The Sniper / Discussion

This is the discussion related to the wiki page The Sniper.

The Colonel 03 Jan 2014 17:25

Moved this up a level as dangling "sniper" off the bottom of "ace pilot" seemed odd to me.

This is NOT actually a page about snipers.

r_b_bergstrom 10 Jan 2014 18:51

I'll agree having it dangle off of "ace pilot" is weird, but made a certain kind of sense in the context of what the page was actually about. The parent page probably should have been "combat role". EDIT: The reason it dangled off of "Ace Pilot" was because it was a sub-trope of Ace Pilot at TV Tropes Wiki. They don't have it as a separate page over there, but then again they also don't use pages to generate random characters.

The page when I originally made it was not about "Snipers" it was about "The Sniper". It was a page made for use with the character generator, and was based on the similar entry over at the TV Tropes page. So it wasn't at all intended to be about Snipers in the military sense, but about their videogame/roleplaying game equivalent, which is along the lines of a glass cannon or The Nuker. Similar concept perhaps to military snipers, but not technically the same thing. If I had been intending it to be a page about military snipers, it would have been named "Sniper", not "The Sniper", since (as is documented in arcanawiki's style documents) we follow Wikipedia's standards for naming factual pages. The point of putting the 'The' on there was to mirror the TV Tropes formatting for this sort of entry, and I note TV Tropes was linked to as the sole bibliography listing. I guess I could/should have made that more clear. Or I could have named this page "The Sniper (Combat Role)" since I created the page just so it would feed the character generator with a combat role entry. Having a bunch of military history stuff here is beside the point then, though it'd be great to have that stuff on an actual page about military snipers. If you're looking for info on snipers that's the place to look, and if you're clicking through to here because the random character generator sent you here you'll probably only want the combat-role-relevant stuff.

It's kind of like if I'd made a short page called "Superman" that had a short paragraph about The Man Of Steel, and included a link to a DC Comics site about it… and then a couple years later you expanded the page to talk about Nietzsche's concept of the superman and changed the parent page to "Philosophy". The Nietzsche stuff is very interesting, deserves its own page and is rather more intellectual than the original (hypothetical) superman page, but isn't really on-topic for this page. What actually happened is perhaps more subtle than that example, but I think that gets the point across.

So, I'm probably going to make a second page for "Sniper" and set it to be parented where you put this one, and transfer your contributions there. Then I'll set this "The Sniper" page to have "Combat Role" as it's parent, remove the general stuff about snipers in the military from this page and include a link to the new sniper page that has that info.

EDIT: Done. New page is made, and the existing page has been further modified to better distinguish it from being a page about military units per se.

Last edited on 10 Jan 2014 20:29 by r_b_bergstrom Show more

The Colonel 13 Jan 2014 17:10

Okay … that actually makes sense. I'm not all that familiar with the meta-analysis of RPG classes, so the intent of the original page went over my head.