Talk:Miniatures - Iron Wind Metals

This page was originally created as a section of the page Miniatures. I have simply spun off that section into its own page here. The last update of this information appears to have occurred in 2011, so further expansion of this page is possible. Dude RB (talk) 22:48, 10 May 2021 (EDT)

Note about Merger Tag[edit]

Talvin, I hope that the following information helps. From my view, this page and Iron Wind Metals should be kept separate. This page is centered on the collection of miniatures produced by Iron Wind Metals. In contrast, Iron Wind Metals is devoted to a summary of the company. While related, they have different focuses, themes, and purposes. [Note: The given bit of company history is given to contextualize the sequence of miniatures produced. This structure also parallels that present in Miniatures - Ral Partha.)

This page Miniatures - Iron Wind Metals is classified under Category:Miniatures (itself a subcatgory of Category:Game Aids and then Category:BattleTech Universe Products). Its focal point is a summary of the wide range of products that Iron Wind Metals produced. It would be infeasible to have a page for each miniature, so this page serves to catalog those together.

As evidenced by the list under Category:Game Publisher, it is standard to have a page simply devoted to the company info for a particular BattleTech related company. The page Iron Wind Metals fills that niche, even though it could use a lot of filling out yet. Note: The separation of company pages and product pages can be seen elsewhere. This is a reasonable top-down organizational division.

Talvin, I suspect that your interest in merging is due to the fact that the company page is currently brief and that you are seeking to reduce unneeded stubs. In this case, the present section stubs seem appropriate and do mark places where additional content should be filled. Please feel welcome to share your thinking on this, as you may have an angle that I am missing. --Dude RB (talk) 20:05, 22 March 2022 (EDT)

You make a good argument, and I am not committed to the idea. I am doing a ruthless purge of "stub" across the Wiki right now, but these usages are valid, I agree. I was focusing more on the fact that *this* page appears to have actual information about the company, whereas Iron Wind Metals is effectively bare. The list of miniatures/products I can see keeping here, but should not the history and such be hosted on the other page? I am going to pull the Merge tag, but I hope someone with more knowledge of things will take a look at that.--Talvin (talk) 20:11, 22 March 2022 (EDT)
(I am multitasking too much, so I will try to be more lucid this time.) AGREE on removing merger tag, did that. BUT: Miniatures_-_Iron_Wind_Metals#History_and_Background seems like it should be in Iron Wind Metals more than it does in this article. How say you?--Talvin (talk) 20:21, 22 March 2022 (EDT)
I see that you have been on an avid stub hunt thes past few days. I hope that the process is going well.
One thing that could be done is that some of the information from the history sections of both this page Miniatures - Iron Wind Metals and from Miniatures - Ral Partha can be copied to (rather than moved to) Iron Wind Metals and then compacted/synthesized, possibly with other information from the web, to make a more complete company summary. But the history on both the Miniature pages should be left more or less intact while that is in progress. [After Iron Wind Metals was more or less completed, then one could evaluate whether the history portions here could be better tailored for this particular page's need.] A merge tag tends to suggest a moving/merging of info rather than a copy&synthesize approach (and the latter is what would seem better). I'll add a quick note to the talk page for Iron Wind Metals with this note. --Dude RB (talk) 20:57, 22 March 2022 (EDT)
"Well" is a matter of perspective. If somebody got a one-line mention in the original House Steiner sourcebook, and that has been covered, it's not a stub, it's just a very short article. And there are *hundreds* like that, so I have been doing "Triage". I expect to finish triage tomorrow, and it will be roughly half the number of when I started. My first instinct here was, yes, merge, but when you called my attention to it, I saw the reasoning behind keeping them separate. I was focusing more on the history than the products. I figure, if nothing else, I have called attention to the situation: when the folks on Discord realized that I had only just recently made the Camo Specs Online page for the Wiki, the reaction was shock. Didn't it already exist? I think many people assume the miniatures stuff is all already *here*. I'll see if some of the others who actually work with Minis want to take a stab at updating the Iron Wind Metals page and this in tandem. If that doesn't work, I will do my amateurish best at it. --Talvin (talk) 21:05, 22 March 2022 (EDT)
Such triage is important. Some stubs serve an important role (i.e. those that truly represent a spot where something that can and ideally should be added at some point). They give people "nucleation sites" or ideas for where they can jump in and contribute. They give longer term editors ways to communicate either what they hope to do next, especially if their editing gets interupted by weeks or months. But there can also be stub chaff and that can unfortuantely obscure the more legititamte stubs. So a good stub review/threshing is helpful.
If you end up taking a stab at the Iron Wind Metals page and want someone to give it a second look/pass, please feel free to let me know. The editing process is iterative and multi-layered. --Dude RB (talk) 21:37, 22 March 2022 (EDT)
Definitely agree on the purpose of "stub", that's why I took it on. I found one that had been there so long, it was not {{stub}}, it was [[Category:Stub]] from 2009. This one, I just missed a trick, but that's why we tag rather than just charge forward: I was very much in a particular mode, saw that one page *has* the history and such while the other looks barely started, slapped merge and moved on. Thanks for catching that.--Talvin (talk) 21:42, 22 March 2022 (EDT)
And to keep things on track for this page: if you wish to discuss the stub-triage any further, I already have a section on my talk page for that.--Talvin (talk) 21:45, 22 March 2022 (EDT)