Forum:Episodes, cases, incidents

Forums: Index > Watercooler > Episodes, cases, incidents

This started out as an extension of the discussions in Forum:Notability of events. I want to lay out a philosophy of sorts concerning how the various cases in the series would be categorized and organized. In short, there would be a category called "Incidents" whose articles would describe notable events (mostly crimes) that the series talks about, and "Cases" would be a subcategory of those incidents that are left as mysteries to be solved by the player (now that I think about it, I'm not sure how the musicals, manga, etc. would handle this). However, in pondering this, I ran into an issue concerning the kind of inconsistent way we handle cases to begin with, and a lot of that has to do with the episode articles.

The episode articles are in this weird limbo between in-universe and out-of-universe content. One result is that most of them are really long, making it unlikely that very many people read them all the way through. Another is that a lot of the episodes cover multiple cases, some of which have their own articles, creating a lot of redundancy. Not to mention there's one case that spans two episodes! All of this results in navigation within and between articles that I'm sure is confusing to some people, and perhaps discourages the addition of out-of-universe content. The main Ace Attorney Discord server (or at least, the one that the Court Records server merged into) frequently has discussions involving information about the games that is scattered throughout the internet, but is not mentioned within this wiki's pages.

To address these issues, I've been thinking of a way of dividing out the episode pages into smaller chunks that are easier to read, navigate, and edit. The episode pages could be structured something like this:

• lead section
• episode navigation
  • Investigation, Day 1 (Each chapter gets its own page, maybe as a "subpage" e.g. Turnabout Revolution/"Investigation, Day 1"/"The Doctor's Study")
    • intro
    • "The Doctor's Study"
    • "The Treasure Hunt Begins"
    • etc.
  • Trial, Day 1
    • intro
    • etc.
• case summary/summaries (Each entry here also gets its own page, the way we have pages for DL-6 Incident and the like.)
  • Khura'in royal residence arson
  • Murder of Archie Buff
  • Murder of Inga Karkhuul Khura'in
• development
• references to other cases / popular culture
• notes
• category:episodes

Thoughts? There are certainly even more complications concerning a proposal like this, though at least maybe the manga/musical/etc.-related articles should be okay. capefeather (talk) 03:26, March 4, 2018 (UTC)

If we did this, would the "Murder of Inga Karkhuul Khura'in" page be a repeat of content from Turnabout Revolution? Also, you mentioned "information about the games that is not mentioned within this wiki's pages"; could you give me an example of that? Bluebully (talk) 23:41, March 7, 2018 (UTC)

I think they'd serve somewhat different purposes the way articles about DL-6, SL-9, etc. are different from the equivalent episode articles. If you look at those articles you see that they're structured in a certain way, i.e. the incident, the trial, the aftermath describing what happened afterward and how it affected relevant parties, and later resolution. The episode articles, on the other hand, describe the nitty-gritty of investigations from protagonists' points of view, almost doubling as guides to the games themselves. capefeather (talk) 23:58, March 24, 2018 (UTC)

I guess another kind of related idea I had prior to thinking of the above is to rework how we handle the templates for these pages. We currently have one template for episodes, cases, and trials, which gets a little weird because some episodes have multiple cases/trials and one case spans two episodes. We could have the navboxes for each case like we do right now, but have the option of combining them into one episode table somehow. This idea is incompatible with the one above since that one separates the case summaries out into separate pages (in that case, I guess the case summaries would use the current CaseData table while the episode article uses something else). capefeather (talk) 01:24, March 29, 2018 (UTC)

Okay well, I'm not really certain about a lot of things about the ideas that I brought up, but I think they also should be addressed sooner rather than later because a bunch of other stuff that was supposed to happen depends partly on it. Maybe we should take a step back and go through things one step at a time. First of all, does anyone have thoughts on how to handle the CaseData table? Should it be made into a multipurpose template like Template:Place, or perhaps should there be separate templates for episodes/cases/trials? capefeather (talk) 23:59, October 22, 2018 (UTC)

Sorry for not giving any input into this before. I think a multipurpose template would be better. - Strabo412 (talk) 09:57, October 25, 2018 (UTC)

Yeah I mean I guess nobody is all that motivated to talk about or put these things into action lately, really. I know my motivations have shifted between parts of the wiki from time to time, haha... I know I suggested talking about one step at a time, but I suppose I could ask about two. Firstly, I still think it's a worthwhile effort to separate out most of the content of the episode pages into at least the major trial/investigation sections. If this happens then I'm not sure what kind of naming system to use. We could just port over the in-universe style content and name these pages by date or something (e.g. "Investigation (September 22, 2028)"?). I'm also trying to decide what's the best way to consider whether an individual trial/case merits its own page. If the episode pages get sectioned out into multiple pages then the trials more or less handle themselves (though I guess each trial day gets its own page). For cases, right now I'm thinking that if an episode contains multiple "cases" (not "incidents" since most episodes seem to have some past "incident" to account for), and/or if a case spans multiple episodes (i.e. the UR-1 / Clay Terran debacle) then each case should get its own page that functions like DL-6 Incident and SL-9 Incident. capefeather (talk) 02:10, October 26, 2018 (UTC)

Both what you've said above and the breakdown in your first post sound like good ideas to me. If nothing else, I agree that breaking those huge episode articles into smaller ones would greatly aid navigation and encourage editing; I especially agree that we are seriously lacking in the development sections on both episode and game articles despite excellent resources like Gyakuten Saiban Library. - Strabo412 (talk) 08:10, October 27, 2018 (UTC)

I know I'm outnumbered here, but I think splitting the episode articles would only make navigation more complicated. The only ones that I think might benefit from it are Turnabout Succession, Turnabout Revolution, and maybe some of the Investigations episodes that really are too long. Even then, I would only split them into two or three pages. Bluebully (talk) 19:04, October 29, 2018 (UTC)

I'm not sure how splitting the episode articles would necessarily make navigation more complicated. I think visitors tend to look for specific information rather than reading entire articles, especially ones that are so long that they slow down and glitch the source editor. capefeather (talk) 01:58, October 30, 2018 (UTC)

I take opposing views very seriously and that has a lot to do with why I've stalled on this. What is certain right now is that we should probably move forward soon with the plan of giving cases and trials their own pages in cases where they don't line up one-to-one with episodes. On the other issue of whether to give investigation/trial blocks their own pages, nobody seems to have said anything on it for a while. capefeather (talk) 03:35, November 26, 2018 (UTC)