User talk:Nescientist/Effect section guideline

Subsections

Perhaps it's the momentum that the "Generation I/etc" subsections have in their current usage, but I don't really like the idea of text immediately under the Effect section and then subsections for "Generation I/etc". I think "In Generation I/etc" might work better.

On a bit of a tangent, an example "end product" is always a good thing too, IMO. Tiddlywinks (talk) 15:00, 26 October 2016 (UTC)

When I wrote this, I always wanted to avoid "role models" where possible, and be explicitly not strict where I needn't be. The idea is that common sense for special cases should always precede what the guideline proposes, and there shouldn't be arguments like "The example has <X>, and because of that it should be the same here". (I would have liked to avoid the example lines, actually.) However, I could try to do some examples for cases where I believe there are not too many options for!?

I think what I thought of the most was the flow of reading; what do readers playing Gen <whatever> need to read? I think there were/are four viable options how to "structure" Effect sections then, all of which have drawbacks:

1. Have no general section, but only subsections that each work on their own. (I believe that's your proposal, Tiddlywinks!?) I think there's too much repitition (not concise), and it would actually (visually) look weird with that.
2. Have no general section, but only subsections that build up on the preceding subsections. The main problem I see here as that you'd like always start to read Gen I, not what you're actually playing. And that might be obsolete information already.
3. Have a general section, and subsections that each work on their own. Still much repitition. And you'd have to always read a general section. (But whatever's in the general section is relevant to you anyway. Except that you'd have one more "section", I can see no reason not to prefer this option over Option 1.)
4. Have a general section, and subsections that build up on preceding subsections. You'd need to read a general section. And you'd need to read preceding subsections.

I went with option 4, and tried to condense "read preceding subsections" to "briefly scan preceding subsection, read only interesting parts in there" as much as possible, with the help of clear codewords. (That's kinda what we're currently doing, I guess.) If you're playing Gen III, you'd read the general section first, followed by the Gen III section, and (if you're still interested) followed by the Gen II section (skipping anything with an "in this generation" codeword and anything that is deprecated by a "now [instead]" you just read in Gen III already).

I personally prefered options with a general section over ones without (i.e., Option 2) because I guess you can always have the most relevant, most defining information (things Pokémon newbies want to know) in the very first sentence. (Such as: "Ice Beam inflicts damage and has a 10% chance of freezing the target.")

Also note that without a general section the current generation's moves/Abilities are inherently not future-proof: You'd need to add "onward" to the subsection in the future, which is a thing that has apparently been forgotten (or, noone cared) for some/many effects that currently end in "Generation IV" or whatever.

I haven't really thought about prepositions. (But now that I did, I'd like to note that you'd need to change "In Generation VI" to "From Generation VI onward" when there's such a subsection. But given that you'd need to add "onward" for those anyway, it may still be worth it.) Nescientist (talk) 10:51, 27 October 2016 (UTC)