Forum:Some stuff that really needs a conclusion

So, a bunch of stuff has accumulated over the months that really need to be decided. I kind of feel badly about the music stuff because I know how pointless it is to try to have a civil discussion on translations. Plus, there were a lot of unknowns as to what exactly should have an article, what each article should have in terms of content, etc. I guess that stuff has been settled (?), but with the music sections staying stagnant and forgotten for so long, I don't want this to happen to other arguably pressing matters, even with the loads of stuff I'm trying to catch up on.

The first matter is article capitalization. The games are known to be rather inconsistent with capitalizing certain terms, like "police department". The working solution thus far has been to capitalize unless it's ever not capitalized in-game. However, this causes inconsistencies between articles on subjects that are "related". The concern for me is to have a system that's internally consistent, so that there's no ambiguity whatsoever as to whether or not a page should be capitalized. So if anyone wants to propose a different way of doing things, like capitalizing every page in certain categories no matter what, keep in mind that it should ideally be consistent and not rely on ambiguous criteria.

The second matter is names in Gyakuten Kenji 2. While the general consensus seems to be to stick with the Japanese names, there are a couple of complicating factors. The Zheng Fa character Shi-Long Lang simply converts the Japanese reading to the Chinese reading. We could naturally extend this to his father and the president, but does that go too far into "fan localization" territory? If we leave both alone, then Lang's father remains "Dairyuu Rou", which may seem silly to people considering what the obvious localized name "should" be. But if we just convert the father's name, the way it's being done now, isn't that kind of inconsistent? I'd also like to know what people think about putting the fan translation patch's names into character infoboxes.

I suppose the third matter is the biggest one: the timeline. There was a long, protracted argument about this, most of which quite frankly didn't serve to accomplish anything. The current implementation of the timeline is described here, and the important thing to note from that page is the working "theory" behind the timeline. The profiles of most characters align with a certain line of logic that treats each game as taking place in the same year (and T&T/AAI/AAI2 all take place in the same year), but a consequence of this is that any reasonable attempt to construct a timeline results in contradictions and logical stretches with the profiles.

The "catch-all" solution to this is to assign two-year ranges to every game and flashback case, which is essentially the logic behind the current timeline. I proposed in May that we henceforth use the latter year in each range, a proposal that apparently was ignored or misunderstood when the long debate occurred over the last week. At this point, it really just comes down to opinion. A strict interpretation of using the former years or the latter years results in arguably strange consequences, like DL-6 being treated as taking place in 2002, or Turnabout Trump being treated as being six years after Bridge to the Turnabout. I believe that this is an unproductive way of looking at things, because underneath everything is the same two-year range system.

It's been brought up elsewhere that there are outliers to this system; for example, Larry Butz increments a year in AAI2 (even though Dick Gumshoe does not), and Miles Edgeworth and Franziska von Karma decrement six years in Turnabout Reminiscence even though AAI repeatedly says it happened seven years ago.

The last matter is how to deal with stuff like the background, wordmark and favicon. I understand that some people want a sense of permanence in one or all of these things. Personally, I have an attitude of expecting any of these to deserve a change, and so I tend to be more willing to use themes from recently released games. I don't know exactly what's going to be achieved from a discussion on this topic, but I feel it should be thrown out there.

To avoid what happened with the timeline discussion, I'd like to ask that responses to this focus on either giving an opinion or providing new information that may be relevant to what we do with any of these items. The actual discussions on these items seem to have been driven into the ground, so it would likely not do any good to try to revive a debate on these items without the introduction of new information. I'd really like to re-foster an attitude of prioritizing consensus-building and actually doing stuff over debating over personal ideals. I could easily have spent the last few days working on finishing pages like Aura Blackquill. I don't mean to guilt-trip people by saying that, but I hope it illustrates what I'm talking about. I'll probably put a link to this on the main page or something later on.

capefeather (talk) 04:07, July 6, 2014 (UTC)