User:PhantomCaleb/Sandbox/Template:Bookmark



Purpose
This template highlights paragraphs that are deemed to be of particular interest because they cover lesser-known facts. It generates an anchor to the paragraph and adds an entry to the "Did You Know" page.

Context
One of the inherent particularities of video game wikis is that for the most part they tell readers things they already know. Zelda Wiki wouldn't be complete without descriptions of game plots and character biographies, but most of its actual value is in the tidbits covering development history, technical minutaie, and easter eggs.

For example, suppose someone visits the Cremia page. What information is more likely to be interesting to the reader? A) Her biography: she's Romani's sister, runs the ranch, doesn't believe in the Ghosts, etc. B) If Link helps her deliver milk but already has Romani's Mask there is a 50/50 chance she'll give him a smothering boob-hug. Even though Fact A covers most of the article, anyone who has played through Majora's Mask knows it already and won't get anything useful out of it. But Fact B will be surprising to those who haven't gone through the whole sidequest at least twice in one save file and got lucky.

Zelda Wiki serves its readers by making these kinds of noteworthy details stand out. Traditionally, this problem is solved by placing the information at the end of articles in a bulleted list in a section named "Trivia." This is a bad idea for a few reasons:


 * "Trivia" is an inapt name for the article section that is the most likely to contain interesting information. If anything, it's the rest of the article that's trivial.
 * The information is not placed in the context of the main article body, disrupting flow.
 * The bulleted lists become catch-all sections for "miscellaenous" information. This gets abused by novice users and leads to crap like, "X kinda sorta looks like Y from game Z." and, "this is the third-to-last time that X appears in the series."