Forum:Standardizing infoboxes and other stuff

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While editing the weapon articles I've been thinking about what each of the infobox fields mean. It's not always obvious, so before making any fundamental changes I thought it best to discuss it first.

First item on the list, the 'magazine capacity' and 'maximum ammo' fields in the infobox. As an example, the Half-Life 2 pistol has a magazine capacity of 18 rounds, and 150 rounds of spare ammo in addition to the 18 rounds loaded in the gun. So, what exactly does 'maximum ammo' mean? Does it refer to how much spare ammo one can carry (150), or how much ammo, full stop (including that in the magazine)? Because if it's the latter, then the Half-Life 2 pistol's 'maximum ammo' would be 168. Once we come to a consensus on this we'll have to specify which is which in the OverWiki:Manual of Style.

Next up, the walkthroughs. They need serious revamping. I intend to go through them sometime, but before I do, I need to be sure people won't be undoing my changes left right and center messing up the consistency of it. Right now, one or more contributors have been going through all of the walkthroughs adding lists of absolutely every item, weapon, character and location that appears in each chapter. I appreciate the effort that's gone into that, but seriously now. Originally, I only listed elements that played a significant role or first appeared in the chapter in question. here is an example.

This touches on what I've said before about notability. There's a good reason we don't have a List of headcrab appearances or List of harmful environmental hazards. It's going into nauseating detail on subjects nobody cares about. So, as stated before, "see also" links in walkthroughs are only justified if the subjects of those links: So this means no listing every enemy that appears in the chapter, no listing every character that appears in the chapter (for however brief a time), no listing every locale you see or hear of in the chapter, and so on. Let's be reasonable with the links, okay?
 * Are newly introduced in the chapter (examples: Crossbow in Highway 17, Airboat in Water Hazard, Father Grigori in "We Don't Go To Ravenholm...", etc.)
 * Play a very significant role in the chapter. Striders are first seen in Point Insertion, but it'd also be justifiable to put a see also link to them in "Follow Freeman!", where they feature prominently as enemies.

And the same goes for quotes. Please, don't go adding quotes to articles unless they really add something to the article. An example of a bad quote is this one that I removed from the Armoured Personnel Carrier article recently: "Someone's gotta get rid of that APC!"

- Barney Calhoun

That's tantamount to adding a quote to Grenade saying "Grenade!". I don't even need to explain why this is a bad idea.

I intend to add most of this advice to the Manual of Style, but I'd like to hear what everyone has to say on these issues. --MattyDienhoff  «talk » 00:51, 19 February 2009 (UTC)