User:El benito

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Hi, my name's Ben Younkins. My personal home page is at LiquidBen.com. I'm also running my own MediaWiki installation. I primarily contribute material to the Wikipedia as a form of leisure in my downtime.

I've published a couple articles that would be useful to someone installing MediaWiki and customizing it


Contents

[edit] False cities, Manufactured realities

What is it that unifies Dark City, The Thirteenth Floor, The Big O, and the Matrix series? They all are centered in what are apparently false cities.

I haven't experienced them myself, but also described as parts of these are Adjustment Team (a Philip K Dick short story), The Lottery in Babylon, and eXistenZ. The article for Adjustment Team suggests "manufactured reality". I might see about creating a new category for these.

[edit] Some notes on comics articles

This is just a few notes I typed up on writing a decent article.

[edit] Superbox

Put a superbox on every profile. If it doesn't have one, add one! Except for rare circumstances, this should go at the very top of the article, preceeded only by disambiguation links.

The powers section might be inclined to give some people fits. The best rule of thumb is to just give the utmost basics, and save the details for an in-line Powers and abilities section below. Iron Man wears robotic armor that flies and shoots lasers. That's the basics.

[edit] Intro

The intro is a short blurb explaining what this article is about. In as few words as possible, try to explain to your grandmother or some other outsider, what to expect. You'll see certain common terms. The first sentence will usually contain something to the effect of "So and so is a fictional superhero in the DC Comics universe". Imitate this, linked as you see other articles. The next sentence or two usually give a brief sense of the character. If it's a supervillain who's usually faced by the same hero, like Doctor Octopus, then mention and link their heroic adversary right then and there.

[edit] Character biography

This is all about who the character is right now. If there's contradictory Pre-Crisis/Zero Hour info, it is okay to include it as long as it is labelled as such, preferably in a subsection labelled for that continuity. If you're going to have continuity subsections, you may also want to toss in a preamble explaining that the character's continuity is "forked".

This is the place to cover in-story information only. It's not the place to cover information that's outside the comics, such as who owns the Superman copyright.

[edit] Powers and Abilities

Okay, powers and abilities covers the functionality of the character. What can they do? Put it in here.

One note though, these are comic books and therefore numeric values aren't all that useful. In one book Spider-Man's going to have trouble lifting a small car, in another, he'll be tossing around trucks. Give people a general idea. And furthermore, if you think you're going to be able to toss in some numerics you cribbed from OHotMU, OverPower, Heroclix, Marvel Super Heroes or whatever... Guess again. That content is likely copyrighted, non-applicable outside of source, and isn't going to be welcomed anyway. Keep it qualitative, not quantitative.

[edit] References

  • Google - Need I say more? Actually yes! Learn to search within one site at a time, like the Wikipedia for example.
  • The Appendix to the Handbook of the Marvel Universe - Great Marvel site, springboarded the editor's career into writing the Official Handbooks of the Marvel Universe. The only drawback is that it contains only obscure characters. You won't find entries for Spider-man or Wolverine in there.


[edit] Fair use rationales

Have a look at the tag I added to the image. The copyright status tag is not enough - it also needs a specific justification for every article it appears on. Have a look at Image:116 4 352.jpg for a good example of what I mean. Phil Sandifer 03:22, 21 September 2007 (UTC)