User:BaconShelf/Sandbox6

This page will discuss a proper outline to split off Covenant rank articles from their gameplay equivalents, as to better organise and facilitate discussion of both gameplay and lore.

Why?
Because Halopedia's information on enemy units as they pertain to gameplay is crap, and unsuited to the way we do things right now.

How?
This project will aim to split lore and gameplay information into separate pages; this is for a number of reasons, perhaps the biggest of which being the lore vs. gameplay split. Oftentimes, enemy ranks in-lore do not correspond to their gameplay/filenames, and oftentimes valid information has been historically excluded from Halopedia due to not having a valid lore basis. An example of how this process will be managed is given below using the example of the Minor ranks;

Minor page (lore)
Currently, Halopedia hosts "Minor" pages for the Sangheili Minor, Jiralhanae Minor, Unggoy Minor, Kig-Yar Minor and Yanme'e Minor. Despite this, almost none of these ranks are sufficiently covered in the Halo lore to particularly need dedicated pages; the information on their roles and responsibilities is lacking, and across all of these examples almost all are the same. The most prominent differences come from armour designs and colouration, and even these examples have very little in particular to say about them.

As such, given the extreme similarity of information to say about these ranks, it is more befitting to combine all of them into one page, with specific sub-sections to discuss the specifics per-species. An example of this can be found here, with information covering the Jiralhanae and Sangheili in a rough form, though a fully-realised page would also include the other species'. This implementation is based on a similar implementation of the Private rank on Wikipedia, where only specific sub-sections are needed for the discussions of difference by Country in all but the largest examples. Likewise, this would let us properly implement Covenant-native terminology, where appropriate.

Likewise, this implementation would also allow for discussion of the Minor rank as it may be employed by other non-Covenant or Covenant-derived groups, such as Sesa 'Refumee's heretic faction, Merg Vol's Covenant or even internal Covenant groups such as the Special Warfare Group.

The following ranks would be suitable for such a page;

Gameplay unit pages
With the above (page)s handling the majority of lore information, this leaves the specific gameplay pages free to entirely focus on their subject's gameplay effects. Appropriately, these pages would be titled Elite, Brute, Grunt (etc) to help make them easier to find in a context not surrounding lore-based discussion. These pages would likely take on a form resembling the way the Fallout Wiki structures its NPC articles, albeit adapted for Halo.

For example, an Elite Minor page may include;
 * An overview of the Elite Minor's role in each game
 * Game-specific sub-sections with the Elite Minor's stat tables, and descriptions of the Elite Minor's behaviours
 * Game-specific overviews of where and when the enemy in particular spawns (IE variations on difficulty or specific encounters for rarer enemies)
 * Lists of file directories for where the Minor's model/textures/scripts (etc) are located in the game files (for use with the Halo modding toolsets)

For enemies with minor unit variations (such as the Jiralhanae's Captain Major and Captain Ultra or Chieftain and Weapons Chieftain sub-ranks) these can likely be included as subsections on the main Captain/Chieftain (respectively) pages.