User blog:Documentalist/First blog

Introduction
When I created this account 11 days ago I had one goal in mind: create a walkthrough for all of Skyrim. I've been making walkthroughs in MS-Word before, but these were for older games (not so much content to cover) and for private use (not such much discussion about decisions made in the walkthrough).

The first few days I spend reading parts of the Skyrim wiki, made some posts on the forum. I searched for a place to start writing (How to create a page? What name shall I give it? How mature must it be before I can publish it?) and I hoped to find co-editors for these pages, but so far no one seems to be interested. The good news is that I did find a good place to start writing: here.

In this branch I can experiment as much as I want. In the past week I've been experimenting with various ideas and so far I learned 2 things.

Collapse/Expand
In MS-Word a mayor challenge was getting the right kind of data and the right level of detail on your screen/page. As an editor I want to see clarifications (What exactly did I want the player to do?), remarks (What impact will that have?), rationales (Why did I let the player do that? at this point in the game?), and status (How much gold does the playable character have after each step? levels? skills? inventory? health? etc. As a player I want short to the point actions.

The advantage of a wiki page when compared to a word processor page is that one can expand and collapse pieces of data. This helps significantly to get the right level of detail on your screen for what you want to do with the walkthrough. I'm *very* happy with this feature and don't understand why it isn't used in quest pages in this wiki.

Templates

 * 1) To get a consisted layout you need templates.
 * 2) To make it for an average editor clear, in the source code, which characters are part of some Wiki markup and should not be edited and which characters are "data" that must be edited because they appear as content on the page you need templates.
 * 3) To get things expanded/collapsed/calculated/etc. you need templates.

Today
I've been working on my Skyrim walkthrough, upgrading the set templates I have made so far. With a day or 2 I'll be ready to put some content in them to see if they are good enough for the job. Documentalist (talk) 00:41, October 3, 2013 (UTC)