User blog comment:Lord Boots/Potential Problems and Solutions for the Dishonored Wiki/@comment-6716431-20160903035133

With the upoming release of Dishonored 2 (10 weeks!), I agree that this wiki needs changing to get ready. Allowing these issues to remain until Dishonored 2 is released is, I believe, not the best of ideas. Dishonored 2 will introduce new players to the Empire of the Isles, and bring them, along with many old players, to this wiki, seeking assistance on their quest. A wiki with as many issues as this is not going to be the best way to help them, but it turns out that it actually is the best option out there. Rife with formatting inconsistancies, this needs change. I would be more than willing to do all I can to help with this change but, not being a higher-up like most of you guys, I'm limited in what I can do that will actually help to giving my opinions, then acting out changes stated by you.

And so, my opinions. First, almost every character page is different, in some way, to every other. The pages on powers are different to each other, assassination targets have different pages, and many stub articles that should exist do not. I have done my best to follow the guide of style, but reading the multiple pages it is spread over is rather confusing, and then I am often tempted to ignore such rules to make my edits consistent with what exists. As such, I propose that certain pages are designated as perfect templates. This will mean that the page is exactly as it should be, and anyone can look to those for guidance. I propose these pages are Daud (protagonist page), Thaddeus Campbell (assassination target page) and Void Gaze (supernatural abilities page). These represent the three main categories of pages, and will all be mostly unaffected by Dishonored 2, thus the later-discussed issue of rushed edits by newcomers will be avoided. Other such perfect templates will also need to exist, for example books/written notes, technology, minor characters, location etc, but it is not so important exactly which pages these are, provided they are again unaffecred by Dishonored 2. These perfect templates will then be listed on the new style guide page, which will consist of all the rules previously put on the multiple pages, and any new rules devised as a result of these conversations. Other things to note of this style page would be things like using "the" in titles (see Night of Flung Shutters and The Great Burning), whether articles need to be pluralised in their title or not (many a time, I have been caught out by going to the Wolfhound page, only to find I meant Wolfhounds), all the way down to minor things, such as whether the captions of pictures in galleries and at the top of pages actually need full stops. As for stub articles, someone once created a page on Blake, limited in information (it actually had less information about Blake on it than the page Creating a Safe Haven, a fact I found to be of amusement). Yesterday, I added to Blake's page a lot more information, enough to replace the stub banner with a spoiler banner, while still retaining the page as Blake's page. The information is in Dishonored, but not the wiki. I firmly believe that one should effectively be able to 'play' Dishonored simply by reading this wiki. Using the example of the High Overseer, searching for that leads to a page on a book, a location and a mission. In order to learn about the position of High Overseer, I have to scour a number of pages, some of which I have only discovered by accident. With the addition of a new High Overseer in Dishonored 2, this is really not an acceptable situation. It is my belief that, if it exists in the game, it should exist on the wiki. For example, there is no page on the Grand Inventor, but it is likely that there will be some information about the position of Grand Inventor that does not pertain directly to Kirin Jindosh, and then where would that go? I propose that a page is created on even minor things such as that, ready for them to be filled with information come Dishonored 2.

The flood of edits by players of Dishonored 2 will create chaos, likely ignoring many of the rules in place. How shall this situation be dealt with? I see two options. One, leave all this until after Dishonored 2 is released, then try to recover. The other, fix this problem now, knowing that much of it will be destroyed. I believe the second option is better. If all the existing pages are updated and prepared for Dishonored 2, we will only have to deal with the new pages, and those will be in a much better condition than they would be in if no changes were made, as it is obvious to new contributors exactly what their pages need to look like. If we wait until after the chaos, we face two issues. One, we have so many more pages to change. Two, how do we say for sure when that chaos is over? Only yesterday, I added a new page (Magnus) to this wiki, as well as adding a lot more information to Blake’s page. How do we know that, four years after Dishonored 2 is released, another person will not come along and do the same thing? This wiki is edited many times per day, how do we say when Dishonored 2’s chaotic entry into the wiki is over? As for what changes will actually be done, I suggest a higher-up makes a firm, detailed decision about what will change and how, allowing this wiki to be ready in time for Dishonored 2. I gladly offer my assistance in any changes to the formatting of this wiki.