I've poked around the Manual of Style pages and have found that you prefer bulleted lists within articles here, but in cases such as Federation starships you allow tabled lists.
I'm wondering what the policy is as far as creating pages solely to house a list with a large amount of information? On Wikipedia there's a "List of ____" page policy/style/whathaveyou, but I haven't yet seen such a titled page here. Is there a policy against these pages altogether or do you simply have different naming conventions?
I've been using Memory Alpha to find information for a while and I've been frustrated at the lack of organization and sortability of some large amounts of data (personnel and ship's rosters, etc.) and would love to contribute by creating functional lists like the Federation Starships page, but I'm not sure if such pages would be within policy. -- T'Maire (talk) 19:12, June 29, 2014 (UTC)
- Both styles, bulleted lists and sortable tables, are used interchangeably depending on what was though would be best. Holographic duplicate and the Starfleet casualties pages use pretty much the same table, but the latter also use bulleted lists as well for non-individual references. Can you give some specific examples of the problems you are seeing? - Archduk3 20:14, June 29, 2014 (UTC)
Those two pages are almost exactly what I was thinking of. As one example, let's say you're looking for a list of USS Enterprise D personnel because you want to find specific people who served on that ship. The page at USS Enterprise (NCC-1701-D) personnel lists names in alphabetical order and a photo here and there, but if you want any further information on these people you have to open up the individual pages. If you're looking for all named Sciences division crewmembers, that means opening up over 100 pages and reading each one just to find out what division they were.
If that page had a list similar to the Holographic Duplicate page but in a single list, you could have columns with sort parameters such as division, rank, species, etc. If the sort function is available, you could then sort the table by rank or species to find the info you're looking for much faster.
I've also come across some lists that are simply incomplete and need updating and adding to, which I'd be happy to do while making them into tables if that's acceptable! -- T'Maire (talk) 21:49, June 29, 2014 (UTC)