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| - I'm trying to make some sense of how the various major continuities are handled, overview-wise. Some have their own continuity page; IDW's just got a timeline, with overview stuff shoved here and there among the individual miniseries. Some don't have anything. Some, like the G1 cartoon, are not much more than lists. The ones that exist tend to be hard to find, aren't categorized uniformly, etc... is there a master format for this stuff?—The preceding unsigned comment was added by Repowers (talk • contribs)12:15, 29 October 2007. There is no master format for continuity pages. Please feel free to make one! It would be a good thing to have! --Steve-o 00:55, show30 October 2007 (UTC) You know, I think it would be hot if once we got more timelines up, we began putting Chronology links to the timetable on the story pages. Several Dreamwave comic pages have them, and I think IDW comics should too, since IDW really isn't telling the story in a linear fashion.--Zodberg 09:36, 30 October 2007 (UTC) Sounds like a good idea. --MistaTee 13:51, 30 October 2007 (UTC) Would it make sense to have an overview writeup at the start of each timeline, a few paragraphs or so? Or should "continuity" be a separate page? Where should a chronological list of issues go -- publisher's page, continuity page, timeline page? That's not such a problem with, say, Marvel G1, but Dreamwave's a little messier, IDW's all over the place, and gods help you if you want to sort out the mess that is Marvel UK. -- Repowers 14:29, 30 October 2007 (UTC) A continuity page should have the following (in my opinion): * A one-paragraph description of the continuity, not more than a few sentences long. * A list of what media belongs to this continuity (which can include some stuff that's vaguely contradictory, but should exclude stuff that's way out there, like Earthforce relative to G1 comics). This can be sorted by publication order, or internal chronology, but if there's a major difference between the two, it should be spelled out. * An overall description of the main events in that continuity, focusing on the events actually chronicled (not the distant past). In particular, for most continuities, changes in the leadership of either side, the changing status (living/dead, present/absent, duplicated by Straxus/encoded on a floppy, etc.)of the big two leaders (usually Optimus Prime and Megatron), any events involving Unicron or Primus, and introductions of major teams or groups of characters (Headmasters, Fuzors) should be in the summary. * If necessary, a timeline, which may end up integrated with one of the above parts. * Pointers to important and closely-related continuities (again, such as Earthforce), discussion of divergences, etc. JW 15:14, 30 October 2007 (UTC) All that sounds pretty good, though I wouldn't get too hung up on following individual characters too much, even the leaders. In Marvel G1, at least, they changed over on a pretty regular basis. On a related note... this and a lot of other overview-type pages are really lost in the shuffle. They should be top-level pages, with everything branching off of them and linking back to them, but instead they're buried and nothing links to them. You start off reading, say, the article on Spotlight: Soundwave. Where do you go from there to find out more? The IDW issues category? That's the only link out of that page. If you're a newcomer, or even someone with an imperfect memory, how do you know what comes next? Either the individual issue pages need to link to the timeline and continuity pages, or the category page does, or... something. Taking care of it on the category page might be simplest, like what's on the Category:Marvel US issues page. -- Repowers 19:12, 30 October 2007 (UTC) Yes, the site is sadly lacking in both "uplinks" and "sidelinks" for the media; links from a TV episode to the TV series, links from an issue of a comic to an overview of the comic, links from one comic to the next comic in that series, etc. JW 19:21, 30 October 2007 (UTC) I'm still poking around and figuring out what's been done and what's needed; it might take a while to figure out how to start cleaning things up. It looks like we've got some random timelines started (still need ones for the Beast era and a few others), as well as continuity pages for some but not all of the major storylines, so I suppose each major continuity should have both kinds of pages. I wonder if there's a way to use a category or subcategory to get individual episode/issue pages to quickly link back to the main overview pages?... -- Repowers 19:28, 30 October 2007 (UTC) JW, we do have that comics nav template, though I like the comic infobox on wikipedia more. --MistaTee 20:04, 30 October 2007 (UTC) Ah... ...so we do. Very useful. Now we just gotta propagate it over a few hundred comic issue... :S -- Repowers 20:25, 30 October 2007 (UTC) Also, the nav setup only can link up one level. So Infiltration #2 can link up to the main Infiltration page, but not to the IDW continuity page above that. Would putting a variant of this template on the main page for each miniseries, linking up to the continuity page, work instead? Then you're never more than two clicks away from an individual issue to the continuity overview. -- Repowers 20:25, 30 October 2007 (UTC) That, or somehow add it to the main comicnav template, perhaps in small letters above the series name. I don't wanna step on anyone's toes though. --MistaTee 20:45, 30 October 2007 (UTC) That'd make the most sense, to add a "Continuity" level to the template, or alternately a lower-end "Mini-series" option. But hell if I can make sense out of how these things work... that might be a rainy day project, figuring that out. :\ -- Repowers 20:51, 30 October 2007 (UTC)
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