I've been thinking about this for a while. I actually drafted a long post for these forums, but didn't reach much of a conclusion in my head about what to do. I have the post in my email, and since it looks like I'd just be quoting the majority of it anyways, I'll post it here. Essentially, because of the fact that the wiki reflects the original static nature of MMOs, it doesn't have what I think is an ideal way to deal with dynamic or changing content. Long-running MMOs in general have this issue, but CoH was moving away from that model, and the wiki was going to have to follow it. Should a reasonably official version of CoH come to the Unreal engine, I think it would behoove us to make sure that the wiki can handle things like contacts dying, or anything else that a new, modern engine could allow an MMO to do. Anyways, here is the post I drafted, with minor changes and completions:
So in the "Mask comes off" thread, I posted a reply about something that's been bothering me for a while: there is absolutely nothing in the main players' articles about the Who Will Die storyline. The relevant part of my post is here:
My concern with the wiki is not that arcs are missing, it's the fact that the current format for articles doesn't allow as much freedom as I would like for adding dynamic content. If you look at Sister Psyche's page, there is indeed a section about her wedding to Manticore (but nothing about Who Will Die). The issue is that it's sort of... I don't know, almost like a piecemeal way of doing things to just add "and then this happened!" at the bottom of the article for major events like weddings and deaths. There was never any need for contact articles to have a better way of presenting dynamic content, because there was little that changed in game requiring it. So the lack of forethought (poor choice of words as it implies negligence or lack of smarts which it wasn't, but close enough) in wiki formatting led to what is in my opinion a poor way of displaying info that happens to contacts / NPCs after their initial appearance.
I was first made aware of this when I fixed up Penelope Yin's many pages. Right now, there is a page for the original, young version we meet in Faultline. There is another page for the older, Freedom Phalanx member version. So that's
two articles for what should be
one character. Now, it could be argued that they are "separate" characters, and as far as
gameplay mechanics are concerned, they are indeed two very separate contacts. But I am of the opinion that Penelope Yin should have one page, with all her versions, since she is one person. But
the way the wiki has contacts formatted essentially
requires her to have two pages. A similar issue comes about with The Dark Watcher - the single
character has two
articles: one for his Primal Earth appearance in the War Zone, and one for his Praetorian appearance.
This may be the wrong view, for Yin & TDW, given their mechanics in game as two separate contacts. However, it does raise questions about how the wiki handles changing content. If you look at the articles for the major players in Who Will Die,
none of them have anything about that story line! Darrin Wade, Miss Liberty, Psyche, Statesman... nothing. I marked some of them incomplete a long time ago, noting that that content needed to be added, but I didn't add it at the time because I'm not really sure
how to add that content. As I say in my quote above, just adding a section at the end of the article would seem to do a disservice to that content and the article - it's a bit of a cop out, and the top part of the article would still read as if the characters are exactly where they were before they died.
But perhaps, for characters who have one major life changing event, that works. Put a blurb at the bottom about how Statesman is dead, maybe add something to the top, and we're done (future work would need some sort of spoiler tag). But then we come back to Penelope Yin. The Praetorian version, in Mr. G's arc in I24, was to become "Penelope Mayhem". I did think about adding yet another Yin page, but just decided to add a line at the bottom of her page, saying "Check out Mr. G's arc for info."
There has to be a better way of doing that. I just don't know what that way is.
There are really a few issues with different types of NPC here:
1. Contacts with multiple appearances - the two Dark Watcher pages are separate because the contact pages are formatted so that the info box has
one contact's information. Could we just stick a second one after a {{clr}}, and put all the content down there? Sure, but would it look good? Is it better than having two articles? What's the best way to combine those articles so that there is one article for one single character?
2. NPC Allies / Enemies - Miss Liberty's page is formatted in such a way that she's an NPC Enemy. She has a blurb, and dialog (which is was something people had concerns about including on pages:
http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Talk:Zephyr) and some notes. In her case, it shouldn't be too hard to add Who Will Die as another section.
3. Contacts with life-changing events - This is mostly Darrin Wade (possibly only him). Again, putting a blurb at the bottom just doesn't seem like enough to me. Of course, cluttering the top with spoiler tags isn't quite right either. I don't know.
It's not a huge issue now, but like I say at the top of this long post, should CoH return, dynamic content is going to need to be examined, particularly the way that the wiki handles individual character articles. Right now, it's pretty much just the Who Will Die folks and Penelope Yin (particularly Praet Penny's conversion to Mayhem) but in the future that may change.