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Talk:Portal:Miniatures

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Revision as of 14:30, 22 February 2022 by Siegfriedfr (talk | contribs)
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Hello,

So I "think" I finalized a major clean up of this section over a period of 3 months. I'll write down the philosophy of it and its benefits.

  • The goal is to have something that doesn't exist anywhere else (to my knowledge) on the web : a compact and complete gallery of every unit/model released for 40k and it's satellite games.
  • Prior to working on it, this section had rather bad press on the web (Reddit, dakka,bolter...), with people criticizing the unreliability of it and otherwise advising people not to trust it, which was counter-intuitive to the lexicanum being the major referencing wiki about 40k in general, but not about the miniatures.
The tools used were 
    • white dwarf magazines to source releases and find oldhammer pictures
    • catalogues/collector's guides to identify the range of miniatures trough time
    • Codexes and rulebooks for some outliers, altho those are rather unreliable to source release dates, and they also contain a healthy dose of misleading conversions
Here are the design principles I applied 
  • Separating specialist games and Horus Heresy from the 40k minis, in order to make the editor experience easier, and the user experience better.
  • Only leaving officially released kits/blisters. That leaves out conversions, kitbashes, different paintjobs for the same model/unit... Basically anything that is redundant, or tricks the reader into thinking that a "conversion" was released
  • Adding a "context" subtitle in the form of
    • a Codex release when available
    • the year of release when there was no event
      • And the month when there might be contentious about it (for example, a unit appears in a codex in year X, but was first seen in a white dwarf during Year X-1)
  • Correct or update the source/the description when updating/moving any image
    • Correct and update the pages where said images are used for consistant trough the wiki
  • Archive the webstore and Warhammer community pages. Every time. To this end downloading the webarchive add-on/pluggin (chromium browsers) helps ALOT.
Images
  • Square images are the best solution for consistency trough the wiki, and works better with the "packed" gallery mode
    • But it's not always possible to get a square image, especially for pre-webstore miniatures.
    • Webstore images become consistantly squared and high res for everything that was still for sale after 2010
  • Cropping is good. Excessive cropping is bad.
    • A model should be given some room to breath
    • The base should be entirely visible (except for aircrafts)
    • A few millimeters of nothing between the model and the image borders does alot for a better presentation
Thoughts

On a more personal note, the gallery presentation is critical to the uniqueness of this section of the lexicanum, but is indeed a poor medium for adding footnotes and making sourcing easily accessible and apparent. I believe the galleries shouldn't the place where source footnotes are added, because:

  • It's an unreadable mess at the bottom
  • The [Needs Citation] tag everywhere makes all galleries harder to read

I believe a solution would be a specific section with sortable listings, where the release year and the source for the release period would be sortable.

--Siegfriedfr (talk) 12:05, 22 February 2022 (UTC)

This talk is also open to challenge the work done with the opinions of other regular lexicanum editors, as constructive feedback would be appreciated. --Siegfriedfr (talk) 14:30, 22 February 2022 (UTC)