Forum:The Great Referencing Initiative
I'd like to rally all active wiki editors so we can mount a coordinated effort to tackle what I, and a few other people as well, perceive to be Traveller wiki's greatest weakness: its lacklustre article citations. We have a robust system to support citations, but very few pages are properly leveraging it and many more, most of them legacy ones, are giving information without any hints to its provenance whatsoever.
As Traveller wiki is not just a fan-facing database but also used by writers, being able to search for a given topic's previous mentions across the Traveller ludography would be a great boon to us all. There's also the important matter of clearly marking what is published information and what is fan-contributed content within a given page, as the lack of clear demarcations can (and actually has already) cause problems when fan-contributed material is mistaken for official and printed in a publication without attribution to the contributor fan.
What we truly need is a joint effort to start adding not just Ludography Cites, but particularly Page cites, Source cites, and whenever possible and relevant, Unpublished Cites to existing wiki articles. In an ideal world, once this (admittedly gargantuan) effort is completed, we'd have most of the wiki at a citation standard comparable to Wikipedia's, with the origin of the information in each line/paragraph properly indexed with an inline citation.
Within the world of fan wikis, for an example we could look to as a potential model I put forward SARNA, the BattleTech wiki. Having our own version of their 'Referencing for beginners' page adapted to Traveller wiki's standards could potentially be a good start, as it'd help educate the more casual editors (who might not have bothered reading through the full Manual of Style) on how/when to deploy citations.
Even so, there's a few big questions as to how to coordinate such an effort:
- How do we split the (enormous) workload among ourselves?
- How do we structure our search for references? Do we adopt a 'Publication-First' or an 'Article-First' method? (i.e.: Do we each pick a publication to read cover-to-cover and add citations to all relevant wiki entries referenced in it, or do we tackle groups of articles within a same topic and go hunting for references across the Ludography, respectively?)
- Should we consider adopting some of SARNA's policies, and if so, to what degree? How to balance rigorous citation with allowing for fan contributions?
Any thoughts, ideas, and opinions you might have on both this initiative and how to implement it will be greatly welcome.
(Oh, and a I'd also like to extend a thank you to Tjoneslo for pointing out to me that the Wiki Forum does, in fact, exist, following a brief exchange in the Mongoose Publishing Discord server early last month.)
- — GabrielGABFonseca (talk) 21:31, 15 July 2025 (UTC-3)
- This is a wonderful idea, and like so many of the other ideas that are scattered through the forums, mostly this requires attention from people dedicated to idea of making it happen.
- First stage of this is, as you mention, is documentation. The primary existing source for this is Traveller:Sources. The "Traveller:" namespaceis the section for help pages and information about the wiki. If we need more details about any part of how the Wiki works, it will appear within the "Traveller" namespace. The second is the Template:Page cite template, which replaces the <ref/> tags. And the other related templates.
- The challenge will be two problems. First is we've encouraged some of the editors to adjust the language of the articles to be "in-universe". That is to edit out references to game mechanics (especially), and take a date-neutral stance. In some cases this has been taken further to support the article layout, by splitting paragraphs or duplicating sentences in different parts of the article. The second will some of the non-canon material added no longer exists in an accessible form.
- Much of the Mongoose published material, both first and second edition is not references or included in the wiki. This is due to long standing policy about not including the material due to copyright concerns. These concerns have been addressed, but are still there and need to be followed and acknowledged.
- In addition to putting citations into the existing articles, there is a Library Data project, with it's own Manual of Style to gather important articles and make sure the references are included correctly.
- Finally, I'll point out that the Wookipeida (the Star Wars) also has a Sourcing page that may be a useful reference. The Wookipeida help and formatting pages have, in the past, been a source of inspiration for the pages here at the Traveller Wiki.
- Thank you very much for bringing this up as a great idea, now to find the time with the five or so contributors to the wiki. Tjoneslo (talk) 17:48, 16 July 2025 (UTC)