Narutopedia talk:Manual of Style

Section Style

Just wondering if the section style shud be changed to having, the Abilities Section, after the Part In Story section...Most of the articles go by that, and having the Abilities section before part in story might be a bit of a spoiler for those who started watchin...but the main reason wud be that most articles dont follow this style but rather the Abilities after Part in Story...AlienGamer | Talk 08:52, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

No, that part of the order was something long discussed. Basically Personality, History, Abilities, and Background are basically "aggregate" sections, ie: ones that encompass a sub-topic for the entire series, and the Part in the Story is a full plot. The aggregate sections are smaller and we try to group them together. ~NOTASTAFF Daniel Friesen (DanTMan, Nadir Seen Fire) ^(talk) May 27, 2009 _@ 16:45 ^(UTC)

Hyuuga

Why should we not use Hyuuga? Geijustu wa bakuhatsu da (talk) 11:28, October 8, 2009 (UTC)

"Other info" section

It says we should put things like "Naruto's history with the Demon Fox", yet Naruto's article does not have an "Other info" section in the first place. So I ask two questions:

1. What exactly is the purpose of the "Other info" section, and what can/should be put in it?

2. Are there any articles that actually have an "Other info" section?

Thank you. MarqFJA (talk) 21:20, February 17, 2010 (UTC)

"Naruto's history with the Demon Fox" is an example of an "Other info" section. In other words, it's a section present in only a limited number of articles . The "Legacy" section present for a couple characters (Minato, Sasori, etc.) would be another example. ~SnapperTo 00:35, February 18, 2010 (UTC)

Arc update/mishap?

Ok, I'm confused. Lately, I've seen groups of seasoned users changing the "arc" in section titles from lower to upper case and back. Even bots were used. Now, has there been a change or a discussion I didn't know about? Because if there was, something should be here in this talk, at least for reference, and the manual of style should be updated accordingly if the upper case is now the standard. Omnibender - Talk - Contributions 23:58, July 28, 2010 (UTC)

I think the bot's involvement was strictly because of the switch to title case. ~SnapperTo 03:04, July 29, 2010 (UTC)

I used a bot because I was under the impression that title case was the new standard, meaning the word arc in titles has to be capitalised as well now. If I did something wrong, I apologise, but I do believe it is simply the manual of style that has to be updated here. --ShounenSuki ^{(talk | contribs | translations)} 08:46, July 29, 2010 (UTC)

Tense Use

Given how we are supposed to write articles relevant to any point in the series, it would be a lot more logical to write them in the present tense, instead of the past tense. Of course, events that happened before the series started should still get past tense.

Example:

When Naruto was born, the Nine-Tails was sealed into him by his father. Twelve years later, Naruto uses the chakra of the Nine-Tails to defeat Haku. Later Naruto defeats Gaara with the help of Gamabunta.

[...]

After training with Jiraiya for two and a half years, Naruto returns to Konoha.Soon thereafter, he leaves with Kakashi and Sakura to help rescue Gaara, who has been appointed Kazekage during Naruto's absence.

I continue to agree. I think this is a bad habit being carried over from other wikis. ~SnapperTo 16:19, September 28, 2010 (UTC)

UK English VS. US English

I was hoping that someone would bring this up by now, but seeing that no one has, I guess I have to. I've been meaning to ask this since we switched to using UK English. So, to begin this conversation: Can someone tell me how this whole thing started? I mean, seriously. Suddenly we switched from using US English to the UK English out of the blue? It doesn't make any sense to me. Shouldn't we use the US English because that's how, for example, the Naruto episodes are written as?

For at least two months, users who are newcomers to the wiki having been repeatedly changing all of the UK English back to the US, the English spelling that wiki originally started with. And I'm quite uncomfortable with using the UK English, mainly because I have absolutely no idea who started this whole switching thing.--NinjaSheik 21:05, July 25, 2011 (UTC)

The most recent thing was here (I knew it would be good to keep following this page). There's some earlier talk about it somewhere, but I don't have that page followed. Omnibender - Talk - Contributions 21:08, July 25, 2011 (UTC)

I see now. Though Suki-senpai did list very reasonable explanations, don't you think it's only fair if we have a majority vote? I don't really care about how we spell it, but anonymous users and newcomers have been repeatedly switching the UK to the US spelling. Doesn't that indicate that most of the people who reads the Narutopedia prefer American English? I just think it'd be better to stick the US spelling since everyone seems most familiar with it, and it would save whole lot of editing wars around here.--NinjaSheik 21:23, July 25, 2011 (UTC)

Since when did we ever decide anything on majority vote? We aren't a democracy. We decide things by consensus and eventually my arguments seem to have won through.

The reason so many new and anonymous users have been changing British English to US English is because on the whole, people from outside the United States are more familiar with the fact that there are two major variants of English spelling. (Not that I mean to say that people from the US are ignorant or anything. It's just easier for them to get through life without coming into contact with enough British English to make them take note of it. Even books written in British English often get 'translated' into US English for distribution in the US. This hardly ever happens vice versa.) US English users are also more likely to consider British English spelling a mistake, even if they know of the existence of British English — The Internet is, after all, still quite US-centric.

I gave my arguments and you're more than welcome to give your own. I just hope they're better than 'a random poll was more in favour of it' and 'some random users that are obviously unfamiliar with the wiki keep changing it'. As for your argument that US English seems to be the form most people are familiar with, well, it's nonsense. As I said on the page linked to above, only about a quarter of our visitors are from the US and, thus, actually familiar with US English outside of the Internet. —ShounenSuki ^{(talk | contribs | translations)} 17:44, July 26, 2011 (UTC)

I'm fine with the UK English, it's just that the newcomers and anonymous are really starting to me think about changing to the US again. I was just trying to be fair to everyone. And besides, I seriously don't want to change back to the US when we're still in the process of changing everything to the UK. I just wanted to ask, that's all.--NinjaSheik 17:49, July 26, 2011 (UTC)

Citation suggestion

Right now you've got two issues: Episode titles don't indicate the episode number (making the categories hard to navigate), and citations to chapters and episodes don't name the title (making it hard to keep track of whether you're searching for the right one).

I understand why this might be done: correcting refs all across the wiki would be annoying when the official translation comes out and is inevitably different, but I think it can be handled more easily.

1. For episode/chapter articles, the infobox should categorize the page by the episode/chapter number.
2. For citations, they could use a switch-type template in which you input the title, episode/chapter number, opt. page, and the template matches the episode/chapter number to the current consensus title for that periodical, outputting something like, {Naruto anime, "One Worth Betting On" [239]} within the citation. This way, when a translation is updated you can just revise the main template, and the citations will update themselves automatically.(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻ (ಠ_ೃ)Bully! 00:03, November 2, 2012 (UTC)

...I could whip up a starting template using the titles of chapter 1/episode 1, if that would help illustrate what I'm suggesting.(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻ (ಠ_ೃ)Bully! 07:37, November 3, 2012 (UTC)

• On browsing categories. Are you talking about just browsing the overall Episodes category or some sort of filtered category? We have a complete auto-generated List of Episodes with the titles and episode numbers.
• On searching. Does searching for "Naruto 239", "Episode 239", etc... not work? If so theoretically it should actually be possible to hook into the go feature of MW's search and make those work. (Unless of course Wikia broke that.)
• Categories are a horrible way to deal with attributes like episode number, etc... you might not know but infoboxes already annotate pages with that kind of information. We put it inside of Semantic MediaWiki attributes (eg: Special:Browse/Jiraiya: Naruto's Potential Disaster!). We can query this information from anywhere on the wiki and even make whole lists out of it.
• Putting titles inside of a #switch in a template is a freaking horrible way to do things. That said, that's a side topic because we already have all the information we need to do all this without doing that.
• Though we probably do need some sort of {{cite anime|...}} template.

~ Daniel Friesen ^{(DanTMan, Nadir Seen Fire) (Local Talk ⁝ Animanga Talk)} 06:24, November 4, 2012 (UTC)

I was talking about the episodes category: with everything just using the chapter title (which is fine), it's kind of hard to tell what order things are meant to be in.

Searching does not work, no; at the very least, the desired title is not in the suggested searches, nor in the first few results.

No, I didn't know that, and I don't understand how it works. Do you have a guide on how to use it, and if so, could you make it more visible on how to browse these?

To clarify, the switch would have input of chapter number, and output the title. Right now, the bulk of citations just say "Naruto, chapter 149", with no links. This means I then have to go to a list of chapters or something, peruse that, and then find the right one to get to what I want. A simple template like <ref>{{cite|m|149}}</ref> => <ref>''Naruto'' chapter 149, "[[The Ninja-ness of being a Ninja!]]"</ref> would be pretty easy to remember how to use, and actually pretty easy to implement with AWB using regex.(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻ (ಠ_ೃ)Bully! 04:27, November 23, 2012 (UTC)

The category is just a category to attach things to. It's best to use the list pages and other representations of the data we already have. Namely the episodes/chapters lists.

I may have to poke Wikia as far as the search stuff goes. It looks like they've been screwing with the search system.

We don't need a switch. We have all that data in SMW. For example with {{#ask: [[Category:Chapters]] [[Chapter number::5]] }} you can get Chapter 5 (Sasuke Retsuden), Momoshiki and Kinshiki!!, Target, The Third Choice!!, Unpreparedness is One's Greatest Enemy!!. A link to the page. And with various other options you can pull out other data like chapter number, various names, arc, etc... And you combine that with the template.

Also rather than <ref>{{cite|m|...}}</ref> a {{cite chapter|<number>}} would be better. And without having to wrap it in ref. ~ Daniel Friesen ^{(DanTMan, Nadir Seen Fire) (Local Talk ⁝ Animanga Talk)} 04:54, November 25, 2012 (UTC)

What about British and American Spelling.. and date format and Long and Scale of numbers?

Like colour or color OR 17 May 2??? or May 17 2??? or 1 billion or 1 Trillion (thousand million millions?) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_American_and_British_English http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_spelling_differences

British English

The first point under Writing Style section Articles should be written in British English, not US English, why is this point a strike through text? Does it mean there is no such rule now? and does it mean that the articles can be written in any format, British and American. Old users use British English and they revert edits of the new user because the spelling is in American English. Sometimes the users get into edit wars and the old users tell them that this wiki accepts only UK English and direct them to this article, they don't see the point. I think this point should be changed and it should be clear.--Mecha Naruto (talk) 08:51, April 24, 2015 (UTC)

I too am for clarifying this. My opinion is, as it was before, to use UK English as this wiki did like forever. Using both would be a problem as I think we should be consistent with the writing style. So if we would adapt US English, we might have to rewrite the entire wiki and that would be too much. Let's just stick to UK English like we always have. Norleon (talk) 08:56, April 24, 2015 (UTC)

This will never be solved. I think the reason Dantman struck it out is because he believes the rationale were dubious, but no discussion on this was ever started. I will remove the strikeout since the wiki will always use British English. --Sajuuk _[Mod] ^{talk | contribs | Channel} 09:01, April 24, 2015 (UTC)

Improper Style Change

/discuss. ★WindStar7125 09:56, April 25, 2015 (UTC)

It stays. Nothing wrong with it, edits that don't change the page's appearance are useless and only serve to increase edit count for no reason. Just because TU3 doesn't agree, doesn't mean the policy is redundant or should be removed. Everyone else agrees with the policy, which means it stays. There is nothing to discuss about this. --Sajuuk _[Mod] ^{talk | contribs | Channel} 09:58, April 25, 2015 (UTC)

This "pointless edit" clause is itself pointless and unnecessary. I do not care if Simant enforced it, if you hadn't noticed he isn't here anymore. What is a pointless edit to some is not pointless to others and simple things such as "Doesn't change the appearance of the article" is not sound as the the code and the texts itself is edited and altered accordingly.--TheUltimate3 ^(talk) 10:01, April 25, 2015 (UTC)

I never said it had to be removed. I did say altered though. Because constantly monitoring edits that don't change the appearance of the page does get annoying. But honestly, this witch hunt has my head going in circles. ★WindStar7125 10:02, April 25, 2015 (UTC)

And I don't really care if Simant is gone. Pointless edits are pointless edits. You might consider a hidden syntax edit to be useful, but to everyone else, it is a pointless edit that does nothing to improve the wiki whatsoever. Just because you have OCD over syntax doesn't mean there is a need to flood the wiki in hidden edits that nobody cares about. Seriously:

1. Who cares if there is a single space in a parameter? Nothing is affected by the space.
2. Who cares if ==heading== is done? The heading is still the same regardless.
3. Who cares if there are comma's at the end of lists parameters? Nothing is affected by a trailing comma.

These are all pointless edits . There is nothing to discuss, it doesn't need to be altered, because it does what it says: don't make edits that can't be distinguished in page diff's. That doesn't stop people making minor edits in general, but it's simply a policy intended to reduce useless edits that you can't see in a page diff. --Sajuuk _[Mod] ^{talk | contribs | Channel} 10:06, April 25, 2015 (UTC)

How bout this? ★WindStar7125 10:08, April 25, 2015 (UTC)

For example the {{-}} this thing I see added to articles every now and again. On my computer screens, this does nothing, yet nobody bates eyelash when it's added. Or to the more extreme example of the hidden texts we use to tell people to not add stuff. Those are not seen, yet those are not considered pointless. Simply removing a space to line up the infobox and suddenly it's the end of the damned world.

Either that was specifically targeting Kunoichi101 or the rule itself is pretty messed up.

@Windstar7125: By the Forum Moderators opinion, and the enforcement of the policy, that edit would be reverted and Omnibender told not to make pointless edits. Or are we picking and choosing what is considered pointless?--TheUltimate3 ^(talk) 10:11, April 25, 2015 (UTC)

That is also a pointless edit, but I let it slide with Omnibender for several reasons: mainly because that isn't the only edits he makes on the wiki.

@TU3: This is rollback abuse. You do not have the right to misuse rollback to revert non-vandalism, then protect the page to keep your edit in place. That is the very definition of power abuse and Wikia doesn't tolerate it. I am probably going to ask someone else to undo your tool abuse. And if you don't believe me, read this page:

Do not protect a page you are involved in an edit dispute over. Admin powers are not editor privileges - admins should only act as servants to the user community at large.

The rule was not targeting any users in particular and it is most certainly not messed up. Also, the {{-}} additions are indeed pointless edits and it could be easily sorted with other methods, instead of mass adding them to page. --Sajuuk _[Mod] ^{talk | contribs | Channel} 10:12, April 25, 2015 (UTC)

@ForumModerator: Oh that went through? Could have sworn I hit the back button. Neat. Anyway that'll be fixed shortly. Back to my point, yes Omnibender's edit is just as pointless. If we are going to block Kunoichi101 for a pointless edit, like you want, I don't see why Omnibender get a pass because he does more. Maybe Kunoichi101 is an editor who just wants to format things? Not ever editor needs to make full on articles and the like. Some just want to make sure everything lines up properly. We shouldn't ban people for that.

Also jesus the edit-conflicts.--TheUltimate3 ^(talk) 10:17, April 25, 2015 (UTC)

Is it a pointless edit? Because I've seen many, many, many users do edits exactly like Omni's there. Some users just can't stand images just being randomly inserted into text like that, hence the spaces being inserted and edits like that being performed. As for the commas and headings, yeah, those are bothersome. ★WindStar7125 10:17, April 25, 2015 (UTC)

@TU3: Thank you for fixing, but protecting the page is still a no-no. Omnibender gets a free pass for it, simply because those edits are not his sole contribution on the wiki. He has posted in the forums, fixed broken links/fixed redirected titles, and helped to revert vandalism, which mostly trump the few minor edits he makes. I asked him about it and I accepted his reasoning for it, even though they are pointless edits that could be made along with another edit at the same time.

@WindStar: Yes, it's a pointless edit, but see above. --Sajuuk _[Mod] ^{talk | contribs | Channel} 10:21, April 25, 2015 (UTC)

Yes they are bothersome. But that is why users can and do edit them out and such. Again this has more to do with what is considered a good edit over what someone considers pointless. I consider half the shit the Forum Moderator says and does pointless, but I obviously cannot just block him. Why? Because he is editing the wiki and contributing in the way he chooses. We shouldn't tell people "If you aren't going to change 1k bytes of texts so don't bother." The dreadfully few new editors we do get trickle out very quickly because we have this boys club thing going on where only a few people are allowed to edit in any meaningful way, (which isn't helped by the fact that only a few of us actually CAN edit due to access to things like up to date manga stuff is only handled by a select few) and when they try to help with simple or minor things, they get blasted for making poor editing choice.

We shouldn't condemn people for making what they consider a good edit and treat it like they are vandals. It has nothing to do with if you care about what they did or didn't.--TheUltimate3 ^(talk) 10:23, April 25, 2015 (UTC)

Nobody is treating them as vandals. I don't know why you think we are, because nobody is being treated as such. We are simply advising that you shouldn't make hidden syntax edits, unless its coupled with some other edit on the page, since it adds a pointless revision that people have to look through on the page history. If the hidden edits are being made with some other edit, like expanding content or trimming out unnecessary details, it's fine. But if the only edit is just a syntax edit nobody will be able to discern between diffs, it is pointless and does not improve the wiki experience for anyone. --Sajuuk _[Mod] ^{talk | contribs | Channel} 10:28, April 25, 2015 (UTC)

The only reason why Kunoichi101 isn't permabanned yet is because I stepped in. If making minor edits are ban worthy and this the Pointless Edit clause stands, I'll do so and save us all the trouble, as well as anyone else who dares make minor edits to the wiki. Because at this point we may as well just do that then. Why make minor edits or contribute very little to the wiki? We could just cut the weeds, so to speak.

But that of course is crazy. Having the go through edit histories that only change minor things (again, it is not like they are clicking the edit button and then hitting save. There ARE changes just not in your face with it) shouldn't be a problem and having to do so sure as hell shouldn't be something that is so bothersome that we can potentially ban people for "wasting our time".--TheUltimate3 ^(talk) 10:35, April 25, 2015 (UTC)

No, making minor edits, in general, is not worthy of blocks and I will never condone people being blocked primarily for minor edits. However, Kunoichi101's edits were primarily hidden syntax edits that could not be discerned between diffs and primarily did nothing to improve the wiki. These kind of edits are meaningless and simply add useless revisions to page histories. She has, to my knowledge, not actually expanded anything on the wiki, except getting into revert wars, ignoring user requests and making unimportant edits. There are, frankly, better things she can be doing and she makes no attempt to actually contribute. Like I said to her before: if she cannot contribute to the actual wiki, then maybe making no edits, or simply posting on the forums, would be wise, rather than simply making useless edits to pages.

Also, clicking the edit button, changing nothing on the page and publishing, is called a null edit and does not create an edit revision. --Sajuuk _[Mod] ^{talk | contribs | Channel} 10:55, April 25, 2015 (UTC)

Then when this is over and if this rremoved I will permaban her and tell her to go else where. I'm sure that'll please you in the end, Forum Moderator.

Now I want to hear from others regarding this. Neither of us are going to budge on this.--TheUltimate3 ^(talk) 14:17, April 25, 2015 (UTC)

"Pointless" is subjective. What one person deems pointless another will deem useful, even necessary. So it should not officially be a thing, especially if it's not going to be enforced consistently. ~SnapperTo 16:51, April 25, 2015 (UTC)

Unless I'm very much mistaken, you blocked Kunoichi101 for making unimportant edits that came under this policy. So do not be a total hypocrite. And it's actually enforced consistently. --Sajuuk _[Mod] ^{talk | contribs | Channel} 16:53, April 25, 2015 (UTC)

Times change.--TheUltimate3 ^(talk) 17:10, April 25, 2015 (UTC)