General versus Personal Pages Edit
To: An Adventurer
Way back you made a post on the discussion board here about having people write commentary style columns and Connor is a huge creator of original content, like his in game distributed book of crafting. A few days ago on a Turbine boards thread I invited him to do as you suggested. I see you've moved your own pages to User:An Adventurer but I'd be fine with it either way myself. It might be nice to have a nice clean title for people that will be making original contributions or commentary (like the Tlosk's Tidbits you suggested back then). In the meantime I made redirects to avoid anyone coming to an unfriendly deadend page.The primary distinction I think being, with regard to policy is whether material is of general interest or if concerns a single user. The issue being content in the User namespace won't show up in searches at all unless you do an Advanced Search and explicitly include the User namespace. It's set up that way to keep personal pages that aren't of general interest invisible. But I think would work contrary to the content's purpose for general material that lots of people will be interested in viewing. --Tlosk 17:34, 18 May 2009 (UTC)
To: Tlosk
Good points. We should work on the various policy and rule pages more so there are some clear guidelines for this kind of stuff.I still feel that personal pages should be under the user page, even if they are of general interest. That would include the two colo guides by you and atarax, connor's videos, my fiction, and any other user generated content of this type. I think a better solution would be to make a new page that is a directory of user content. I've created something in my sandbox to demonstrate: User:An Adventurer/Sandbox. In addition to this directory, links would be placed on other pages when appropriate. For example the colo guides would be linked on the colo page.
--An Adventurer 18:08, 18 May 2009 (UTC)
To: An Adventurer
What are the benefits of segregating general interest pages? --Tlosk 18:27, 18 May 2009 (UTC)
To: Tlosk
My reasoning for separating user generated content from regular content is 1) there should never be a situation where general pages and user pages must compete for a page name and 2) there should never be a situation where two user's personal pages should compete for a page name.Perhaps tips/guides could have stand-alone pages, since there is little difference between a guide written by a single player and a general quest guide or other guide page. I still think that columns/fan fiction/personal pages should be under the user page. There is a difference between reference and entertainment. The Colo guides by yourself and Atarax would definitely fall under reference. Connor's videos and my fiction are purely for entertainment.
--An Adventurer 18:43, 18 May 2009 (UTC)
To: An Adventurer
That makes sense. Maybe a page titled "Opinion" or "Commentary"? And we could link to it from the main page, and link to articles (can group by author if we get a lot by an individual) there. --Tlosk 18:55, 18 May 2009 (UTC)
I'd like to come up with some general categories to cover all the user created content, reference and entertainment. How about these?
Category:Player Generated Content
--An Adventurer 15:35, 7 June 2009 (UTC)