Cunnan talk:Manual of Style

Taken from the Village Pump.

Personal details

Pages have been created for SCA Contacts for various areas of Europe. While I prefer the information to be on the country's or kingdom's page, I have concerns about the address and phone details being put anywhere on Cunnan. They are far less likely to be updated regularly and I would much prefer this sort of personal data to be on the group's homepage outside of Cunnan. What do you guys think? - Cian Gillebhrath 13:12, 6 June 2008 (EST)

Good observation. I would think (knowing most of the people involved) that they posted it there themselves. If so, I have no problem with it. If not, that info should be deleted. Not sure how we can find out the truth though. CsikosLo 01:01, 10 July 2008 (EST)

Personas and households

This year has been a quiet one for Cunnan but an old issue has had to enforced by me as a moderator a few times - that Cunnan is not an archive of pages describing SCA personas (see Village Pump 2007), but we do allow pages on SCA groups like households. Unfortunately, sometimes the household pages contain a lot of details on their members and things that are more specific to the individual than the household.

Sorry to those whose pages I mention here but I need examples. Firstly, House Fettered Fleur. I have editted this page a few times to makes its format match those of other pages. It had a paragraph on one of the leading members which mainly discussed and promoted her SCA-related business interests. Since I could not see how this related to the household, I treated it as advertising and deleted the text. A page had also been created for another of the household's leaders Menken but I changed that to [[User:Menken]] since he was the one had just edited it.

More recently, a page was created for the Natt Sang household. This includes a descriptive paragraph for each member that mentions their general character, how they like to participate in the SCA and their musical skills, but no more. I have reformatted that but not deleted any content.

My question to the community (and especially the mods) is whether Natt Sang is saying too much. Small households sometimes say a little about the roles and habits of their members, but generally as appendages to a list, e.g. House Reverie, like a standard SCA regnum. Sometimes little is said about memebers at all e.g. House Awesome. Bigger households have simply too many members to list them all.

So should Natt Sang's member details be abbreviated to something like the following?

Lady Rhyslyn of Soundstream:

• Instruments: celtic flute, Irish whistle, celtic harp, guitar, bass, singing.
• Roles: Husmor, Emmisarian, seamstress.

If not, then should it be editted in any other way?

- Cian Gillebhrath 18:25, 1 November 2009 (EST)

• Recent editting has brought to light two more persona pages that do not seem to qualify for inclusion: Randal Sinclair Hawkins and Kari Kyst. While they seem to have been great people and have been duly recognised in awards for their contribution to the SCA, nothing in their description indicates that they have played a extremely significant role in the development or history of the SCA or their kingdom. All edits so far have been done by Rohesia and Donngal and I don't know whether these editors are also Randal and Kari. If so, then these descriptions should be moved to their User pages.

If there are no objections in the coming weeks, I will delete those two pages.

I have since also noted Logan Ebonwoulfe. He certainly seems moreso a person of great note if he is included in an outside publication, but I know nothing about this Warlords card game. What do others think about keeping a page active on him?

- Cian Gillebhrath 10:37, 20 November 2009 (EST)

• A new one to consider - Michael of Bedford. 10 times a king, first King of Atlantia, Laurel, Pelican, Knight. But is that enough to qualify him for inclusion? Did he introduce something that is widely used in the SCA? Is he known to all in the Society? Is he known outside of the society? - Cian Gillebhrath 10:18, 23 November 2009 (EST)

• • I've been thinking on this subject a bit and trying to figure out a good rule of thumb. As a first pass: if the page consists of a simple list of awards, or even a few simple lists, that's probably not enough. An explanation should be needed. For example, the page for Cariadoc of the Bow doesn't list his awards, rather it gives his accomplishments with appropriate explanation and links. (Full disclosure - I created the page so I like the format, but I don't actually know His Grace.) With respect to Michael of Bedford's page, it's just a list of awards, which I'd suggest is inadequate. There may be other information which could be added to the page to make it clear that the page should remain, but as written I don't think the page works. AlexandreDavigne 00:14, 24 November 2009 (EST)
    • That sounds fair enough. Then it would just be down to us to decide whether the accomplishments are sufficient. Anyone else have a view? - Cian Gillebhrath 10:13, 30 November 2009 (EST)
      • Sorry about that, I did not realize till reading here today that general persons were not eligeable for inclusion in Cunnan, feel free to delete the page I created on Duke Valharic, just trying to add content Donngal mac Ronain

"Cunnan isn't a link farm"

"It's tempting to just add links to other sites and not add "real" content to Cunnan, but adding content to Cunnan is even better. Even if you only add a few lines to an article it still provides a starting point for other users later on. "

I'm particularly interested in linking to a variety of external sites that provide facsimiles of music, editions of period music into PDFs/.nwc files, and many such things. I found it hard to tell from the wording of this passage in 'Cunnan: What it isn't' whether that would be actually bad, or okay but not as good as it could be, and at what sort of ratio of article text to link it would become okay.

I'm not interested in building extensive pages which duplicate the effort of another site (e.g. I feel http://cunnan.lochac.sca.org/wiki/Royal_Peers_of_Lochac duplicates the work of Canon and could be replaced with a link like this: http://lochac.sca.org/canon/reign.php?show=index&init=Lochac).

- Bethan Daniels of Brockwood (talk) 15:16 19 June 2013

See Also / External Links

In terms of standard style I have been putting "See Also" as a heading and "External Links" as a subheading of that, unless there is no "See Also" heading, in which case it is simply a heading on its own. This makes sense to me in terms of how it relates to a Table of Contents. Does this seem reasonable to adopt as a standard style? Conrad Leviston 12:53, 31 July 2011 (EST)