Template talk:Infobox character

From A Wheel of Time Wiki

Ned Baker Biographical information Nationality Andoran Date of birth 1001 NE Date of death 1098 NE Physical description Gender Male Height 2 spans Weight 20 stones Hair color brown Eye color blue Chronological and political information First mentioned TEOTW 53385 First appeared TEOTW 53386 Affiliation Illuminator, Darkfriend, Blue Ajah
	[Source]

Contents 1 colors 2 Why the new template? 3 Images 4 Eras

[edit] colors

I want to standardize and automate this as much as possible with templates, but I need to get a clear picture of what factors decide the color, first. Shall we go strictly by nationality? Do we need different colors for different ajahs? For darkfriends? ... --Gherald 20:54, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

Coloring by Ajah might be a good idea - what is the standard currently? SparrowsWing 20:46, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

Well it's all pretty haphazard atm. Ajah colors in some places, hair and eye color in others, and nationality like red for Andor as well... --Gherald 07:04, 10 January 2007 (UTC)

Something I've tried to do whenever editing a character box is to use the foreground colour of the character's name to indicate good or bad: black for darkfriends; white for, erm, 'lightfriends' =) Maybe that would work here too. Aristoc 13:01, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Black for darkfriends with no other more significant affiliation may be fine (perhaps forsaken would have their own color, etc). But there are way too many characters who are not darkfriends for white to be useful in general. Best we use that for the children (who may also have some yellow as a secondary) and the white ajah. --Gherald 17:39, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

How about a single colour scheme for all character infoboxes with a different scheme for nation infoboxes, etc? 'Unnecessary complications complicate unnecessarily.' --Jade-eyed Raven 09:41, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

Agreed. Simplicity good. --TheParanoidOne 22:12, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

The color fields are optional. If you really want, you may omit or leave them blank to use the default colors when adding this template to new pages. But I would hope you don't object to someone like me coming in later and trying to make things look purty. While this "complication" of having different colors for different types of characters may not be necessary, I think it adds a nice touch. Be sure to glance around starwars: and see how good it looks... --Gherald 17:38, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

I'm not saying that colours are bad. I'm just saying that given the choice between having one colour and having a different colour per box, which is seemingly randomly selected, I'd go for the first. But I can't fit that into a three word paragraph. :) --TheParanoidOne 10:58, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Why the new template?

I wouldn't think we're so complex yet that we can't just edit the existing template. I want to make sure I understand what your goal is here; is this a "drafting" space for eventually replacing Template:Character? Or is the extra word "infobox" somehow important to your goal? -- [[User:Nae'blis|nae'blis 21:10, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

I'm doing it here because it is generated with a new mechanism that substs smaller templates, and also because it may end up having a different syntax and I don't want to break all our character pages. --Gherald 21:17, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

Okay, cool. It's a little big, but overall somewhat more classy. I think Star Wars' model is a bit "slick" for us though. I don't see any advantage, personally, in being able to hide the userbox, and it's confusing as to what it does, at present. I also don't think there's any real merit in including a direct link under [[Source]], as most readers won't have any use for it. Put an HTML comment in instead, if this is designed to be substituted (which I hope it isn't)?

On the other hand, I have an itching desire now to create a Ned Baker stub... -- nae'blis 21:22, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

I don't think [hide] is at all confusing, and I find it handy when I want to focus on the article text at starwars

[source] is similar in concept to wikipedia:tnavbar used at for instance wikipedia:template:lotr. I suppose it isn't very useful for a template as complex as this one; not sure why starwars has it.

This template is certainly not for substing into articles; that would be a nightmare. The only use of substing is to create this template from the smaller meta templates. --Gherald 21:49, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Images

Is it possible for us to scan images from the guide for use on character pages? Or does anyone know of a bunch of fan-based images we could get permission to use? starwars seems to think copyrighted character images are ok under fair use; this template sure looks slick with a suitable image.... starwars:yoda for example --Gherald 21:49, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

I wouldn't want to use the Guide pictures anyway, for the most part they seem to have little to do with the actual description of the character (and even some of the flags are wildly off from the text right next to them!). Only thing that occurs to me is we could offer to host some popular fan art, if people agreed (but not necessarily what was being added to Wikipedia a few months ago). -- nae'blis 23:31, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Eras

Is there any way us to quantify eras for wot? Would e.g. War of the Hundred Years be an era? --Gherald 21:49, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

I think the narrowest we get is the calendar "eras": New Era, Free Years, Age of Legends, etc. RJ isn't real fond of giving specific dates, though of course certain cultures have specific names for various times... -- nae'blis 23:36, 30 October 2006 (UTC)