Talk:The Incomplete and Unofficial Guide to /bind

Curveball's Guide

Is this Curveball's guide? - Snorii 07:53, 13 January 2007 (PST)

o.o and even more curios.. does this mean the talk with Lighthouse has gone well? --Sleepy Kitty 08:05, 13 January 2007 (PST)

Yes, Snorii, it is. The original source is here. As for the talk with Lighthouse, I told him (and the community-at-large) that I would convert a guide or two to give an idea of what it would be like to have player guides posted in the wiki. I've also posted a thread about it in the Paragon Forums. Let me know what you think! --TonyV 08:39, 13 January 2007 (PST)

I guess we need to add something to the guide giving acknowledgment to Curveball. Is Lighthouse's idea to make guides a community effort with no single author? Anyway, I think it looks very good, but I definitely like the way Wiki's work. Good job, Tony. - Snorii 08:44, 13 January 2007 (PST)

^^;; heh, was expecting that link to go to coh forums for some reason.. Anyway, o,o I would say this would tie into my earlier suggestion a couple weeks back about a thank you page.. so ppl who wrote these could get some recognition, but at the same time, leave it for others to improve and update. --Sleepy Kitty 08:55, 13 January 2007 (PST)

Regarding credit for work done: I'm not so keen for giving one person credit in the main article. It's not that I don't want people to have credit; I've found Curveball's work invaluable. But here is what I was thinking when I took his name off of it:

• The nature of the wiki is that articles aren't written for personal credit. For example, even though I wrote the original Tree of Thorns Respecification Trial article, it's not really "TonyV's Tree of Thorns Respecification Trial" article. it's our collective Tree of Thorns Respecification Trial article.
• If an article "belongs" to a person, it might give the impression that etiquette dictates that the article only be edited by that person; and attitude which is, of course, antithetical to the wiki concept.
• It's entirely possible that a player-written guide that gets posted in the wiki might be edited to the point that it bears little resemblance to the original guide. It's not unusual for someone to post an article, and that article is taken up by someone else who vastly improves it. I suspect that the same would happen with guides.
• Generally, given a choice, I'd rather have someone update an existing guide than create a new one. What I'd like to avoid is 10 guides to recording demorecord files, each basically covering the same thing.
• There are other ways--better ways, in my opinion--for folks to get credit for the work they do in the wiki. The most obvious is that they're listed in the history as the person who created the article. Another is to discuss it here, on the discussion pages.
• In the specific case of Curveball's article, there were lots of references to "me," "I," "my," and so on. Since I was posting the article, it kind of seemed weird for me to leave them in. I don't want someone to see me as the author in the history log and think that "me" in the guide actually refers to me, TonyV.

I just think that it's not really appropriate for folks to take title or content credit for wiki articles, even for player guides. Like I said, it's not that I don't want to recognize folks who contribute, but in my mind, the point of the wiki is to present the information in as clear and concise a manner as possible, and giving title or content credit ("This guide was written by...") kind of defeats that point.

Thoughts?

--TonyV 16:43, 21 January 2007 (PST)

Just found this a few days ago after being away from CoH for a year... Shows you how observant I am, right?

In my opinion, the original guide was written so very, very long ago (the bulk of it came from my time in the beta test, for crying out loud) that I don't see any reason, on my part, to insist on my name being in the wikified version. There have been a lot of people who have added to bind knowledge since 1.0 and 1.1 of the forum guide were published, figuring out tricks I never even thought of.

That said, as a general CYA rule of thumb, if you take information out of something that was previously written you're supposed to source it. If you look at the pages on Wikipedia you'll find that at the bottom of an article it will list references, or it will have a notification that it doesn't have references and needs them. For example, if you saw some interesting information about the CoH invention system in a print magazine, and you put that information in the wiki, you'd need to reference where you got that information or the publishers of the magazine might have grounds to sue you.

That's not a problem for this bind article, though. I posted it on the forums and in doing it technically became the property of NCSoft (I think) so they're the only people you need to worry about. :)

--"Curveball" 17:32, 15 June 2008 (CST)