User talk:DavidJCobb

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Walkthroughs

Good evening! I've noticed you've contributed walkthroughs to the website, which is wonderful! We need more people doing this.

I wanted to point out just one thing. Mass dialogue dumps belong primarily on NPC pages. Dialogue is nice to have on quest pages, but most of it should be delegated to the proper NPC's page. Only the important bits should go on walkthroughs. The rest can be summarized, so you don't have to type out an ungodly amount of dialogue for one quest page. For some quests, it's easier to just slap the dialogue down, as it explains everything you need to know. But in the case of NPCs like Bezeer and Najeepa, they didn't have much dialogue on their pages at all, it was only on their related quest's walkthroughs. Ideally, the dialogue would be put on their pages first, then picked through for the best lines to go on the quest page. Our dialogue guidelines aren't perfect, and you're not necessarily doing anything wrong, but I don't want you to feel pressured to put too much dialogue on a walkthrough when it's usually delegated elsewhere.

With that said, I'm glad you're documenting dialogue! If you don't want to type out all of the dialogue, we have a .lang file you can copy/paste from, located here. Update 25/Update 25pts are the most recent, but you should be able to find dialogue from Shadowfen quests in versions as early as Update 10. Open the lang file in any text editor, Ctrl+F, type in a short phrase from the dialogue you're looking for, search for it, then copy/paste it into the page you're editing. I usually just type out player responses and dig for NPC dialogue in the lang file.

Thanks again for helping out! I'm glad that more people like you are working on ESO walkthroughs, we have a lot of those to get through!--MolagBallet (talk) 02:07, 4 March 2020 (GMT)

This seems to represent a change from how things were done when I started writing these a while back. I don't see any changes to UESPWiki:Online Quest Project#Detailed Walkthrough Guidelines, which advises for full inclusion of quest-essential dialogue. Looking back, I see I have been adding branches that aren't 100% essential (e.g. informational branches), so I'll probably have to at least go back and prune those; however, it sounds like you're advising that even quest-essential dialogue be summarized/omitted unless it's brief.

(As an aside, I am aware of the lang file; I have a copy from a couple years back, when I had first started doing walkthroughs, and I've been using that when the typing has gotten cumbersome. I had forgotten where I'd obtained it, so thank you for the link; I'll grab an up-to-date copy now.)

I recognize your name on several articles; you seem to be a more experienced contributor for ESO. Is there are more current set of guidelines somewhere that I can refer to for reference? DavidJCobb (talk) 15:09, 4 March 2020 (GMT)

You're correct - full inclusion of quest-related dialogue has always been fine on quest pages, going back to even older games. Not every quest actually has full dialogue, but its never been discouraged. Dialogue can exist on both NPC and quest pages. Informational branches are really up to the author, but there isn't a rule that those cannot be added. It depends how relevant they are to the quest. --Jimeee (talk) 15:59, 4 March 2020 (GMT)

Re-reading MolagBallet's comment now, it seems more like they were just giving advice on how I could save time and effort while still falling under the general guidelines, rather than actively telling me I was doing something incorrect. My bad for misreading/misinterpreting their advice originally — I consider myself a guest on UESP, so I was legit concerned there may have been a guideline change that I missed — and I do appreciate it.

I'm fine continuing to do full dialogue; it's not especially challenging and I kinda enjoy being able to get the most complete possible information up. DavidJCobb (talk) 03:04, 6 March 2020 (GMT)

Okay, no, there's obviously an outright disagreement with how dialogue ought to be documented for ESO, and that disagreement is obviously occurring in spite of what's clearly indicated on the project guidelines page. No one's pointing me to any other set of established guidelines and I'm not interested in debating this, so I'm done. Peace. DavidJCobb (talk) 12:00, 18 March 2020 (GMT)

Dialogue logging add-on

Wow, that add-on is really cool. I thought about add-ons helping with wiki stuff for a while, but didn't get into add-on writing so far. Two things where an add-on might help are Achievement counting, and perhaps showing the full list of items in cases where the interface abbreviates it with ... x more. --Alfwyn (talk) 13:30, 9 March 2020 (GMT)