Category talk:Talk:Canon

I have no opinion about Seeker products, and I agree that Judges Guild and Paranoia Press material should be considered non-canon. But FASA and Gamelords material has been used as basis for explicitly canonical material a lot, and it seems a pity to ignore that much excellent and canon-compatible material.

I suggest accepting it as canon (with, perhaps, a caveat explaining its slightly fuzzy status).

Rancke 12:06, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

I will mark it as deuterocanonical or second canon, along with the DGP material. This would put all the "approved for Traveller" material not explicitly de-canonized. So we now have four categories of material: Canon (material produced by GDW), deuterocanonical (material produced by offical licencees), de-canonized (material produced by one-time licencees, but status has been revoked), and non-canon (matierial produced by people with no official licence). Articles from the former two sources are marked as "canon", and the latter two sources are marked as "non-canon".

Question: Do you have an opinon on how we should mark articles which originated as canon, but have been expanded by non-canon sources?

Tjoneslo 13:30, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

Split them into two parts, firt listing all canonical information and then the rest. Mark them as both canon and non-canon.

I have another question: Non-canon material is all very well, especially since posting it to the wiki means that the author has given permission for it to be used as background material by writers of canon (it does mean that, right?), but what happens when there are competing versions? I ran straight into the problem today when I saw that Thomas had posted the Whanga landgrab material. As you know, I've written an adventure set on Whanga for JTAS Online, and the two versions are not compatible, to put it mildly. Is it First Come First Served? And if it is, what happens if (as I have a vague hope for) someday A Visit to Whanga gets into print? What happens if someone thinks the posted non-canonical material is silly and decides to do it over? Especially if some think it's silly and some disagree? What if someone spots an undeniable mistake in the posted material (case in point: The Whanga article says that it was granted to the Duke of Regina in 1099 by the Archduke of Deneb. There was no archduke of Deneb in 1099, dukes don't get entire worlds as fiefs (that's archdukes), and any fief granted to the Duke of Regina by the Emperor would have been granted 500 years ago).

Also, I know that JTAS Online articles are specifically not canon, by Loren's own word. Nevertheless, I can't help feeling that they must be somehow 'better' than material that hasn't been selected by a Traveller editor for publication. But I realize that I'm biased.

Rancke 13:38, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

That is the question. Is a LandGrab article more canon than a JTAS Online article. I don't see that either is inherently better than the other. However in the end it doesn't really matter which is more cannon, as both are non-canon, they should appear under the non-canon heading. We have some other examples of conflicting articles. In this case list both articles with a note at the top that there are two divergent items. The first one there at the top... Problems with articles (cannon or not) should be listed on the talk page, perhaps with a reference on the main page that there are cannonical inconsistancies.

Dcorrin 17:10, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

My (lengthy) opinon on this is as follows: We are going to find more and more of these conflicts as time goes on. Not just non-canon vs. non-canon but all of the perutations of canon, semi-canon, non-canon, alternate canon, etc. As I see it there are three ways to deal with this. First, the editor-of-the-week decides which version is "more canon" and only that version is posted. This is exclusionary and prone to starting flamewars and causing hurt feelings.

Second, we post both (all) versions, either in the same page (as Dan suggested) or on seperate pages. The seperate pages would probably be subpages. For example, there would be "Whanga (world)/Landgrab" and "Whanga (world)/JTAS Online" pages and the root page "Whanga (world)" would be a disambiuation page point to the other two. Or we could use author names, or book names to distinguish sources.

Third, and the option I like best, is to go back to the Traveller wiki's statement of purpose: to be an in-game ship's library. In this case having the meta-information about the source(s) in the article breaks the fourth wall. To fix this, an article would be need to be rewritten to remove or smooth over the inconsistencies between the sources. However, it may not be possible to reconcile different sources of information into a coherent article. And some people may want to reference the original sources in an unedited form, particularly canon references.

My proposed solution is, and it may be too convoluted, is to use the second option above by creating sub-pages for the original sources. The root article would contain as much information as can be resolved between the sources. This may be as little as "this article as several incompatable sources" with a link to their pages.

I'll create a {{conflict}} template with some text to indicated that the article has conflicting sources, to notify the user quickly of the potential issue.

Tjoneslo 18:16, 20 April 2007 (UTC)