Herocopia:Community portal

Introductions to General Policies

This page is the meeting ground for Herocopia.com topics that are more global in scope. A place to ask generic questions, raise concerns, discuss design and content issues.

A couple of slight difference for the veteran contributors to be aware of please.

1. Don't delete a policy item (like this one) when it has aged or answers have been provided. Instead, we will be archiving them to the bottom of this page.
2. Take advantage and use the "special page: Recent changes" to see where people are commenting on specific characters, topics or whatever. Don't promote a local issue to this Help Talk Page unless you feel strongly that it is global in scope. Even then, think twice about just how strongly you feel about that global nature of your topic.

For now this is just a holding ground of sorts. But it will be the place to talk about policies, overall presentation, template changes...

More to come for this section as we move along.

--Infobroker (talk) 18:08, 8 July 2013 (PDT)

To Do List (miscellaneous stuff)

• Documentation pages for the character templates. (done --Infobroker (talk) 07:10, 27 August 2013 (PDT))

• A collected page for Street Names - rather than them scattered, unless it is a really special street, with something really special happening there.

• There are still lots of pages to dredge from the Wayback Machine website. (hint hint)

• There are lots of Dark Age incidental characters that still need adding. Good excuse to go back and re-read the story arc in its entirety. My only problem, I get interrupted when I find a fun incidental, like the Universals and I want to post an entry for them here on Herocopia.

• Need a 'bot for correcting punctuation for appearance lists. Had one in the past, but I think I had a hard drive crash on the computer where that was stored and running.

• Looking at upcoming issues, it would be nice if we can get the Confessor, Samaritan and Winged Victory clean and shiny. Of the three, WV is probably the most demanding. Any takers? (UPDATE: These are looking much better. Thanks Guys! --Infobroker (talk) 21:18, 25 September 2013 (PDT))

Time Demarcations

For now, let's use a demarcation point of the start of the current Astro Cities(2013) series as a line between current and past activities and the start of the very first Astro City comic (Aug1995) as the dividing point for early and middle periods of past activities. We can discuss and adjust... --Infobroker (talk) 07:00, 27 August 2013 (PDT)

Issue Title Templates

• The templates for formatting Astro City Comics titles need to be rebuilt. I want the names to match what is in the indentia. The abbreviations can be whatever we like. Then we need to incorporate them into the appearance lists and elsewhere. For the most part let's use 'bots here.

For now, just use something that you are comfortable with. Making it look like what we have been cut-n-pasting from the old pages would be helpful to the 'bots.

Once I have the templates working I will append something here and on the Help page. --Infobroker (talk) 07:10, 27 August 2013 (PDT)

update: --Infobroker (talk) 12:03, 4 September 2013 (PDT)

• templates and the issue pages. We need to talk about content for the individual issues and best means for referencing them when authoring articles. I have a scheme here, but it is a bit difficult to explain. Plan to discuss with Fenyx4 a table for indicating how the cross-referencing for this works.

Legacy characters

I admit, the I and II designations to differentiate characters with the same name bugs me a little. Mainly because it's not a designation the characters themselves use, unlike, say, Kroseth IV. Plus, a more casual fan isn't necessarily going to know whether the one he's looking for is I or II. Anyone who didn't read that one caption box of the Visitor's Guide, forex, wouldn't know the "main" Flying Fox is actually the second person to use that name. Looking at how other wikis do it (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotman), I find that method preferable. For example, the two Flying Foxes could be Flying Fox (modern) and Flying Fox (1940s).

--Yiding (talk) 04:00, 10 September 2013 (PDT)

This is one of those suggestions that is so good (and so obvious), I wonder why we weren't doing it a long time ago. Take a peek sir at the Sidebar to the left. I also like that a title like 'Flying Fox (1940s)' explains things instead of adding confusion. Nice all around.

Sidenote #1: Just to be clear, the Confessor and Jack-in-the-Box - those should stay on one page, do not need a Disambiguation. There may some others.

Sidenote #2: The Disambiguation page as a category will stay around. In a few months(once we are use to it as an organizational structure), it being listed on the sidebar will probably no longer be called out.

--Infobroker (talk) 07:29, 10 September 2013 (PDT)

I'd guess we just followed the pattern of Quarrel II being one of the first entries for every other example like Flying Fox and Hummingbird, etc. And that's how Mr. Bridwell had it I believe in his database.
Bouncing Beatnik/Halcyon Hippie/Broken Man?/Others? might be the only one I could think of like that, but as far we know right now, they're all different entities.

--Astrozac (talk) 09:28, 10 September 2013 (PDT)

Well, I jumped the gun on Hummingbird, but stopped before changing Hummgingbird II, but the (an)other option is to refer to the one that is well known and put the note at the top of the page. (E.G. Flying Fox will lead you to the second Flying Foxes' page, with a note telling you if you're looking for the first Flying Fox go here.)

The other thing is compared to Wikipedia, I'm not super familiar with other Wikis, we use it sort of backwards, I believe. Granted we don't have as much material but when you go to Wikipedia, looking for something, you type it in the search. Here it seems we go looking more under the categories and don't do many searches or is that just me?

Is the disambiguation more for when they are equally known/unknown? Or will it better just to use the disambiguation for all to let users find out about heroes/things they didn't know about? And it would cover us with the never knows about Astro City (e.g. The Flying Fox of the 1940s might be fleshed out more prominently than the current Flying Fox down the road.). Just a question before we start changing them around..

--Astrozac (talk) 09:48, 10 September 2013 (PDT)