Forum:Historical article improvements

RobertM525 recent concerns about the storyline article has, unfortunately, reminded me of a long standing issue present in the episode articles. At the moment, the episode articles are geared almost solely to recapping events as they happened in the game, and only from in the game. As such, they do not present a full record of their historical periods, which is what the "Storyline" article implies they do.

I think we need to regear the episode articles as general history articles. We need to finish pulling out the mission descriptions into separate articles, and then integrate info from the novels. We definitely need to, when such info is available, provide political, social, and economic context to events. I think SC:G:Nova can do that a bit for Episode I. SC:QoB (which I have not read) might be able to provide some for the protoss and zerg for Episode I and II

In terms of article organization, I think we'll need to discard separating sections by mission. The level 1 headers will encapsulate a general period of an episode, as they do now. The level 2 headers will encapsulate campaigns (or other notable sub-periods) and section(s) providing context.

As the episodes will likely serve as poor-man's portals to other subjects, we'll need to be clever in mentioning seemingly 'minor' events. For example, we'll probably want to drop in a mention (and links!) of Nova's kidnapping and recruitment into the Ghost Program in Episode I. That sort of thing.

Once we come up with something suitable for Episode I (I sense a long lived dev page...) we can probably apply it to the others, and even the “early history” articles (those might be easier since their scope is more limited.) I think we still need blurbs for the “early history” articles in the “Storyline” article.

As for the post-Brood War articles, I don't know how much we can do for those. Since my impression is that the mangas and the like tend not to go out of their way to reveal dates, integrating those together is probably a lost cause. - Meco (talk, contribs) 14:47, July 22, 2010 (UTC)