I've been working on a new layout for the Mafia II vehicle pages that I think will help clean them up and make them easier to read and understand. You can see my example, which is still a work in progress, here:
There's a lot of inconsistencies between the vehicle pages and the information differs from one to the next. The section on statistics is just a massive jumble of text and can be a little hard to read. There also seems to be a lot of opinionated remarks scattered throughout the pages as well.
As far as the new elements of the page are concerned, I can redo the icons for "other upgrades" and "selling price" if anyone can think of something better, those are just ones I threw together in photoshop last night.
The infobox is just a general template, it would have to be made into an actual vehicle infobox with the information from that one and add it to the templates so it can be easily reused. I think it would look better if it was slightly narrower myself. I don't think that's something I can add, if it is someone can tell me how and I will. The table can be added to the templates as well.
Aside from the new look, a few ideas I had for the layout are:
- Move what real-world vehicle(s) it's based on from the description section to the trivia section.
- Some of these vehicles tend to get a little carried away with what real-world cars they're based on, in some cases you can tell that multiple people who didn't agree made the entries. The article should either list the one vehicle it most resembles, or the differences should be highly noticeable, subtle details like a slightly different bumper or tail lights etc. seem to trivial to be mentioned, but that's just my opinion, I made the article with an example of each
- Get rid of statements in the statistics section like "The above indicates that it has an inline 6 cylinder engine that give it moderate performance but poor handling etc." This seems like nothing but pure speculation and opinion.
- As a basis for the engine power description I thought we could use the following criteria:
- Low powered engine = under 85 mph stock.
- Medium powered engine = between 85 - 100 mph stock.
- High powered engine = 100 - 115 mph stock.
- Extremely high powered engine = over 115 mph stock.
- Of course these won't be necessary for vehicles like buses or large trucks etc.
- These can be adjusted if anyone disagrees with the values.
- Get rid of statements like "Culver is similar sounding to Chrysler and New York is also called the Empire State…" or "The name Shubert is a German last name not unlike the French Chevrolet…" These can be on the actual manufactures pages, but personally I think they just clutter up the articles with unnecessary information that's speculation at best.
- All infobox pictures should be high quality and for uniformity they should be from the Car-cyclopedia.
- Any gallery over two pictures should be made into a slide show.
For vehicles that cant be upgraded, you would just remove the table and have the infobox with the Design, Availability, Trivia and Gallery sections. I made an example of that I could post as well.
Well that's about it for now, I also made an all text version without the table, I could post that too but I think the table really makes the page stand out.