UESPWiki talk:Online Quest Project

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Dialogue Consistency[edit]

To ensure the amount of dialogue added to pages is consistent with the other namespaces and the Style Guide, I think it would be worth adding the guidelines for dialogue directly to the project page. This is how Dialogue was detailed on the SRQRP project page:

Dialogue. Key quest-related dialogue can be quoted as part of the walkthrough. In particular, if there is information from an in-game dialogue that would otherwise need to be paraphrased as part of the walkthrough, it is generally preferable to quote the dialogue instead of paraphrasing it. However, the walkthrough should not attempt to include every piece of dialogue that you hear during the quest, so try to tell the story through important snippets of dialogue.

Combining that with what's already there on this project page, you get something like this:

Dialogue. Key quest-related dialogue can be quoted as part of the walkthrough. In ESO, there are generally a few paragraphs of dialogue that must be gone through to advance the quest; if there is information from an in-game dialogue that would otherwise need to be paraphrased as part of the walkthrough, it is generally preferable to quote the dialogue instead of paraphrasing it. However, the walkthrough should not attempt to include every piece of dialogue that you hear during the quest, so try to tell the story through important snippets of dialogue. Generally, this is how included dialogue should be laid out:

Hopefully that should make it a bit clearer about how much dialogue is needed on a quest page. --Enodoc (talk) 12:54, 4 March 2018 (UTC)

Dialogue quote formatting[edit]

How should we format it?

At present, I've been mimicking the formatting I've seen in already-fleshed-out articles:

"NPC dialogue is italicized and placed in quotation marks. All dialogue has one level of indentation."
Player dialogue is bolded and not left in quotation marks.
"Bolding is normally done with triple-single-quotes, but some articles used a semicolon (technically a 'definition list term' rather than bolding) and this seems less prone to markup mistakes."
That's probably bad for screen readers, isn't it? A list should be a list.
"Literally all wiki-markup is bad for screen readers. Atrocious, actually. Our bolding and italics are semantically meaningless, and our 'indentation' is actually just a bunch of 'definition list definitions' with no terms attached to them. That sucks, but fixing that would require changes far grander in scope than just setting the formatting standards for dialogue in one game."
Anyway, any nuances for dialogue?
"Never list the 'Goodbye' dialogue option, as it's standard. It also seems right to convert the double-quotes in dialogue to single-quotes in our articles, since the dialogue is already nested in double-quotes. Don't recall that occurring in other articles, but I've had to do it in a few I've written."

However, that begs the question of what to do when dialogue branches.

"Let's say that this is a line of dialogue that offers a branching choice. This is how I've been handling dialogue choices. However, it only really works at all because I never know both choices. The minute we have to list responses to each, it will break down."
Quite right!
What nonsense! [huh template goes here]

I've seen dialogue on character pages use bulleting. I can't recall specific examples but it could be done like this:

"Let's say that this is a line of dialogue that offers a branching choice. We can use bulleting to denote the branch... as long as it doesn't nest too far."
  • This is the first choice.
"This is a response to the first choice."
This choice ends the first branch.
  • This is the second choice.
"This is a response to the second choice."
This choice ends the second branch.
"If both branches eventually meet again, you could have a line here. Why would they, though?"

But is that something we want to do? Because we could also just list both choices as above and then have different sections, or different bits of prose, for each outcome. In some cases, like Online:Decree of the Court, that's actually necessary, because objectives change significantly between some choices.

Then there's the matter of quotes not uttered in the dialogue interface. Cobb elaborates: "When it's a single line, I usually just inline it like this. I don't think I've seen any article other than mine handle this case yet, though." Cobb then starts breakdancing and adds, "If there are multiple lines separated by plot-relevant physical events, this format works for those as well." For conversations between multiple NPCs, I mimic the format I've seen in some character articles:

Prima: "The dialogue is quoted and italicized even though it's already indented and the speaker is bolded."
Secunda: "It looks excessive when you're writing the markup, but when you read the article, it actually works well."
Prima: "It sets the dialogue apart from our wiki prose."
Secunda: "It's also consistent with how dialogue is represented everywhere else."

So should we try to lay out a standard here, or just let it develop organically? DavidJCobb (talk) 07:02, 7 March 2018 (UTC)

A discussion on the Community Portal was held on this subject quite some time ago, but as all dialogue in the namespace should be handled in the same way, this page isn't quite large enough in scope to lay down the standard. I realize this sounds like a non-answer, but the quest project isn't the only place in the ESO namespace where dialogue is transcribed. Fullertontalk﴿ 07:17, 7 March 2018 (UTC)
We should have a standard, and I've been trying to stay consistent when I write my walkthroughs, but getting everyone else to follow that way of doing things is difficult to say the least. My standard is pretty much as laid out in the OP, minus the bulleting; I tend to lay out all the choices and then describe each consequence one by one (as I did here just a bit ago). We need a standard. But, to answer Fullerton's point, I would be 100% in support of reopening or restarting the CP discussion (and Fullerton, could you link to the specific thread you were thinking of? I found a couple relating to dialogue), since evidently this is still a confusing matter. —likelolwhat talk lulzy to me 00:04, 8 March 2018 (UTC)
(edit conflict) The Style Guide specifically states not using semi-colons for bolding, so that's an easy answer. The previous discussion on general dialogue formatting and indenting that Fullerton alluded to can be found here. I think a consensus was just about reached, even if it wasn't directly spelled out at the end, with Tib's examples going uncontested. Neloth appears to be the go-to example page for how to do dialogue. --Enodoc (talk) 00:06, 8 March 2018 (UTC)
Thanks, Enodoc! Since Tib's examples were uncontested (and they look great to me), could we put them someplace more prominent than an archive of the CP (like the Style Guide, though we may need a whole nother page or sub-page since it's a lot of information)? And then link to that page from here? —likelolwhat talk lulzy to me 00:18, 8 March 2018 (UTC)
(edit conflict) Quest pages should not have bulk dialogue transcribed on them at all. The page covers this, and the concerns about branches by stating that "only the dialogue needed to advance the quest should be detailed". Also, there is nothing here usurping the general style guide's take on dialogue either, "Key quest-related dialogue should be quoted as part of the walkthrough. In particular, if there is information from an in-game dialogue that would otherwise need to be paraphrased as part of the walkthrough, it is generally preferable to quote the dialogue instead of paraphrasing it. However, the walkthrough should not attempt to include every piece of dialogue that you hear during the quest." Quests that have bulk transcriptions on them quite frankly are not complete/finished, even the ones that require nothing more than finding and talking to a person. As this pages says, key dialogue should at most be the players "dialogue" indented using a colon, followed by the NPCs using the same format (ie one indentation using a colon). Lengthy dialogue does not need to be transcribed on the quest page, it can usually be surmised instead, reducing the need for readers to wade through waffle to get to the important parts (the very reason people go to websites for help). I said somewhere else a while ago, using dialogue to fill articles is laziness, start from a position of using none at all (because you don't need to have any at all on these pages), then use it to give the page some spice. The less you use it, then the bits you do use appear more important. Silence is GoldenBreak the Silence 00:36, 8 March 2018 (UTC)
It sounds like you're advising against including quotes/transcriptions at all? The guidelines do state that editors should only detail dialogue that must be encountered while playing the quest, but the example immediately following that instruction shows an example of an exact transcription.
  • Editors are not directly instructed to summarize lengthy dialogue even if that dialogue is not optional.
  • Choosing to fully transcribe non-optional dialogue does not conflict with the general style guide. If you omit optional dialogue, then you aren't "includ[ing] every piece of dialogue that you hear during the quest."
  • Full transcriptions of non-optional dialogue are consistent with content elsewhere in the wiki. The Community Portal cites Neloth as an example of how to transcribe dialogue. The wiki has transcriptions of his non-optional dialogue in his Dragonborn character page and in the articles for quests he is involved in. Other NPCs, e.g. Serana, are handled consistently.
For the ESO quests I've been writing walkthroughs for, I've been transcribing only the content of conversations that directly advance a quest, and burying optional dialogue in the talk page (in case it might end up being useful elsewhere, e.g. because it contains lore or character information). Even doing things that way, the questions asked here and in that Community Portal discussion are still a pertinent concern. DavidJCobb (talk) 03:34, 8 March 2018 (UTC)

() I do agree that DB:Neloth is the best example of a page with dialogue, and that the standard used there should be moved to a more prominent place—perhaps the style guide?

Additionally, I strongly disagree with Silencer's proposal to scrap dialogue. Among other things, a quest is a narrative and dialogue is an important part of narrative. Additionally, user's attempts to wrap dialogue into prose can prove disastrous, for example in SR:The Horn of Jurgen Windcaller, which features a generally poor attempt at incorporating Delphine's dialogue, with especially poor sentences such as "tells you that her organization has been looking for someone like you", which is not only an unindicated partial quote, but insultingly ambiguous. The problems of testing editor's prose skills are easily negated by simply allowing them to transcribe quest-related dialogue. Fullertontalk﴿ 04:51, 8 March 2018 (UTC)

Please never put words into my mouth. Yes, my advise is to write the quest page without dialogue and only use it to "spice" it up; I've found that writing quest pages like that allows me to properly explain how and when to do things, as contrary to Fullertons suggestion, it is only ever the dialogue that is ambiguous in finished articles. Finished articles do not have badly written or unclear sentences in them (except the bugs section). I did not suggest or say that dialogue should never be used, but I did say that relying on it instead of doing your own writing is laziness and I stand by that, but I am not about to accuse someone of laziness simply because their written article includes dialogue. Once you have written the section, you can better see if replacing it with dialogue from the game is truly a better option, or even necessary.
For DavidJCobb, there is a difference in how Quest, NPC, Location, etc pages are handled and what they display. This is the Quest project and only concerns those pages. Neloth is an NPC page, and an NPC page will contain every scrap of dialogue that person says, and actually is not a good example for how dialogue should be handled for quest pages. Pages where dialogue is handled for multiple choice and random choices are SR:Season Unending, and SR:Diplomatic Immunity. The three conversations listed on DI are partly missable, an important consideration for including important dialogue. I can't think of too many times that is possible in ESO, but there is one in ON:Signed in Blood, though it isn't transcribed yet.
The advice I give is always geared towards someone who intends to write an article that never gets changed after they write it, as that is how I approach writing pages. If you don't want your quest pages rewritten in the future then don't listen to advise that says shove it all on there. An example of a quest page that doesn't have a single quote yet doesn't lack in giving the information contained within that dialogue is ON:The Artisan. In fact, the dialogue is deliberately ambiguous in that quest, so summarizing the important information from each person is necessary for the reader.
The advice on the page here and the style guide is not that dialogue should be included, but that only relevant dialogue should be, or in other words, do not include non-relevant dialogue. Neither page requires that dialogue be included at all. Some people think that Online articles cannot be written like Skyrim or Oblivion articles because it is a different "type" of game, but that is a load of dung. There is no reason ESO pages cannot be written like Skyrim's, particularly concerning the ludicrous choice to force this ugly style of dialogue on ESO pages. If you want good examples for different types of pages look at the Featured Articles, those are the styles and layouts that will stand the test of time. Silence is GoldenBreak the Silence 19:32, 8 March 2018 (UTC)
Agreed. There is definitely too much dialogue overall on ESO quest pages right now, so much so that the actual walkthrough is lost. By referring to the Neloth page, I was giving an example of how dialogue should be presented in general, rather than the amount we want on quest pages. I do think dialogue forms a bit more of a major part in ESO quests than in Skyrim or Oblivion though, as dialogue seems to crop up all the time in ESO. Conversely, in Skyrim, it just appears usually at the beginning and end of a quest. This revision of Soul Shriven in Coldharbour I think is a reasonable example of dialogue use in a walkthrough; it may still be a bit too much, but it doesn't include the whole lot. --Enodoc (talk) 23:44, 8 March 2018 (UTC)
Hm... Reading over that revision, I can see that almost all of the dialogue is inlined into the prose and I actually find it harder to skip over it, in cases where the dialogue has to be encountered during the quest but doesn't have to be understood if you just care about gameplay. :\
On a related(?) note, I'm also noticing that some people have been adding quest dialogue to NPC articles, which is consistent with how other games are handled but inconsistent with the code comments that are initially present in the bot-generated articles. However, I don't see that guideline formally stated anywhere. For articles like Online:Angwe and Online:Veenaza, I filled them in with basic summaries while avoiding quest-specific content, per the code comments; then someone else came in and added the dialogue, because the comments weren't there for them to see anymore. Should the quest project guidelines be updated to say, "Only quest pages should have quest-specific dialogue?" DavidJCobb (talk) 17:33, 11 March 2018 (UTC)
I don't know where those comments originate from. As shown on pages like Skyrim:Delphine, quest-related events do belong on NPC pages. --Enodoc (talk) 22:30, 12 March 2018 (UTC)

Quest Stages[edit]

I've taken the liberty to rewrite this section because it was too confusing and mixed up some definitions, such as quest stage and quest objective. I've also added information on how to use the UespLog data via ESO Log Data Viewer, and I really think we should encourage people to use it where they can. I've also removed the claims that stages are hard to document, in fact, I think it is a really easy task.

I'd like input about the "hidden" objectives, because as it is, they are actually mostly just omitted. I'd argue that they are hard to find (you don't see them in game), and their text is also not always readable or understandable. It's clearly not meant for players nor to be part of a player guide. Do you think the hidden objectives should be documented? In this case we can re-add some short note about them.

Tib (talk) 10:55, 13 December 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for rewriting that, it's definitely miles ahead of what it used to be when I wrote it. As for hidden objectives, now that I think about it, I don't see the purpose in noting them. They're not going to be useful to anyone attempting to complete the quest, and often they just clutter the quest stages and make it unreadable or nonsensical. Puzzle of the Pass is a good example of that (obviously it was filled in by a bot but it does show how many hidden objectives aren't useful and/or don't make much sense.
That said, I think if a hidden objective is useful and of substance - for example if it was a certain action you could take that wasn't an explicit objective but registered as a hidden objective after you did it - it should be documented in my opinion. I'm not sure if there are any cases similar to that in-game. So overall I think they should only be documented if they're important and useful, but attempting to find and classify hidden objectives certainly shouldn't be a priority. I'd be interested to hear other viewpoints on this, however. Acynatic (talk) 22:57, 17 December 2018 (UTC)
I think hidden objectives are shown for the same technical reason that they are shown in other namespaces - they are a part of the quest stages, and the table is a record of all (non-empty) quest stages. However there is limited practical use for them in ESO, since they have no functional benefit (can't be used in mods, etc). There is similarly no practical use in recording old quest IDs (although current IDs do have minor usage in add-ons). Old IDs should probably be added to Notes as a historical record, rather than in the Header with useful information. --Enodoc (talk) 18:02, 18 December 2018 (UTC)
Another issue is getting the hidden objectives right. For example I have seen numerous "optional" objectives listed as "hidden", or some other similar, probably unintentional mistakes. That might even be the main reason why I am so sceptical. So, what I am mainly interested in is - should the documentation of hidden objectives be mandatory, optional, or not exist at all? Optional or not exist would both be fine for me. Tib (talk) 14:25, 21 December 2018 (UTC)
I'm leaning towards optional. I see no reason to outright forbid their inclusion, but they should not at all be a priority in completing quest stages. Acynatic (talk) 00:11, 22 December 2018 (UTC)
A good example for actual useful hidden objectives may be the first stage of The Army of Meridia. I have a character doing that quest now, so I can confirm the hidden stuff do not appear visible in the journal. Anyway the hidden objectives show how many lights and people need to be recovered before the city is restored. Also the hidden objectives had their own blurbs which makes me wonder if the original plan was for them to be hints.
I agree with idea that the hidden objectives should be optional.--Talyyn (talk) 02:41, 22 December 2018 (UTC)