Hey.

As you may or may not know, Pride from OMFG has started a show on Youtube explaining World of Warcraft lore in bite sized chunks. This show is Lore For Noobs (L4N).
I am part of Pride's L4N team, and I have taken upon me the humble task of adding these videos to the relevant articles on this wiki. However, I have just now found out that these videos are disappearing. I don't know why. I know this is a wiki and anyone can alter any page, but I really don't understand why someone would remove the videos. Is there any way to stop this from happening?

--Ultima (talk) 21:26, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

Discuss their value with the people who are removing them? It might be being seen as unwarranted advertisement.--SWM2448 21:30, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

Agreed; that or they might appear too... cheery for a pedia. TherasTaneel (talk) 21:31, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

A bit too "happy" for me xD

Loremaster A'noob, Arch Druid of the Noobhoof Clan (^talk/_contribz) 21:45, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

Excuse me? too "happy"? What does that mean? I happen to write for Lore 4 Noobs too. I wrote the Illidan ones you took down and trust me, I am not a happy fairy unicorn princess.

Graict (talk) 21:55, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

I don't see the point of including them, since all the information is already in the article anyway. -- Dark T Zeratul (talk) 22:02, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

That's a slippery slope, since so are the videos on Archimonde e.g. TherasTaneel (talk) 22:05, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

Thats like saying you don't see the point of having videos showing how to take down a raid boss because all the information is written. These videos make it easier to understand.

Graict (talk) 22:08, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

There's a big difference between telling someone what a boss does and seeing what they do. I don't see how a video explaining who Illidan is is so different than text explaining who Illidan is. -- Dark T Zeratul (talk) 22:13, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

I think it's pretty obvious that most people prefer to listen to someone talking about a subject, instead of reading large chunks of text. The L4N videos provides an easier way for these people the get access to lore, so that they don't have to read the huge articles about the different individual subjects. Perhaps a WoW player has trouble reading, and he wanted ot know about lore, if so Lore 4 Noobs is the perfect solution. In my personal opinion, the videos are only doing good for the pedia. I'm Ziztran, and I'm also a writer for L4N, and I'm just posting this because I really don't see the point of removing them from the various sites.Ziztran (talk) 22:19, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

Dumbing down, it's the hottest new thrill! I don't care much for it, but I guess it helps the...less literary? TherasTaneel (talk) 22:27, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

It helps the people who have trouble reading, like dyslexic people. As a matter of fact, I have a friend who loves wow, and loved the stragety games that came before, and he especially loves the lore, but he's dyslexic and therefor has alot of trouble reading the wowpedia articles and the books, even the comics. I think this would help people with these learning disabillity, why keep them from having a taste of the magnificent lore Blizzard provides?Ziztran (talk) 22:43, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

If the videos are now intended as an audio/visual equivalent for the articles themselves, and not just an addition to the articles, is Wowpedia's actual endorsement being sought?--SWM2448 22:47, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

The thing is, they're not equivalent, they're an easier way for people to get the important lore. The articles themselves have more detail, but the fatal lore that cannot be missed is displayed in L4N. Ziztran (talk) 22:55, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

Ultimately, here's the way I see it: the L4N videos contain nothing that the articles don't already have. -- Dark T Zeratul (talk) 23:21, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

Hey, This is Pride, I created L4N, we added the videos to the pages because this is a community driven wiki, and we being apart of the WoW community felt we could give an alternative source of information in regards to WoW Lore, but we refresh ourselves on wowpedia when we start writing an episode, why not share said content with wowpedia? No we arent looking for any endorsement like I said you help us more than enough by simply having the information available when we need it and we say thanks to that by adding a -wowpedia.org tag on some of the cards we use. If you want to talk about endorsement things, an admin can find my email. Its all over the place. Really what it comes down to is that it cant hurt to have L4N on the matching wiki articles and it really makes no sense to remove them when we put them up. If an admin wants to actually talk to me about it, again my email is easy to find. Pride (talk) 00:05, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

I don't see why so many people are against it, it briefly explain the character with some information that is already in the article, but in the form of video with cards, although to be fair you should put the wowpedia article link somewhere in the video(or in that thing where you can put words below the video).--Ashbear160 (talk) 00:20, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

I had doubts about it when I first saw them appearing on pages, but after watching them I had no problems with them. It's actually nice to have a recap of what is already on the article, or what may be missing from the article. Though I'll admit, I'm not sure if embedded videos are the way to go, but maybe instead link to the youtube page. A WP:VOTE maybe needed, should disagreements continue between sides. Sssssssssssssssssssssssss For Pony! (^Sssss/_Slithered) 00:44, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

I think it is a nice idea to have resources available to users in more than one medium. I am sure people who have have bad eye sight or have problem with eye strain might appreciate a video format. I'd like to address an example though. For instance, http://www.wowpedia.org/History_of_the_Horde is intimidating and my first thought was "wall of text". However, the videos at the bottom though are intrusive. I understand it is a lengthy subject being discussed requiring so many videos but going from the wall of text to a wall of videos doesn't seem to be an inviting solution. Links might be appropriate as previously suggest or maybe even posting one video which contains links or information leading to the next in the series. --Royalite (talk) 03:52, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

After reviewing more of the videos it dawned on me that if the OPs argument for the videos would be for dyslexics or (what I put forward) those with poor eyesight, the videos would best be viewed un-embedded. The pictures are too small and the writing on the cards impossible to distinguish within the embedded window, further the videos encourage reading the text on youtube if you didn't catch all the information. The more I am thinking about it the more links make sense for both the purpose of what the videos intend to achieve and how best they could be utilized on the wowpedia site. The OP seems to prefer embedded videos but the only reason I could justify was it being a flashy catch --Royalite (talk) 04:11, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

I agree, and it has been changed to links. Sssssssssssssssssssssssss For Pony! (^Sssss/_Slithered) 04:58, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

We understand your reasons for this decision. I will add links to future Lore For Noobs episodes instead of embedding them, and start changing any other parts that are already embedded to links aswell. Please do understand that while some of the L4N team have implied here that these video's are here to help dyslexics, this is not actually the main reason, though it might actually help those people. We mostly want to show our work here to add another way of providing the same information, and since alot of our information comes from this wiki we might aswell return the favor. But I must agree that especially on the horde page the increasing wall of videos was becomming intrusive. Ultima (talk) 15:39, 26 March 2011 (UTC)

Thank you. Sssssssssssssssssssssssss For Pony! (^Sssss/_Slithered) 01:39, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

This is actually good Skyzod324 (talk) 04:04, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

An advantage to coming to the discussion late, I can start an entirely new discussion on the topic. I just viewed The Horde (part 1). A large part of it consisted of flash cards: images and text on them. While I can understand that format being useful to the soundbite generation, but is that format useful to dyslexics (which was one of the proponent arguments)? Education is not my field; presumably you have researched and tested the utility of these videos? That's a criticism of the video, though, not of the links being or not being on the wiki. Still, I agree that there are folks for whom the video format would be more useful.

Relating to the wiki, though...

• If these are intended for people who would not otherwise absorb the lore, how would we present this information to them on the wiki page? It sounds a lot like an infobox link or icon would be called for. I'm doubting that someone who is not interested in in-depth information about a lore topic is going to want to scroll to the bottom of the page. This might raise a question of whether one of us is sponsoring the other by doing so, and encourage boss tactics video creators to ask for the same sort of arrangements.
• My Youtube-fu is weak, and I see no obvious way *on youtube* to easily go from topic to topic. Perhaps a "Lore for Noobs" wiki page would be in order, with a link to it from the "videos" section of lore pages that link to L4N videos. How such a page would be formatted (whether just links to "these lore pages have videos on them" or "these are the videos, and here's a link to the related lore page, or just a link to a Youtube "channel" or whatever it is) I'm not prepared to guess.

--Eirik Ratcatcher (talk) 21:55, 30 March 2011 (UTC)

I already explained above that the format being useful to dyslexics is not the main reason. On the subject of creating a Lore For Noobs page on this wiki to gather all videos in one place... I could do that, but I don't know how welcome such a page would be. I currently use my own user page to gather links to all articles that have L4N videos.