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[Brando Commando]

I think my favorite part of the forum and the dominionstrategy site is probably the articles. I've learned a lot of tricks from them and still feel like there's a ton to learn.

That said, I think the quality of the articles could be much better if people only followed a few simple suggestions. Feel free to disagree...but I think a lot of these are intuitive enough and certainly feel like a good idea to me.

1. Back up your claims.

A lot of threads about strategy are filled with one-off comments asserting something. Sometimes these are refuted by other people. I have no real way of figuring out how might be right.

Articles should provide a deeper look and more reasoning. So take a hard look at your assumptions and try to give me some evidence to back up what you're saying. At the very least, show me your logic.

Maybe the biggest point here is, if you're not high-level, your personal experience may not provide a good guide, so look to comments from more advanced players to check it. (This clause applies to me, BTW.)

But more to the point....

2. Do a draft, and maybe even two or more, before publishing an "article"

This is all toward improving the quality of your advice. And one of the best ways to do that is to subject it to public scrutiny.
I noticed a recent article on Remake was titled "Remake (draft)" That's great (and follows a precedent I think I might have set myself...) because it lets us know that you're (hopefully?) going to go back, look at all the criticism and then incorporate back into a new version of the article, so that each future individual reader doesn't have to go back and read the entire thread to pick out the useful from the inane, etc. That just helps us, as a community, avoid duplication of effort.

3. Read previous threads on the same subject and try to take the best advice from there.

'Nuff said.

4. Break your paragraphs up and give them subheadings.

Personally, I find it hard to read long paragraphs on a computer screen, so this is nice in general for anything that isn't supposed to be a narrative.

But this goes doubly true for advice like this. Remember, as a player I'm going to have to integrate your advice into a complex web of knowledge I already have in place in whatever implicit decision tree I'm already using. It's a lot easier if your advice is broken into discreet chunks. (It also makes it easier for people to critique.) And using bold for these subheaders is always welcome.

Here are some good ideas for subsections for articles about single cards that you might include when appropriate (thanks to GendoIkari for this list):

Lists of cards/types of games that the card does and doesn't work with.
Comparisons to other cards.
Common traps/pitfalls that people fall for with the card.
Example games.
Statistics (when councilroom is up)

...That's it. Happy writing.

[gman314]

I agree with all of these, except that I'm not totally sold on number 2. The way I see it, when you post an article on the forum, you are basically submitting to a peer-review process and so regardless of whether or not you call it a draft, people will offer feedback. Labelling it as a draft makes it clear that you're committed to reviewing your article, but you can show the same commitment by staying active in the discussion and going back to edit anyways.

[Brando Commando]

...you can show the same commitment by staying active in the discussion and going back to edit anyways.

It's true, it can be a little academic whether you actually label something a "draft" or not. But either way, you really ought to go back and edit the original article.

"Staying active in the discussion" is fine, but I just think the writer ought to take on the task of putting together an overview of all the big issues surrounding an article topic -- it's really about this reduplication of effort thing I'm talking about. Why have two hundred people slog through the same thread to pick out the juicy bits and better advice, instead of having that writer integrate the best of the thread into the original article?

[WheresMyElephant]

Count me as a dissenter. I don't think we have a quality problem as much as we have a supply problem, and I'm hesitant to discourage people with a lot of requirements.

People who want their articles vetted better and aren't willing to read a short discussion thread can always wait until they go up on the main site. Alternatively I guess we could consider allowing anybody to go back to old dead threads and make new versions of the article to incorporate whatever criticism or discussion came afterward, if the original author is not inclined? (Not that this is exactly against any rules now, but I think most people would feel this was too presumptuous.)

[Brando Commando]

People who want their articles vetted better and aren't willing to read a short discussion thread can always wait until they go up on the main site.

But most articles never make it to the main site...so we have a trove of articles of (presumably) various quality.

Alternatively I guess we could consider allowing anybody to go back to old dead threads and make new versions of the article to incorporate whatever criticism or discussion came afterward, if the original author is not inclined? (Not that this is exactly against any rules now, but I think most people would feel this was too presumptuous.)

I'm all for this. I don't think it's presumptuous -- if someone didn't do a very good job the first time around, why not have somebody else clean up and incorporate all that?

Maybe I'm on the wrong Internet, but I think most things could use more judicious editing and development rather than a bunch of information thrown together in the form of a forum discussion. That just makes it harder for anybody to raise their game via reading articles.

[GendoIkari]

You didn't put "draft" in the title of this article.

Seriously though, this is a good start, and addresses many of the important generalities. But I think it would be good to talk about some of the specifics as well. Of course, specifics are more prone to exceptions and such, but it might still be good to list the specific things that articles should include. That is to say, they (assuming we're talking about card articles) should probably include the following:

Lists of cards/types of games that they do and don't work with.
Comparisons to other cards.
Common traps/pitfalls that people fall for with the card.
Example games.
Statistics (Darn you council room )