Board Thread:Wiki discussion/@comment-18014300-20190429201344

I've noticed this problem for quite a while now, but I never got around to dealing with it. I now see that it appears to be getting out of hand. The formatting and organization of our pages regarding armor and other equipment are quite a mess.

I. Table style

For starters, the wrong table style is being used across virtually all equipment from Odyssey and Origins. The table style should be consistent with the ones used for equipment from older games going all the way back to Assassin's Creed II.

There are two table styles that we use for equipments depending on whether the page covers (A) a specific model of weapon or piece of armor or (B) whether it instead covers a type of equipment. (A) In the former scenario, we use a basic, unsortable table. Refer to Persian Shamshir and Syrian Sabre for examples of how the table should look. (B) In the latter scenario, we use a sortable table. Refer to Sword, Mace, Heavy weapon, Smallsword, Bastard sword, etc. for how this should look.

The vast majority of our pages on equipment from Origins and Odyssey do not currently conform with the table formatting used with equipment from games that precede these.

II. Lead sentences

While I understand that editors have only been using older articles on weapons as a precedent, most of the time, pages on equipment should not start with "obtained" or "obtainable by [player character]. The reason is because although this is a factually correct statement from an in-universe perspective, it still strongly implies a gameplay perspective because it treats the player character's interaction with the equipment as the absolute, main point of reference. In reality, within the Assassin's Creed universe as well, not every weapon or piece of equipment sold by a blacksmith revolves around this very specific individual of Kassandra or Arno or Bayek, no matter how heroic and famous they are. Common weapons, for example, should be described as weapons which were used widely in a particular setting by soldiers. That they could be acquired by Kassandra or Bayek is not the main idea of these pieces of equipment. There are exceptions of course where the equipment's relation to the main character is the main idea, but for most equipment, this is not the case.

III. Categories

The categories for armor is currently all over the place. I should point out that not all hoods and articles of clothing are technically armor. Of course, all forms of clothing provide some form of protection, even a crown, but armor is clothing designed specifically for protection and not as an accessory, a supplementary piece to match armor, a simple belt, etc.

Aside from this, armor is normally an uncountable noun, meaning that its plural is still armor. The only time armor is a countable noun where its plural is formed by adding an -s affix is when entire sets of armor or types of armor is being described. The reason why Category:Armors was named as such originally appears to be because at the time of its creation, the pages that went into only dealt with full armor sets. However, we now have many individual armor pieces being added to the category which is not strictly correct. I have therefore discussed creating a Category:Armor at Category talk:Armors. If we do this, then Category:Armor can still remain specifically for pages on armor sets, but we might find it preferable to use a Category:Armor sets for those instead to avoid the problems of ambiguity in "Category:Armors".

IV. Spelling standard

This is not actually a problem, but I thought I should take the opportunity to explain this as well. Armor is the American English spelling while axe is the Canadian English (and British English) spelling as opposed to armour which is Canadian and ax which is American. Ubisoft most often uses Canadian English, a hybrid of American and British English, in its works, but depending on the author, they also can be quite inconsistent themselves. Armor vs. axe is one of the most notable examples of such an inconsistency.

Our main policy is to use the spelling standard of a particular term favoured by Ubisoft. So although armor is American English and axe Canadian, and it would seem that using both is contradictory, we try to abide by the spelling used by Ubisoft when we can, and they do tend to be fairly consistent with spelling armor the American way but axe'' the Canadian way (with a few exceptions like Armour and Sword).

Since editors here normally naturally follow Ubisoft's spelling anyways, this hasn't been an issue, but I thought I explain it in case of any future confusion. 