Forum:Articles for inhabited lots

While working on splitting Goth home into separate articles, I came across an inconsistency with how the wiki handles articles about occupied lots. Namely, for lots in The Sims and The Sims 2, we have an article for the lot itself, and another article for the family that lives in the lot. For example, the Burb family article states that they live at 63 Gunther Goth Highway in The Sims: Unleashed, and the Pleasant family page shows that they live at 215 Sim Lane in The Sims 2.

However, the article on the Bachelor family in The Sims 3, for example, includes information about their lot, and there is no independent article written about the lot itself. This pattern seems to hold true for most households/families that appear in The Sims 3. The information included about the lots themselves is usually very sparse, often only consisting of the lot's name, the lot address and the in-game description of the lot. Additionally, some pages about TS3 worlds list out only the unoccupied lots, while never listing the occupied ones, while other articles do list even the occupied lots, but provide no link to any page with additional information about those lots.

The way I can see it, we basically have two options. Either we can take the TS3 approach and consolidate the lot pages from TS and TS2 into the respective family or household articles, or we can take the TS/TS2 approach and create separate articles for occupied lots. If we choose to take the TS/TS2 approach, we'll also need to do further research into the lots, or else every article for those lots will be a stub.

What should we do? --  LostInRiverview talk ~ blog 23:03, October 24, 2014 (UTC)

Discussion
We should take a mixed approach, IMO. Creating occupied lot articles for TS/TS2/TS4 aren't much of an issue as there aren't as many families to start with (around 5/6 per neighborhood/world), unlike TS3, where there are usually over 20 families included within each world, not to mention that there are many worlds, including store worlds released for TS3, meaning that creating lot articles for each and every family in TS3 would be absolutely monstrous.

I'd prefer that we keep the TS1/TS2/TS4 lot articles (minus empty and unoccupied lots, obviously) though, as there aren't all that many to start with, and that we only create lot articles for particularly large/notable families for TS3, such as the Goth family, which should hopefully reduce the workload by quite a bit.

In a nutshell: Keep the TS1/TS2/TS4 occupied lot articles, and create lot articles only for large/notable families for TS3. EpicJoyBoy  (My talk page!)  05:02, October 25, 2014 (UTC)
 * I don't generally agree with half measures. I think if we're going to write articles for some occupied lots, we should write articles for all of them. Of course, the creation of the new articles would be on an as-needed basis, so there would be no particular rush to get all the articles created at one time. --  LostInRiverview talk ~ blog 05:22, October 25, 2014 (UTC)
 * I think that we should either make an article for every occupied lot, but I don't feel it would be as difficult as it seems, I believe that just providing a image of the lot, its price, the family that lives there, and a basic description of the house would be enough. It would be tedious but maybe we could tie it in to a project of the month or something similar. As long as there is some sort of consistency in terms of lot info, I'm happy.
 * Taking the TS3 route seems like an easier option and something that would take less time to undertake. Ѧüя◎ґ (talk) 14:54, November 24, 2014 (UTC)
 * I'm going to officially come out in favor of creating individual articles for occupied lots (i.e. the TS1/TS2 approach). The actual task should be pretty easy. And while it would be time consuming if done all at once, we fortunately don't have to make all the changes simultaneously. Adding lot information to the family pages is just going to make those pages needlessly long, especially for long-standing families. Ultimately I feel like creating individual articles is the best choice. --  LostInRiverview talk • blog  •  contribs 23:22, November 24, 2014 (UTC)
 * I think we should separate family and home lot articles for TS3, for a couple of reasons: (1) I believe it's always best to deal with different aspects of the game in separate articles rather than trying to cover all the ground in one, which always ends up making something look like it's been included as an afterthought, and (2) it makes a more useful, navigable, and comprehensive resource, for example for players who don't play pre-made families but would like to use the wiki to get information on pre-made houses. Obviously it would take some time to add and properly write all the articles, but five years ago hardly any NPCs from the TS2 era had their own character article, and now practically all of them do. I trust wiki magic to work on this one as it did in the former case. 137.205.238.128 (talk) 15:50, December 2, 2014 (UTC)
 * Just to let people know, the above post was me: my computer crashed just as it was posting, and must have logged me out, hence why it wasn't signed. Sorry about that. Beatrice Monty (talk) 14:23, December 3, 2014 (UTC)
 * Bump --  LostInRiverview talk • blog  •  contribs 18:56, January 1, 2015 (UTC)

I've decided to support LiR's measure of creating individual articles for inhabited lots (TS2 route). This is already done for console households. Ѧüя◎ґ (talk) 22:46, January 31, 2015 (UTC)
 * Bump. Ѧüя◎ґ (talk) 15:19, February 28, 2015 (UTC)


 * I actually prefer to have individual page for each inhabited lot. But I think the problem is that the content would be too sparse for a lot page on its own, but would make large families (like the Landgraabs) unnecessarily even longer. The content of a lot page is usually short and not descriptive enough. I was thinking we could make a list of inhabited lots for each neighborhood (TS1/2) and world (TS3/4), like how we handled TS2 empty lots.  Nikel  Talk  –  Vote!  07:07, April 5, 2015 (UTC)
 * That sounds like it's a good compromise. We're still getting the lot descriptions off the family articles, while at the same time we're not creating dozens of new stub or near-stub articles. What approach would you take to deal with already-existing pages for occupied lots (from TS and TS2)? --  LostInRiverview talk • blog  •  contribs 13:51, April 10, 2015 (UTC)
 * I'm not so sure about that. Normally, I'd merge the separate existing lot pages into the list of lots page. If the page isn't too expansive like 223 Idlewild Street, we can move the entire content to the list page; but if the page is quite long and detailed like 165 Sim Lane, it might be better to keep its own page, have it on the list page, and use Main to link it to the main page. But honestly, even a long page like 165 Sim Lane is sufficient to be moved to the list page altogether, IMO.  Nikel  Talk  –  Vote!  08:51, April 11, 2015 (UTC)
 * Sounds good. I do think our focus should be first on getting the TS3 articles created, then on merging together for TS1 and TS2 lots as needed. -  LostInRiverview talk • blog  •  contribs 00:38, April 22, 2015 (UTC)

Conclusion
Closing thread due to inactivity. If there are any other issues or if there are any additional comments you would like to make, please start a new discussion thread. --I am  k6ka  Talk to me!   See what I have done  18:10, July 9, 2015 (UTC)