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This is a thread for staff members to discuss the formatting of Powers & Abilities sections, recent changes to some pages, and what we could do going forwards.
To give an example of previous general formatting and the issues with it, here is a screenshot of what Garou's page used to look like:
I think that people can see the issues with it at first place. It's a huge wall of text; mostly blue thanks to the heavy use of links with the abilities and the justifications sort of blending together making it difficult and annoying to read.
It was agreed upon unanimously in this thread to change it, and my suggested formatting was accepted so that the page looks like this:
There are three main changes:
1) Abilities are bolded. This makes them stand out, they're the first thing you see and the unbolded justification follows them. It is essentially no different to how we bold ratings further down the page.
2) Abilities are bullet-pointed. Instead of a colossal wall of text where each abilities and justification carries on straight into the next, each ability and its justification is on their own line. We already do this for Notable Attacks/Techniques where these attacks are listed individually. If we can do it there, we can do it for abilities as well.
3) A scrollbox is used to contain the extended list of abilities. Yes, I know that bullet-pointing the list makes the overall Power & Abilities section longer, but this solution takes care of that. It is now optional to choose whether to scroll through Garou's abilities or scroll down the rest of the page instead. Obviously not every profile, whether they're using bullet points or not, is going to need this solution as it should only be used for excessively large sections. So this is optional.
I'd be happy for discussions to go ahead on what people think of these changes overall but I'd like to pre-emptively address some possible objections by providing a few other suggested guidelines for Power & Abilities sections.
1) Brevity; not all abilities need a paragraph of justifications after them. Just enough of a description to justify the ability, a source link or reference to go along with it. Additional information could be placed in the "Notable Attacks/Techniques" section if appropriate.
2) Tabbers; information on abilities can be split along multiple tabs as it is done on Garou's page now, so that all of the abilities aren't in one huge list but multiple (usually going by keys or transformations). Sometimes splitting up Resistances from Abilities can be done this way too, like is currently used on Superman's Post-Crisis page.
3) Compactness. Sometimes a single justification can be used for multiple abilities. In that case, the abilities don't necessarily need to be on distinct bullet-points if they fit better together. For example a bullet point can look like this:
All of these general guidelines can further reduce the bloat on pages whether or not it is for a bullet-pointed list or a wall of text.
Lastly one other thing:
4) Not mandatory: I am not suggested that these highly beneficial changes be mandatory. I don't have the time or patience to go through nearly 30,000 profiles and change them to this format. If a page benefits from this new format, then it can be updated and gradually I suspect a large portion of the wiki's will change over time to this. But it's not something we need to spend countless hours implementing for the sake of implementing everywhere.
To give an example of previous general formatting and the issues with it, here is a screenshot of what Garou's page used to look like:
I think that people can see the issues with it at first place. It's a huge wall of text; mostly blue thanks to the heavy use of links with the abilities and the justifications sort of blending together making it difficult and annoying to read.
It was agreed upon unanimously in this thread to change it, and my suggested formatting was accepted so that the page looks like this:
There are three main changes:
1) Abilities are bolded. This makes them stand out, they're the first thing you see and the unbolded justification follows them. It is essentially no different to how we bold ratings further down the page.
2) Abilities are bullet-pointed. Instead of a colossal wall of text where each abilities and justification carries on straight into the next, each ability and its justification is on their own line. We already do this for Notable Attacks/Techniques where these attacks are listed individually. If we can do it there, we can do it for abilities as well.
3) A scrollbox is used to contain the extended list of abilities. Yes, I know that bullet-pointing the list makes the overall Power & Abilities section longer, but this solution takes care of that. It is now optional to choose whether to scroll through Garou's abilities or scroll down the rest of the page instead. Obviously not every profile, whether they're using bullet points or not, is going to need this solution as it should only be used for excessively large sections. So this is optional.
I'd be happy for discussions to go ahead on what people think of these changes overall but I'd like to pre-emptively address some possible objections by providing a few other suggested guidelines for Power & Abilities sections.
1) Brevity; not all abilities need a paragraph of justifications after them. Just enough of a description to justify the ability, a source link or reference to go along with it. Additional information could be placed in the "Notable Attacks/Techniques" section if appropriate.
2) Tabbers; information on abilities can be split along multiple tabs as it is done on Garou's page now, so that all of the abilities aren't in one huge list but multiple (usually going by keys or transformations). Sometimes splitting up Resistances from Abilities can be done this way too, like is currently used on Superman's Post-Crisis page.
3) Compactness. Sometimes a single justification can be used for multiple abilities. In that case, the abilities don't necessarily need to be on distinct bullet-points if they fit better together. For example a bullet point can look like this:
- Teleportation and Interdimensional Travel (X's magical ability allows him to teleport, even across dimensions)
All of these general guidelines can further reduce the bloat on pages whether or not it is for a bullet-pointed list or a wall of text.
Lastly one other thing:
4) Not mandatory: I am not suggested that these highly beneficial changes be mandatory. I don't have the time or patience to go through nearly 30,000 profiles and change them to this format. If a page benefits from this new format, then it can be updated and gradually I suspect a large portion of the wiki's will change over time to this. But it's not something we need to spend countless hours implementing for the sake of implementing everywhere.
