Board Thread:Help Desk/@comment-5785168-20140417115938/@comment-2170536-20140421234832

Greetings all,

Before I begin: apologies for the wall of text to follow.

I hope it is neither inappropriate nor too late to offer my opinion. I'm not advocating for one layout or the other, but I do think that there are some points to be considered when deciding on a new layout (if a new layout is to be implemented at all).
 * 1) Firstly, I do agree with Lamiah2o that this is not the Clash of Clans Wiki, and even though it is a Supercell game, there is no compelling reason to have a look and feel that is similar between all of the various wikis. Not only is the genre very different, the intended audience is quite different demographically as well; forcing both wikis to conform to a single standard would be unnecessarily restrictive to both wikis, I would think. Given this, I think we have essentially total freedom to come up with a layout that best suits our game and our information.
 * 2) That being said, this is not Wikipedia either. Although I do believe that there are a great deal of amazing ideas that have come from Wikipedia, we do not need to slave ourselves to the layouts, formats, conventions or even concepts that Wikipedia has espoused. To me that includes things like infoboxes. I think there are equally valid (and sometimes more pleasing) ways to display information; just because they have been done in the past and work well in an encyclopaedic environment does not mean they have to be used in a game-related wiki (they can, of course, but other layouts can and should be explored).
 * 3) While I agree with ironwestie in general about templates (they are extremely useful tools for organizing and standardizing information and should be encouraged wherever possible), GorillaMan makes an extremely valid point regarding editing. While it is true that the source code of tables and the source code of infoboxes are perhaps similar, the point of the tables is that they can be edited directly in the visual editor. This is much more accessible than templates; many editors simply are not comfortable in source mode, and making a tiny change (typographical error, etc.) should not (in my opinion) require extensive editing experience, or asking an experienced editor for help. We should strive to make as much of the page accessible via the visual editor that we can, while still taking advantage of templates where they make sense. And while it is also true that a new product would require copying and pasting an entire layout, it's not as if we create hundreds of new products every day; we maybe see three or four every few months. At this low volume it's much more important to make maintenance of the page easy, not the creation itself.

So these are my thoughts. I'm not advocating for any particular layout at this point, but I do think we owe it to ourselves (and our readers) to at least explore some new ideas. And while (like ironwestie) I am a believer in "don't fix it if it's not broken", I also believe that no matter how good something is, it can always be improved. If we can't come up with anything better than what we currently have, we've lost nothing, right? But I'm willing to bet we have enough creative people here that we can do better. http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20130823072743/spottra/images/thumb/e/ea/Spsig.png/60px-Spsig.png ( talk ) 15:48, April 21, 2014 (UTC-8)