Style of articles about companies and their products

Not sure if if this is the best place to mention this, but I can't find anywhere else, so here goes. Having done a bit of work on the wiki, I am a bit concerned about the general tone of some pages giving details on companies and their products. I completely agree that such information has a place here and can include useful but hard-to-find stuff such as the history of a company and details of old products. However, much of what I've seen is little more than manufacturer's own PR or product specs quoted verbatim. I've also seen other stuff of questionable validity that almost certainly has been written by someone without detailed knowledge.

I have also contributed to Wikipedia itself, where there are detailed guidelines relating to article style and content. In particular, articles have to written from a "Neutral Point of View", using semi-formal English, advertising is forbidden, as is original research, and all content must be verifiable.

Whilst I don't think we need to go to the same level of depth as Wikipedia, I think some further guidelines relating to the above would be helpful on the BR wiki.

dave 11:09, 8 March 2007 (GMT)

I'd say it's probably as good a place as any, then when a general agreement is reached it can move into the house style page.

Firstly cheesy as it sounds nice work, it's looking good!

Regarding manufacturer's PR, my personal opinion is that it may be worth it if that's what it takes to get them to contribute. At the end of the day a page about their equipment will be PR of a sort anyway. Regarding product specs, knowing the trouble I've had finding specs/manuals for some of the obscure/cheap/old stuff, it would seem to make sense, at the least, to give a link to the relevant page. But then also knowing how often websites seem to get reorganised, see all the edits to fix broken images/links, it would then seem to make sense to add the content of the page, for when you can't access it from their site for whatever reason. So my thinking is to continue to quote specs verbatim (wikified with links to the relevant topics), but perhaps with an obvious header and footer saying "this is a direct copy of the specs from page x, for a current copy please see page x", perhaps implemented with a box round it using a template. That way we hopefully get the best of all worlds, and people can just search here to easily and quickly find the relevant specs.

As to stuff of questionable validity, have a look at Template:Questionable I know it says "inserted by the wiki moderation team", but I think it appears to be a good way for any users to flag up content and start the relevant discussion about what they don't agree with.

However given all the above I'd broadly agree with some additional guidelines. You're in the right place, so why not suggest some?

On a side note and rant, Wikipedia as a community recently deleted a group of articles from a topic relevant to me, under the not notable argument. While I can sort of see their point, it just seemed really daft removing information from an encyclopedia. Rant over.

--peternewman 23:01, 9 March 2007 (GMT)

Acronyms in Article Titles

Pages go at their "long" names (without expanding sub acronyms (so ABTT Show, MIDI Show Control)), then if and when we have to disambiguate stuff, it'll be on the acronym page. I've usually been adding redirect pages for the acronym, and categorising these so they show up on the category page in both forms.

Further are we all in general agreement that pages should be at the "expanded" version of themselves (although not expanding sub acronyms so MSC would be at MIDI Show Control). This should aid disambiguation, e.g. when we get more content, the Tough Rubber Sheath and Tip Ring Sleave articles can be split off, and TRS will disambiguate between the two. --Peternewman 01:28, 17 May 2006 (BST)

Discussion on categorising acronym redirect pages here: Talk:Entertainment Technology Now

Acronyms in General

Also try and not send a user to the acronym page just to find out what it means, just put it in bracket the first time in the article.

Should we be hunting down everything that links to the acronyms page and replacing these links with their expanded meanings in the articles themselves? I can see how it might be better for an obscure Abbreviation/Acronynm to put it in the article. But for the more common stuff (CD, DJ, DVD, TFT for example), this could make the articles unnecessarily cluttered, and links are probably preferred in these cases. The ideal would be if you could link to the acronyms page, but have the yellow tooltip (that pops up when you hover the mouse over the link in the article) give the expanded meaning, rather than just saying Acronym. Is this possible in Wiki syntax?

--Dumps 22:45, 19 May 2006 (BST)

This is obviously something else that's still up for discussion, but my gripe was I can't see much point in linking to the Acronym page just to find out what something means (hence the suggestion to put it in brackets the first time). Although I can see your point, if it's something common/irrelevant there's not much point putting it in and therefore I guess the link makes sense. I guess it's possibly things like TRS (although that may possibly be a bad example) which I feel should have the expanded version (as well as the link to the relevant article), probably because it's a term you may know, but not necessarily the acronym.

Hopefully as the wiki becomes more thorough in it's coverage we will have more articles, and the Acronym page will just become a specific place to look up acronyms, with all links going to "real" articles. I think there would be ways to bodge round what your asking with wiki syntax, but interestingly it does pretty much what we want with the way we do things. If I put a link to MCB (continuing the example) as long as I pipe it to the actual page (which should give minor performance benefits (and makes the wiki look more organised)) then you see MCB, but when you hover over it you see the real page name thus fulfilling your request. I'm assuming it'll work with wanted pages like TFT too. In which case as long as the acronyms page doesn't have a relevant link to an external page, linking to wanted pages makes sense, as we don't have to come and update them in future, and might prompt people to make the page.

--Peternewman 01:44, 20 May 2006 (BST)

I'd agree with you there, link to articles (whether they currently exist or not) for relevant content, the abbreviations/acronyms page for everything else. --Dumps 09:51, 20 May 2006 (BST)

Just to clarify I can't see any reason for linking to the Abbreviations and Acronyms page from a wiki page, unless it's to link to it as a list of abbreviations and acronyms. Any other links may as well go to the formal page name (whether it exists or not).

--Peternewman 17:02, 20 May 2006 (BST)

Abbreviations and Acronyms Page Name

Acronyms (may be being a bit pedantic now) - some of them (Amperes, EQ, Hertz, Volts, Watts), aren't stricly acronyms, they're abbreviations. Whilst it is helpful to have them, it's not strictly correct. Should these be split off to form the beginnings of a new Abbreviations page? (just noticed Abbreviations currently redirects to Acronyms). I'm sure there's plenty more that will be added to the list with time, like FX, LX, Sub(actually that one's ambiguous as there's sub-bass, sub-group or sub-master) to think of three off the top of my head. --Dumps 07:59, 18 May 2006 (BST)

I see your point, personally I think we could perhaps rename the page to abbreviations and acronyms, and make both single words redirect to it. After all it doesn't help the user if we've been pedantic and they have to decide if something is an abbreviation or an acronym to look it up, and if they don't know what it is, they probably won't know which page it's on. So lets merge the pages and do redirects. --Peternewman 13:54, 18 May 2006 (BST)

Sounds like a good idea to me. --Dumps 07:49, 19 May 2006 (BST)

Done --Peternewman 14:56, 20 May 2006 (BST)

Case of Article Titles

Current working has been:

Page titles in "title" case, pretty much the start letter of every word in capitals, apart from things like the, of, was etc. Unless those excluded words are the first word.

Although this is not how wiki standardisises it, and may make searching harder.

Do we also generally agree page names should be in "title case" so most things are capitalised apart from a/the/of/with etc, unless they are the first word? I'm now going to move this talk to somewhere in the BR namespace. --Peternewman 01:28, 17 May 2006 (BST)

Plurals?

PeterN - why move from optic to optics? singular is the correct form. Bruce 00:17, 17 May 2006 (BST)

Agreed - the same goes for a lot of the entries which have recently become plurals (Watts, Dimmers, etc). I believe the singular is correct for all of these. Its how they're defined in a dictionary. Marct 01:04, 17 May 2006 (BST)

I've moved it back for now, as discussed in various places I thought we were generally moving towards plurals. E.g. this article is about lots of dimmers, or this one about fibre optics? As opposed to a fibre optic? Although from your comment in the article maybe the page should actually formally be Optical Fibres, with redirects from fibre optics? Anyway the network area of this is clearly your area, so I'll let you decide, although ideally it would be nice to try and standardise across the wiki.

Interestingly Wikipedia (always interesting to see how they do it) calls their article Dimmer and then goes on to start it "Dimmers are devices used...". Perhaps I was wrong about the watt/watts issue, but I was again attempting to standardise, as we had an article on Volts.

I guess in conclusion I think it should probably plural unless it's a particular product, so we have a dimmers article, with a link to the art 2000. I guess SI units can fall either side of that, so whatever people think makes more sense. --Peternewman 01:15, 17 May 2006 (BST)

My gut feeling was to move to "optical fibre" in this case, although "fibre optic" is the more common usage.

but in a more generic context, how does wikipedia deal with it? I think they use singular? Or is it just "most common usage"? I don't know... Bruce 01:21, 17 May 2006 (BST)

As a user, I'm just a little baffled by this plural issue. Just from a quick glance, should it really be "Hook Clamps", when surely somebody would look up "Hook clamp" for a definition, as the definition surely describes a single article, if you see what I mean? Having said that, "Shutters" and "Barndoors" are definitely plural I think, as they are usually found in multiples, but I suppose someone may still search for "Shutter" as that is an ambiguous item. Another one I've spotted is "Half Couplers" - again, I'd search for "Half Coupler" singular if I wanted a definition. So I guess I don't know, but I'd be more inclined towards singular (with an exception for "common usage" as Bruce mentions above. PDD 19:30, 17 May 2006 (BST)

The following is from the wikipedia style guide and Avoiding common mistakes

In searching keywords, remember that article titles are usually singular, e.g. "Tree", not "Trees".

Bruce 19:54, 17 May 2006 (BST)

My vote would be to go for the singular (common usage excepted as above). Sorry for the Volts that seemed to start all this - that was me - I was following the example of the Watts article which was already there, but then so was Ampere, so where does that leave us? :-)

Side issue perhaps, but since Amps/Volts/Watts/Hertz all disappeared from the FAQ Category, would it be useful to anyone to have stuff like this in some sort of category like Physics/Science/Electronics/Units/Fundamentals/Principles (call it what you will)?

Second side-issue, should short articles like Volts be stubified? Yes they're short, but can anything more be added which is useful in the context of technical backstage?

--Dumps 20:59, 17 May 2006 (BST)

There was something interesting on wikipedia - can't find the reference - but it was basically saying that in wikipedia they were trying to generate "real content", not just definitions, so simple "dictionary definitions" were frowned on, and moved to wictionary...

Bruce 21:43, 17 May 2006 (BST)

I think the crucial thing is obviously to make it easy for users, so we can setup redirects as required if mistakes are likely. I've been reading a bit of the stuff on the Wiki page. There's a lot to it! I'm willing to go to singular (it seems to be the majority too) so any pages we shouldn't singularise? Before I go on a procrastinating rename spree. Also we could do with a consensus (in the general section above or another sub discussion of whether we put articles on their category pages (so should the article about dimmers be on the Dimmer category page, or merely linked to from it?).

I removed the SI units from the FAQ category, I think another category would be a good idea, but I don't think they belong in FAQ, otherwise lots of stuff could go in there.

There is also some interesting stuff on the Wiki style guide about capitalisation, most of which we are breaking, and how it affects the search engine.

As to unstubbing Volt(s) when it has a bit more info I'd say go for it, e.g. a little on Harmonising to EU voltages, and the American and UK voltages. --Peternewman 21:47, 17 May 2006 (BST)

Rumny Sprockets springs to mind, but that would depend which of the various definitions you would lean towards :-) --Dumps 22:33, 17 May 2006 (BST)

Articles on their Category pages

I'd say not, since the pages could get very long and users may not realise there's a category index hiding off the bottom of the screen. However the first line on the Category page (before the usual Placeholders) should be "For the article on , see [[The Article]]". --Dumps 22:19, 17 May 2006 (BST)

How about "items can go on the category pages, but only if it's brief" - say less than half a page. Any more, and it probably justifies a page of its own.... Bruce 22:27, 17 May 2006 (BST)

Sounds good to me Bruce, with Category:Strand Lighting being an example of suitable content for a category (for now) and Dimmer being an example of too much. --Peternewman 22:40, 17 May 2006 (BST)

Grouping of Related Articles

Grouping of similar things onto a page, with unique pages redirecting see VGA etc for examples, again categorised redirects.

Any objections to this? See also the Frog page as another example. --Peternewman 22:49, 17 May 2006 (BST)

Category Paging Limit

Seeing as this seems to be the main discussion page in use, I've just increased the category paging limit from 200 to 500. In theory this may have a performance issue, however I personally prefer being able to see all the articles at once, rather than having to click back and forth for different parts of the alphabet. What do other people think? Should I change it back? Should we now look at only adding things to the sub category, rather than the sub category and the master category?

--Peternewman 02:27, 20 May 2006 (BST)

All the articles at once works for me, it's not very useful if the alphabet ends half way through, and the link to the second half of the alphabet wasn't that obvious.

I'd stick with sub category and master category. It helps clarify ambiguities like the two Martins (Martin and Martin Audio), both manufacturers, but different product ranges. --Dumps 09:58, 20 May 2006 (BST)

Interwiki Linking

Right, you can now link to other wikis (probably primarily wikipedia) by typing [[wikipedia:Article Name]] these links can be piped and used the same as normal internal ones. Just take the article name (including namespace (the bit before the colon)) and stick wikipedia: before it. e.g. [[wikipedia:Image:Google_logo_transparent.png]] will link to the Google logo's image page on wikipedia. We can easily add more links, just ask, links for some other sites already exist, so either guess, ask, or if demand is high I'll make a page listing them.

--Peternewman 03:08, 20 May 2006 (BST)

Could this be used in some way to redirect to the Privacy Policy (hyperlink at the bottom of every screen, but no content on the page)? See BlueRoom talk:Privacy policy. External redirects don't seem to work, maybe using this technique might trick the wiki machine... --Dumps 10:02, 20 May 2006 (BST)

"Not a console" edits, and over/under categorising

While I can see what your aiming for and your reasoning Dumps, I don't think many (if any) of those articles should have been removed from the consoles category, remember we're aiming to make it easy for people to find stuff, hence why Neutrik is in the connectors category, and why the manufacturers and articles should be in the consoles category, it's quite likely someone may want to find out about say A&H, and know they make consoles so go looking there, or find a topset feature on their console and so look in the console category for what it is. Hence unless there are any major objections I'm going to roll all those edits back.

On a related note, I wouldn't classify a lot of those articles as programming tips, more console functions/features. So perhaps we should have a new subcategory they are in as well. Suggestions for a better name are welcome. Also now may be a suitable time to split the consoles category into Sound Desks and Lighting Desks, or however we feel the two should be named, thats suitable clear that articles don't need to be in both.

--Peternewman 14:44, 29 May 2006 (BST)

My concern was that alot of articles seem to keep appearing in the same bunch of categories, i.e. lighting/consoles/programming tips. Having a load of categories that all list the same articles equally doesn't help trying to find things. Keeping the consoles category clean, in my opinion, helps to find a specific console. Links to features/functions should be in the articles for each particular console.

Neutrik are in the connectors category because they are a connector manufacturer. This doesn't extend to Fader/Rolacue/Tracking/Art-Net being in the consoles category. Infact, a lot of console manufacturers (Avolites, ETC, Strand, Zero88 to name a few) were missing from the consoles category beforehand, so there wasn't any consistency anyhow.

I would agree with you though on dumping the consoles category altogether, and turning the Lighting Desk and Mixing Desk articles into categories to hold actual consoles. Programming Tips is probably not the best name, something like Lighting Desk Features might be a better name for the category if it is to hold the functions/features stripped from the consoles category.

--Dumps 15:15, 29 May 2006 (BST)

Fair enough. I think we should keep Programming Tips as a category for programming tips. And probably introduce subcategories to each of the desk categories with their features in.

--Peternewman 16:06, 29 May 2006 (BST)

Spelling

American English or English English?

Yorkie 11:33, 6 June 2006 (BST)

There's a controversial one for you! My standard reply would be both, certainly in terms of redirects for page names, however we've obviously still got to deal with the content itself. Where I would probably say English English, I'm sure any Americans are capable of translating, and although we are an international forum (and wiki), it's hosted in the UK.

--Peternewman 14:41, 6 June 2006 (BST)

And let us face it, Americans are in the minority here - there are people from all over the Europe, Oceania etc, but probably only a hand full of people from the USoA. Generally, you catter for the majority. Just like in power, there is an assumed nominal 230V using british standards (ie the use of Cee-form connectors etc)

-- Mac.calder 15:17, 6 June 2006 (BST)

Images

What's the policy regarding images? There appear to be a lot of articles with off-site images, which obviously isn't ideal, they'll change / disappear sooner or later. Generally, is the idea to upload images using the wiki software and add these into the articles concerned?--tomlyall 16:52, 23 June 2007 (BST)

Copyright is a big issue and so suitable policy is still something we're considering, however feel free to upload any images you own the copyright to onto the wiki. --peternewman 21:31, 29 June 2007 (BST)

Duplication and length of FAQ answers

Okay thoughts on this one please. We seem to be getting a lot of duplication/spreading out of resources in some FAQ answers, notable examples being:

• Video_FAQ#Screen_Resolutions
• Sound_FAQ#Computer_Based_Playback_anyone.3F
• Lighting_FAQ#What.27s_the_pin-out_of_a_Socapex.2FLectriflex_multicore.3F

But what should we do? Move the answer entirely from the FAQ page to its dedicated page, meaning the user has to click again to actually get the answer. I don't think we can do redirects like that, which rules out one idea. Do something wierd and remove/move down the page the automatically generated index, to replace it with a manually made one, which links between either a bookmark down the page, or a new page as required. Or do something else entirely? Thoughts and suggestions please?

--Peternewman 19:41, 8 August 2008 (BST)