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====Operation: D&D Spring clean==== ====Operation: D&D Spring clean====
Ok, just thought it would be nice if we could have some centralised discussion regarding my mass nominations. Title shamelessly . At this time, I have nominated around 30, and around 10 have been nominated by Boz and Shadzar combined- I'm guessing we're gonna need hundreds to cover all the monsters, deities, NPCs, (locations? Minor supplements? Minor modules?) that we have but don't need. Now, there has been a suggestion from Ig8887 that a ''single'' mass nom may have been a better idea, but myself, Jéské and Jack have all commented in various places that that is a bad idea- I don't think it is gonna happen, the AfD would just end up being closed, nothing would be achieved. A comment was left on my talk page- . Any thoughts on that? Should nominations be slowed to give people time to work on them? Personally, I say no. These have mostly sat with tags for a long, long time. People could have fixed them then. Even now, they have five days, and if they need longer- myself (or maybe another admin- Jéské?) could restore the articles to userspace after they are deleted, and they could be moved back into the article space when appropriately referenced. Anyway- centralised discussion regarding our mass nomming. ] (]) 19:02, 2 March 2008 (UTC) Ok, just thought it would be nice if we could have some centralised discussion regarding my mass nominations. Title shamelessly . At this time, I have nominated around 30, and around 10 have been nominated by Boz and Shadzar combined- I'm guessing we're gonna need hundreds to cover all the monsters, deities, NPCs, (locations? Minor supplements? Minor modules?) that we have but don't need. Now, there has been a suggestion from Ig8887 that a ''single'' mass nom may have been a better idea, but myself, Jéské and Jack have all commented in various places that that is a bad idea- I don't think it is gonna happen, the AfD would just end up being closed, nothing would be achieved. A comment was left on my talk page- . Any thoughts on that? Should nominations be slowed to give people time to work on them? Personally, I say no. These have mostly sat with tags for a long, long time. People could have fixed them then. Even now, they have five days, and if they need longer- myself (or maybe another admin- Jéské?) could restore the articles to userspace after they are deleted, and they could be moved back into the article space when appropriately referenced. Anyway- centralised discussion regarding our mass nomming. ] (]) 19:02, 2 March 2008 (UTC)
:I would say not. The only shining moment for this set is that Gavin.collins is not nominating them, and for good reason - he invited a indef'd Grawp sock from a ] to comment on the Brain in a Jar AfD, showing that he didn't even bother to read the page. -'']'' <sup>(<font color="0000FF">] ]</font>)</sup> 19:12, 2 March 2008 (UTC)


===Requests=== ===Requests===

Revision as of 19:12, 2 March 2008

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Some Wikipedians have formed a project to better organize information in articles related to the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game. This page and its subpages contain their suggestions; it is hoped that this project will help to focus the efforts of other Wikipedians. If you would like to help, please inquire on the talk page and see the to-do list there.

Scope

This project aims to improve the coverage and quality of articles on the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game.

Related Wikiprojects

Parentage

This project is a descendant of WikiProject Role-playing games, and the parent Wikiproject of Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Dragonlance, Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Forgotten Realms, and Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Greyhawk, though those Wikiprojects predate this one.

Participants

To join the project, just add yourself to this list in alphabetical order.


   WikiProject        Portal        Assessment        Cleanup        References        Mergers    
   Watchlist (changes)        Article alerts        Article hits        Where did the articles go?    

Add yourself!

WikiProject Dungeons & Dragons
Main Project Page talk
Recent changes
Project Watchlist talk‎
Style Guidelines talk
Main Page Guide talk
Participants and Sympathizers
Userboxes

Userbox

D&DThis user participates in
WikiProject
Dungeons & Dragons.

Participants who want to show they're part of the project using a userbox are free to use {{User WPDND}} on their userpage.

Sympathizers

If you don't want to or have the time to participate yourself, but think the project is worthwhile, show your support by adding your name to this list, in alphabetical order.

Structure

Introduction

Each Dungeons & Dragons article should begin with either:

"In the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game, subject is. . ."

OR

"Subject is . . . in the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game."

History

Each article should strive to include some historical overview of the subject, where appropriate. At some point, it may be necessary for some articles to split off this section into a separate article (such as "History of the Nine Hells").

Creative origins

When known, the real-life inspiration or circumstances leading to the subject's creation should be listed in this section, which should appear before the "See also," "Notes," "References," and "External links" sections. The published source of the information should be listed in References.

Notes

For citing works, a "Notes" section may be necessary. This should be placed before the "References" section. This section should supplement, not replace, the References section, per .

Where practical, the new <ref>...</ref> format for notes should be used inline within the article. If the article has only new-style notes, this will look like: 

Some text about a module.<ref>{{cite book |
  title=] |
  author=] and ] |
  year=1977 |
  publisher=]}}</ref>
... 
==Notes==
<references/>

Items cited in the article will automatically be inserted into the notes section, and a footnote will point to them. Notes should not go under the "References" header, as those items should be alphabetical by author.

Citation templates

Here are some example citations:

  • A module (see above)
  • A magazine article (use "cite journal"):
<ref>{{cite journal |
  author=], ] & ] |
  title=The Orc and the Pie  |
  journal=] |
  issue = #400 |
  publisher=Paizo Publishing, LLC |
  year = 2008 }}</ref>
  • A book (see module example, above)

References

Each article should have a section for references at the bottom, before the "External links" section. Most references listed in Greyhawk articles are in the following format, already adopted by Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Role-playing games:

  • Books, modules, supplements, boxed sets, etc: Author or editor. Title of product. Publisher, year published. Available online:URL, if applicable
  • Articles in periodicals, or works within an anthology: Author. "Title." Periodical or anthology title issue#. Publisher, year published. Available online:URL, if applicable
  • Online sources: Author. "Title." Available online:URL


Please use the following to generate the needed References & footnotes:


<div class="references-small" style="-moz-column-count:2; column-count:2;"> <references /> </div>}}


See http://en.wikipedia.org/Wikipedia:Citation_templates for a complete list of citation templates.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/Wikipedia:Footnotes for an explanation and more information of how to generate footnotes using the <ref> and </ref> tags.

Campaign settings

Articles on individual campaign settings should best be handled by related Wikiprojects, should any exist, as should characters, deities, monsters, places, etc exclusive to those campaign settings.

Characters

Classes

Deities

The text of deity articles should utilize the following sections, in order, after the introduction. See Heironeous for an example.

  • Description
    • Aspects (other forms by which the god is known)
  • Relationships
  • Dogma
    • Scriptures
  • Worshippers
    • Clergy (other subsections, like Paladins or Druids may also exist as subsections of Worshippers)
  • Temples (perhaps Temples and rituals, or add a Rituals subsection, if lengthy enough)
  • Holy days
  • Artifacts
  • History
  • Myths and legends
  • Creative origins
  • Notes
  • References
  • External Links

Game mechanics

Monsters

A discussion of the D&D monster articles on Misplaced Pages is occurring at Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Dungeons & Dragons/Monsters. Please contribute there if you have any views on the matter.

The text of monster articles should generally follow the layout found in the Monster Manual IV, utilizing the following sections after the introduction:

  • Publication history
  • Ecology
    • Environment
    • Typical physical characteristics
    • Alignment
  • Society

Additional sections may come after, such as:

  • History
  • Subspecies
  • Monster X in campaign setting X
  • Monster X in other media

Etc. Note that the "Creative origins," "See also," "Notes," "References," & "External links" sections should come at the end of the article, in that order.

Places

Minor topics

Some articles on what might be termed minor topics, e,g. characters, classes, deities, monsters or places which only appear in a single product are often better placed in a list. Articles can be split off from the list if they grow very large. Some very minor characters are probably not worth writing about, and it would be better placed in the article for the product or product series in which they appear.

Goals

A basic list

  • Find all the pages that are covered by this category
  • Re-work the main D&D page completely.
  • Split past editions into a new article, giving us both more room and more freedom to work with the primary.
- Decided against splitting by edition, see Talk:Dungeons_&_Dragons#Splitting_the_article
  • Clean up (and trim) the less important sections.
  • Cite everything
  • Add a Race category under Characters. Characters heading unnecessary in this section.

Feel free to add to this list as you come up with things, or cross things off as they are finished.

The copy of the main D&D page can be found here. The inuse tag is for anyone working on it, so have at it. Piuro 21:13, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

Articles that fall into this category:

Templates

Project template

Infoboxes

Stub templates

Userboxes

Add to your user pages only, not to article or talk pages.

Categories

Lists

Articles

Misplaced Pages articles on Dungeons & Dragons

New Misplaced Pages articles related to Dungeons & Dragons

Please feel free to list your new Dungeons & Dragons-related articles here (newer articles at the top, please). Any new articles that have an interesting or unusual fact in them should be suggested for the Did you know? box on the Main Misplaced Pages page. DYN has a 72 hr. time limit from the creation of the article.

Articles proposed for deletion

This section should be used to list Dungeons & Dragons articles currently being considered for deletion, not only by project members, but by all Wikipedians. This will not only bring low-quality D&D articles to our attention, but will also enable the project to be aware of and defend articles incorrectly targeted for deletion - or to support the deletion of articles that should be deleted. Please post (newest at the top) both the article title and the article's entry on the Articles for deletion page.

Operation: D&D Spring clean

Ok, just thought it would be nice if we could have some centralised discussion regarding my mass nominations. Title shamelessly stolen from Jack. At this time, I have nominated around 30, and around 10 have been nominated by Boz and Shadzar combined- I'm guessing we're gonna need hundreds to cover all the monsters, deities, NPCs, (locations? Minor supplements? Minor modules?) that we have but don't need. Now, there has been a suggestion from Ig8887 that a single mass nom may have been a better idea, but myself, Jéské and Jack have all commented in various places that that is a bad idea- I don't think it is gonna happen, the AfD would just end up being closed, nothing would be achieved. A comment was left on my talk page- see here. Any thoughts on that? Should nominations be slowed to give people time to work on them? Personally, I say no. These have mostly sat with tags for a long, long time. People could have fixed them then. Even now, they have five days, and if they need longer- myself (or maybe another admin- Jéské?) could restore the articles to userspace after they are deleted, and they could be moved back into the article space when appropriately referenced. Anyway- centralised discussion regarding our mass nomming. J Milburn (talk) 19:02, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

I would say not. The only shining moment for this set is that Gavin.collins is not nominating them, and for good reason - he invited a indef'd Grawp sock from a case he was involved with to comment on the Brain in a Jar AfD, showing that he didn't even bother to read the page. -Jéské 19:12, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

Requests

More tagging

Gavin Collins has been walking the D&D monsters in alphabetical order adding tags, including some that don't seem even vaguely reasonable (weasel words?) and others that are at the least highly debatable. Given his rate of adding them, I have some doubt as to if he's actually reading the articles. As far as I can tell, he's not skipped any yet, including Beholder and Elf (Dungeons & Dragons).

This isn't a new editing behavior for him. An RfC was filed regarding his editing months ago, and the result seems to be that he's reduced the number of articles he's nominating for deletion. I don't know that there is much to do about this but remove these tags where appropriate. Rray (talk) 22:15, 17 January 2008 (UTC)
The "weasel words" template in particular seems very odd and out of place on a lot of these though. Rray (talk) 22:43, 17 January 2008 (UTC)
  • Yeah, and even more fun, a user Duergarthedwarf is removing them just as quickly. I don't think that's helpful... Lots of these are bogus, some aren't. But removing them all is really not much better. Hobit (talk) 22:57, 17 January 2008 (UTC)
I just left you folks a note on my talk page. I'll leave it to the project folks to sort it out from here. I'm not part of this project. Cheers. Toddst1 (talk) 16:17, 18 January 2008 (UTC)
The Weasel template is very pertinent to some of these articles. Check out the article Sarrukh; it has so many weasel words you will be coughing fur by the time you have finished reading it. It is one of the worst articles I have ever read.--Gavin Collins (talk) 21:46, 18 January 2008 (UTC)
Hi, I put this somewhere else too, but could you please provide exact examples (in this article or elsewhere) where you are seeing these weasel words? I just don't see it (and thus can't fix it). Hobit (talk) 22:23, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

Monster of the Week

Hi, all. Given the above tagging discussion, I thought that it would be helpful to do something productive about it rather than what I was doing. So, I've got a proposal. We work on two monsters a week and do as good a job as has been done with Death Knight and related articles in AfD. I'd suggest we find one article that we agree can make it to WP:GA and also pick the next one in alphabetical order and see if we can't meet notability requirements in a clear way for it. If not, we label it for merger into a "minor characters" list and create such a list once we have 10 or so of them so labeled (otherwise the list would look silly). Of course, this will take more than a year, but... Hobit (talk) 21:02, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

Things to do for Monster of the Week

  • Create a page that list all the monsters in "work space". Ideally in alphabetic order. (Gavin, I think given that you are managing to tag things this way it might be reasonable to ask you to put together such a list? )
  • Create a page that allows disccsion of what monster to select next for
  • Go to enworld once a week and ask people to see what they can find sources for these two monsters that are non-trivial third party sources. (or some other board, but I'm an enworld person...)
  • Perhaps templates or something else are needed on the talk page to show the status of this "monster of the week" review?

Hobit (talk) 21:02, 18 January 2008 (UTC)


Comments on idea

Thoughts? Hobit (talk) 21:02, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

  • Take your pick from the following lists:
Good luck: you have several years of work ahead of you! --Gavin Collins (talk) 21:52, 18 January 2008 (UTC)
(note: moved your comment down to the comments section just to keep things clear. If you object, please feel free to move back Hobit (talk)
  • Right, but I noticed you were walking some kind of a monster list and I'd like it if you could create a page for this project that uses that list. The ones you cite are missing lots of monsters and have lots of non-monsters. Hobit (talk) 21:58, 18 January 2008 (UTC)
  • Yep, at 2 per week it will take a couple of years. But it will improve things and that's the goal. As noted, your help would be welcome. So hopefully that's several years of work ahead for us. Hobit (talk) 22:24, 18 January 2008 (UTC)
  • My suggestions are
  1. Redirect a vast majority of the articles (at least until their notability can be established, if indeed it can be) to something like Creature type (Dungeons & Dragons), or some suitable section of that article, or maybe to Monster Manual or something like this. Do this now, and then once references are located, a properly sourced article can be written. Keep in mind that primary sources are okay to use to provide references for factual material provided that third party references are used to first establish notability, that you maintain a neutral point of view, and so forth.
  2. When doing such a redirect, make sure that some comment is noted in the edit summary like "redirect to ... pending locating sources for notability" or whatever (something other than just "redirect" or, worse yet, no edit summary of all). Maybe even adding a note on the talk page before doing a redirect might be warranted as well (saying why the redirect is being performed, so at least there some explanation if someone bothers to read it), keeping in mind the collaborative effort that is supposed to be involved in WP. Also, a comment could even be added to the main article page when doing the redirect (using the usual comment tags to do so), again with a brief explanation why the redirect was performed.
  3. Clean up, find third party refs, etc for Creature type (Dungeons & Dragons) first as it's currently under multiple tags.
  4. Concentrate first on the most "important" (i.e. most notable ones I guess) such as Dragon (Dungeons & Dragons), Elf (Dungeons & Dragons), etc. For example, take the article Beholder. In that article, it suggests that the beholder wasn't based on a mythological creature, but was created for D&D itself. I don't know this for sure (although there is some, possibly primary, reference) that would seem to back this up. If so, to me this would suggest notability, provided, of course, that other people have written about it (i.e. third-party references, blah, blah, the usual WP:RS criteria). It's quite likely the vast majority of the creatures that have articles here are not notable, and therefore don't deserve to have an article of their own (but I'd welcome being proved wrong, as should any other editor who doubts their notability).
  5. When you add sources to an article, make sure to actually cite them in some appropriate place in the article, otherwise you're just setting up a situation where another editor is going to add a {{nofootnotes}} tag to the article, and justifiably so.
  6. Avoid using "fannish" language in these articles, overly long plot summaries, miscellaneous game statistics, etc. Keep in mind that you're supposed to be writing for a "general audience", i.e. people who may not be familiar with the intricate details of D&D (or any role-playing game for that matter).

I know you've likely heard all these things before, but I wanted to state them all right here since you asked for comments. --Craw-daddy | T | 15:19, 19 January 2008 (UTC)

  • Thanks! The only part I disagree with is the preemptive merging. I think that will make it harder to clean up later (not to mention be a huge amount of work right off the bat). I suspect the majority of the monsters will end up merged, and that's fine. But I think we've seen through the AfDs that given concerted effort, many monsters can be cleaned up. Hobit (talk) 16:50, 19 January 2008 (UTC)
Give me a little bit to digest all of this. I have a good grove on now finishing up the White Dwarf's I have. I was going to next tackle the handful or so other mags I have. Plus, I want to hit the Dragon mags for all the other games. Web Warlock (talk) 15:39, 19 January 2008 (UTC)
We also need to decide what creatures we need to save and what others we do not. For example. No one who has ever played 1st Ed AD&D considers the Flumph an inportant monster in the game, but it is an important creature in teh history of D&D because of how reviled it is and how it became the whipping boy of what was wrong with the Fiend Folio. But given all of that, does it need it's own article?? I don't know. Plus we run into the issue of copyrights and IP. We are not really going to find too much third party info on Mind Flayers because Wizards never released them under the OGL. Web Warlock (talk) 16:18, 19 January 2008 (UTC)
Mind flayer will actually be pretty easy I'm guessing. There are almost certainly "ecology of" articles and lots of pre-SRD articles on it. They certainly play a significant role in nethack. But I agree with your major points. Hobit (talk) 16:49, 19 January 2008 (UTC)

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