Board Thread:Consensus Track/@comment-32767830-20190908182120/@comment-25356303-20190908202801

''Since we have a fairly poor track record with CT timeliness, I'm going to make an executive decision that we will reach some sort of consensus about this in absolutely no more than one month, but ideally much sooner. There's no reason that we have to stretch CTs to multi-month timelines, as we've lazily done in the past.''

This is an interesting proposal. I think it can be broken down in the following ways:


 * Benefits
 * We will be able to easily reference different versions of the same book on lore articles. Since many books change over time, this would certainly make things easier for the lorebeards.
 * We can document book differences without relying on hide or other such templates, which have limited functionality on the mobile skin.
 * It might be stylistically nicer to be able to have screenshots of the book content from each game in the infobox (right now, it's often stored in a gallery at the bottom).


 * Costs
 * We will have to manually create articles for every single duplicated book in the series. This would be extremely time-consuming, as it cannot reasonably be automated by a bot.
 * I'm relatively certain that there would be a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) disadvantage were we to begin adding articles that are near-duplicates of each other in large quantities. The real question here is "how big would this SEO hit be?" I can reach out to some folks at Wikia about this and see if they have any thoughts. It's worth remembering that most of our traffic comes from search results.

The issue you're bringing up is real, and certainly annoying. Bethesda seems to be fairly consistent with their book reproduction, requiring few notes about changes across titles, but ZeniMax is much more particular about their use of punctuation, grammar, etc., and the inherently retconnic nature of ESO means that they make weird content changes too, on occasion. Our current system does an okay-but-not-great job of clarifying these differences.

The DPL call could theoretically be fixed if we added a  parameter to the regular Books template, and only used it for ESO pages. This would unify the templates and allow us to generate these lists automatically, without requiring us to split up any existing articles.

For books whose contents are indeed different across games (which is the case for many, but not all, multi-game books), an alternative could be to document both versions on the same page. An example of this in use currently is the article KINMUNE; one version is listed before the other, instead of being combined via hide. It's possible that this could result in a lesser SEO hit than splitting them up. I will have to look into that as well.