Wikipedia:WikiProject Video games/Newsletter/20080409

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style="background-color: #EFEFEF; border: 2px #ababab solid; text-align: center;" |The Wikipedia:WikiProject Video games Newsletter
style="border: 2px #ababab solid;"| {| class="plainlinks" | colspan="2" style="vertical-align:middle;width: 50%; border: 2px #ababab solid; background-color: #EFEFEF; padding: 1em;" | {| style="width: 100%; border: 0px; background-color:#EFEFEF;" | style="vertical-align:middle;width: 55%; border: 0px; background-color:#EFEFEF; padding: 1em" | Image:Gamepad.svg The WikiProject Video Games Newsletter Volume I, No. 1 - April 9, 2008 | style="vertical-align:middle;text-align:right;width: 45%; border: 0px; background-color:#EFEFEF; padding: 1em;" | Archive After 30px

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;Project at a Glance

As of 2008-04-07, the project has:

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• 82 Featured articles
• 10 Featured Lists
• 7 Featured Topics
• 1 article in Featured Article Review

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• 184 Good Articles
• 15 articles for Peer review
• 3 articles for Assessment

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;Featured Articles, Lists, and Topics Candidates and Reviews

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Featured Article Candidates

• Guitar Hero

Featured List Candidates

• List of songs in Guitar Hero II

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Featured Topic Candidates

• None

Featured Review

• Final Fantasy VII (FA)

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;Changes to Featured and Good articles, lists, and topics in March:

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Promoted FA:

Image:LinkFA-star.png Final Fantasy XI, Super Smash Bros. Melee, Defense of the Ancients, List of Halo media, Giants: Citizen Kabuto, Grim Fandango, Spyro: Year of the Dragon, List of songs in Guitar Hero

Demoted FA:

14px Metal Gear Solid

Topic:

14px Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow

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Promoted GA:

14px Grim Fandango, Rise of Nations: Thrones and Patriots, Super Smash Bros. Brawl, Metroid series, SimCity series, Characters of Halo

Demoted GA:

14px Final Fantasy III, Star Fox 64, Star Fox Adventures

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;News

Current proposals and discussions

• Well, gee, thanks 1up!
  1UP.com has recently changed their rating scale. A list of affected articles can be found here. See discussion for details.
• Inactive project cleanup
  Proposal to consolidate inactive projects and taskforces. Project page can be found here.

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;Feature

The Importance of the Lead

The lead is one of the most important parts of any Wikipedia article; its job to summarize the article in 2 to 3 paragraphs in order to familiarize the reader with the structure of the content that you will providing them as well as to give a quick one-minute overview of the topic. Many articles that are processed through Good Article or Featured Article assessments will be heavily scrutinized for a poor lead section.

For articles dealing with video games, a common practice has developed for leads, being a 3-paragraph discussion.

;First paragraph

:The first paragraph should state the name of the game (using both bold (to identify the article's name) and italics as per the manual of style), along with any other alternate names the game may go by. The genre of the game should be clearly identified as well as the developer and the publisher. If a notable person has been cited by the game as having worked on the game's development (such as Tim Schafer or David Jaffe), this should also be noted. Release dates should be given, along with the release of any ports, remakes, or sequels.

;Second paragraph

:The second paragraph should summarize the plot briefly in one or two sentences; a high level overview is only needed to set the stage for further discussion. One or two sentences should be included to discuss the gameplay, including any notable features of the game.

;Third paragraph

:The third paragraph should cover the reception of the game, citing its general critical reaction and any significantly notable successful or failing elements in the game. If the game has won awards, this aspect can be noted, but specific mention of any award is discouraged.

This approach should help you to write a good lead for nearly any game, though this may need to be altered for other games. If there's not a lot of reception information for a game, it may be worthwhile to combine the listed first and third paragraphs into one paragraph. There may be need to talk more about an aspect not normally covered in video game articles (such as with E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (Atari 2600)) which should be noted in the lead.

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;Things you can help with:

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;Project Navigation

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