FlightGear wiki:Quoting Guidelines

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Goals

Formalize how to use quoting on the wiki and establish a set of guidelines to be followed. Provide a sane migration path for existing articles and pages consisting primarily of quotes, without losing significant information.

Background

The wiki is not intended to be a collection of quotes - however, there are numerous articles that haven't been updated in months, or even in years, where quotes may be the only useful "updates" for the time being. Equally, there are undocumented features or articles that got successfully bootstrapped via quote-based articles. Meanwhile, there's a huge number of articles that contain so called cquotes, that were bootstrapped using quotes or that still consist primarily of quotes (usually added via Instant-Cquotes).

In summary, quoting is considered a fairly controversial thing, because quotes are generally poor documentation, but still considered better than no documentation/updates at all.

Examples

For the time being, quotes are primarily used to:

• help document otherwise undocumented features/functionality
• preserve development related feedback (e.g. see CompositeViewer Support)

There are mainly the following categories of articles containing excessive quotes:

• articles that are not actively maintained (i.e. don't have an active "owner")
• articles that are intended to document features that are otherwise undocumented by their developers (e.g. Phi)
• pages whose sole purpose is to help "bootstrap" new articles/features by providing a collection of relevant pointers (i.e. RFCs)

In general, quotes should be sparingly used in articles that are actively maintained. And even then, usually only by adding the ref part of the quote, rather than an actual quote.

To provide some context, here a few examples of articles that are more or less heavily using quotes:

Quotes only

• FGPythonSys
• Python in FlightGear
• Status of AI in FlightGear

Mainly quotes

• Implementing VNAV support in FlightGear

Bootstrapped using quotes

• High-Level Architecture
• Howto:Using FlightGear as an Image Generator (IG)
• Graphics Card Profiles
• Integrated Qt5 Launcher
• Canvas MapStructure
• Phi (currently in progress, by Jaxsin)
• Autostart

Unattributed quotes

• Decoupling the AI Traffic System

Ideas

• Provide a template that allows wiki contributors to veto the addition of quotes to "their" articles (provided they are actively maintained/updated)
• Use a different style/formatting
• Use a separate place for quotes (talk page)
• Use a standard section/paragraph for related discussions
• Use a separate namespace for quote-collections ?

Community Feedback

Template for vetoing the adding of quotes

• Could be something, but it would be better if more time was spent so that the article would be read and the quotes would be added if and where they would be needed. —Johan G (Talk | contribs) 17:33, 21 March 2016 (EDT)

Using a different style

• Could maybe possibly be put in a collapsible template only showing a short summary. Will still be briefly shown when the page is loaded though. —Johan G (Talk | contribs) 17:33, 21 March 2016 (EDT)

the collapsible idea is a good one, and would be easy to implement, even for all existing articles using the FGCquote template. Hooray (talk) 17:42, 21 March 2016 (EDT)

Putting the quotes on the talk page

• Probably a good idea, as they often can be considered as suggestions for improvement of the article one way or another. —Johan G (Talk | contribs) 17:33, 21 March 2016 (EDT)

Obviously, that assumes that there's already an article/page to begin with - so maybe, we should by convention require placeholder articles to have ~300-500 words before quotes can be added to their talk page ? Hooray (talk) 17:43, 21 March 2016 (EDT)

Using a standard section for quotes

• I think it would be a good guideline, though probably on the talk page unless needed to illustrate a point. —Johan G (Talk | contribs) 17:33, 21 March 2016 (EDT)

I am torn on that, I agree with Richard's posting on the forum, and I feel a standard "Related" section would make sense, and depending on the scope/size, a separate page/paragraph may be warranted. Hooray (talk) 17:44, 21 March 2016 (EDT)

Using a separate namespace for quotes

• No, no, no. Absolutely no. This could be done in two ways, as a prefix but still in the main namespace (what sometimes on English Wikipedia is called a user maintained namespace), or as an actual namespace. I think this would be messy and inelegant either way. The quotes intended as pints to add to an article should be more closely attached to the article. Additionally, using a separate namespace makes things like some of the namespace templates break, and further, make these pages not found unless opting to search those namespaces as well. —Johan G (Talk | contribs) 17:33, 21 March 2016 (EDT)

Related content

Wiki articles

• {{FGCquote}} (this is the main template used by ~95% of all automatically created quotes, so provides a good opportunity to update/change/remove quotes in a holistic fashion)
• FlightGear wiki:Instant-Cquotes
• FlightGear wiki:Manual of Style#Quotations

Forum topics

• quoting on the wiki 20 March 2016 –

Mailing list threads

• [Flightgear-devel] Wiki Quotes 17 March 2016 –