that it disconnects the page from it's revision history. Ideally they should stay connected, but it means we need a sysop to clear the path. Listen to me... "Ideally they should," as if this weren't my first wiki ever. --Day 13:45, 31 August 2005 (EDT)

I see your point. However, unless Joe or another wiki expert here knows of a way to do this without history being mucked about, I can't see how we will do it. Spencerian 14:08, 31 August 2005 (EDT)

Verb Tense

What about it? Some pages are written in the present tense, some in the past and some switch. I, personally, prefer past tense. That way, in ten years, it doesn't sound like the show just aired. What do others think? --Day 04:24, 31 August 2005 (EDT)

I favor present tense, which is traditional for discussing fictional characters ("Achilles kills Hector in Book 22 of the Illiad, not "Achilles killed Hector in Book 22 of the Illiad".)

The battle summaries would be a possible exception to this - as histories, the narrative flows best in the past tense, but as fiction, the events are "always" occurring every time the viewer watches - but that should be dealt with elsewhere. --Peter Farago 04:29, 31 August 2005 (EDT)

Hrm. Point. I was thinking, though, that when you read, for instance, the Lord of the Rings, "Gandalf said" rather than "says" and "Frodo did" rather than "does." However, this is a concern to more than just character pages... So where do we put it? --Day 05:31, 31 August 2005 (EDT)

Intro Paragraph?

See User talk:Joe.Beaudoin for my initial thought on this topic. To reiterate just one thing from it: I prefer no intro-paragraph with contents a la Lee Adama which looks really nice and the look of no intro-paragraph witthout contents (a la Samuel Anders) is growing on me. --Day 04:32, 31 August 2005 (EDT)

TOCs are automatically added when the article passes a certain number of headings/subheadings. I don't recommend overriding this behavior. I have no strong opinion on intro paragraphs, but Wikipedia favors them:

Start your article with a concise paragraph defining the topic at hand and mentioning the most important points. The reader should be able to get a good overview by only reading this first paragraph. (Wikipedia:How to write a great article)

It might be wise to bow to their expertise. --Peter Farago 04:41, 31 August 2005 (EDT)

When I mentioned with or without contents I meant "in the case that articles acquire TOCs due to lay out." And I like intro paragraphs on most things. The reason I bring it up for characters is that most of that would go in the intro-paragraph also goes into the Character Data box (age, callsign, full name, place of birth, etc.). This makes them kind of redundant for a lot of characters except the ones we'd know well enough to do a little personality write-up. --Day 05:16, 31 August 2005 (EDT)

I agree with Peter here. The Battle pages that Ricimer created used a one-sentence summary at its start, which works great there. See Battle of Ragnar Anchorage. Spencerian 12:27, 31 August 2005 (EDT)

Non-Canon Names

How should we deal with non-canon names, such as Brendan Constanza and Louanne Katraine? I'm tempted to say leave the articles at the minimum level of information concretely known, but in that case, has Galen Tyrol's first name actually been mentioned on-screen yet? --Peter Farago 13:08, 31 August 2005 (EDT)

Not from what I hear, but RDM has made mention of it in his blog that Tyrol's first name is Galen. As for Constanza and Katraine, I would make those names redirects to their canonical names. Perhaps there could also be a note on those character's pages regarding their reported name, but make sure to mention that they are not canonical and have only been mentioned at IMDB or magazines, or wherever. -- Joe Beaudoin 13:13, 31 August 2005 (EDT)