User talk:Pht

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BattleMech Technology

Pht, I moved your discussion post here, as 'pages' are not the correct place to conduct them.

Gents, I don't see how this qualifies as what you've described as "fanon" (yes, I read the policy and discussion pages) of any sort; it is entirely sourced from Tech manual and an older source (which atm I don't remember, but it had the three section picture of a mech cockpit and was on the same topic as the TM section); it is in fact quite the same as any tro based mech page in form of how it follows it's official canon sources here on the site; excluding that it is about technical information that is (I hope) useful for people GM'ing a battletech RPG game (and to legions of under-informed fans of the mechwarrior video game series), and perhaps for the tabletop in some small way as well - it's had 7000 hits. In fact, I placed this in another section of the wiki before it was moved over to the essay section by another user (which does not bother me!) I'm not quite certain, after reading the fanon policy page and discussion page(s) why this has been tagged. If I need to re-write the article for style or otherwise touch it up, I'll be happy to do so --Pht 02:33, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

On the surface, I agree with your assessment. Doing a little article anthropology, I see that is came across more as an essay than on an article, for two major reasons: it was not associated with a category (which every article must) and it had absolutely no wikilinks to any other articles (also a must, in order provide one of the main advantages of a wiki - the crossover references). If I had taken another 10 minutes reading, editing and categorizing the submission, I might have come to the conclusion that it worked as an article.

However, because it was so very long and as an admin, I had so many other articles to review and tasks to complete, I came to a rushed judgment and (it appears) left it up to you to transfer into an article. I should have indicated that to you in the article discussion, but I did not. I apologize. Sometimes the rush to get things done allows for errors to creep in, but that is life on an understaffed but high-demand wiki.

So, I agree with you. Why don't you 'save' it from 'essay doom' and find both an adequate category for which it to be associated and start throwing in the copious links to other articles. It also really does need citations throughout the article. As some one mentioned on the CBT forums today, the site suffers from a lack of verifiable references to back up statements. While you and I did list the references at the end of the article, I'd encourage you to list specific pages at the end of each paragraph, to make it easier for readers to verify the article's statements.

Second thought: because citing is new to you, it might be difficult to explain how to do multiple citations of the same source material. So, let's work together. You do the wikilinks and find a good category for the article, and I'll follow behind with proper citations.

Looking through the article these last twenty minutes, I can see -while it closely follows the structure of the "BattleMech Tech: A Primer" sech of TM, it uses its own language and does a good job of avoiding our definition of plagiarism. Let's work on it together, polish her up and let go into the wild.--Revanche ^{(talk|contribs)} 03:33, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

Didn't know exactly where to start this conversation that would get somebody's attention - that's why I stuck it out front, knowing that it'd catch the appropriate eyes quickly. I'm pretty "noob" when it comes to wiki's yet! Thanks for moving it where it belonged. :)

Yes, it should pass your bar on not being plagiarism - I'd be amazed if it did not. I submitted it to Cray on the CBT forums for error checking and ok'ing and he submitted it up the line of TPTB and when he got back around to me he said it had gone way, WAY up the life form scale. The line that came back basically amounted to "we aren't outright saying yes. Or no. We reserve the right to pull it." Which I guess is about as much of a "yes" as can be gotten out of TPTB. They've known of its existence since before it was published. :P

On categories ... I'm still not certain where it would fit in the currently existing ones; I can tell you I re-typed this up mainly to help people playing the RPG and playing the MW video games to know exactly what a mech is "all about and really is/is like." That sort of information is sorely lacking, it seems. I originally considered putting it under "battlemech" or something like that, but merging those articles and these would be a nightmare for sure and I'm not sure the style and aims of those articles would mesh completely. Also, I know it's long, but I think this would suffer from being broken up; It's a "tech primer" format. Maybe there is some call for a new catagory of something like ... "In universe information?"

On the citations: I think I can get a handle on those. Page, paragraph, sentence, should work, as the sections are all within a few pages of each other in two books. On wikilinks - yeah, I won't lie. I was going to do those but realized how many zillions and RL kinda took over.

I'll work on it as I have time online (spotty, but I'll do as much as I can when I'm here!)

Thanks for your time ;)--Pht 22:40, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

I would suggest Category:Technology. --Scaletail 23:15, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

Perhaps create a category "BattleMech?" in the tech section?--Pht 23:18, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

Ah, it seems that page already exists! BattleMech--Pht 23:23, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

I like Scaletail's suggestion, because it's much more likely to be found when it shares a 'reservation' with like-minded articles. If you need any help, especially within a day or two, please feel free to contact one (or more) of us directly (on our talk pages). While article discussions are a great place to localize an appropriate conversation, there are less likely to draw a timely response. Also, thank you for your time!--Revanche ^{(talk|contribs)} 01:04, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

Yes, Pht, I think most of the content of that essay could be merged into BattleMech once it is properly referenced. That seems to be the best solution. --Scaletail 01:12, 12 July 2011 (UTC)