Talk:Traveller Wiki/Archive 1

Note: This is an archive of the first year talk pages for main page.

WOW, we've been busy...

By the looks of things we have scrounged the internet, searched and scanned/typed entires from some well-hidden as well as widely available sources. The amazing thing is that if you look at the statisitics page, for quite some time it's only been two or three contirbutors.

I have tried (when asking for permission to use website material) to encourage others to look this Wiki over and consider contributing. I have no idea if anyone I've asked even has thought about it. Sstefan 07-19-2006

The analysis of wikipedia has shown that most of the work is done by a few people. Given the vastly smaller group of Traveller fans, this is not surprising that there are only one or two "contributers". What concerns me more is the (apparent) lack of viewership. I can't tell if the statistic showing no page views is due to some configuration error, or if the system does not count views by the contributers.

In any case, since we now have a significant portion of the canon Traveller library, we should be trying to find viewers. Which means advertising. Not the paid kind, but just mentioning (on occasion) the Traveller Wiki in appropirate places. For example, on the COTI Boards, my sig includes :

Contribute to the Traveller Wiki:http://traveller.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page

This is in hopes of driving some viewers here. Don't be overbearing about this, but a few mentions here and there wouldn't hurt. Tjoneslo 13:14, 19 July 2006 (UTC)

and what is this line all about??? Buy my books: On the Ground, Against Gravity, Through the Waves

and why do those titles almost sound familiar? Sstefan

The Wikia Working page. This page (and the linked ones) are a discussion about how to create a successful wiki, including attacting viewers, users, and contributers. And all that stuff. Tjoneslo 17:12, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

Armour - Armor

Are we using the British spelling (armour, utilise etc.) or the Amercian spelling (armor, utilize etc.)? Sstefan 07-12-2006

I prefer the Engish spelling (armour). All the BITS stuff is spelled that way... The contents should be left in whatever spelling the source material is written in, I recently put in redirects from the USA spelling for armour for all articles that use that word and this should be continued for all alternate spellings in titles. Someone (Thomas?) has created Combat Armor and renamed it in the technology chart without altering all the others that used armour. Dcorrin 19:30, 12 July 2006 (UTC)

Yay, our first edit war. Sstefan created the Combat Armor page, and Dcorrin created the Combat Armour page. I noticed there were two pages with very similar names, and decided to combine them. Being an arrogant American, I chose the American spelling.

While I agree that we should keep titles under the original spelling, the difficulty comes when (like this case) where we have both spellings. I will leave the combat armour alone, but if I come across other cases, I will probably revert them to the American spelling. Tjoneslo 20:04, 12 July 2006 (UTC)

Well I created Combat Armour first so Nyah! Seriously, I would suggest not changing any, just making the appropriate redirects from USAian. Whomever created the article can choose the language (presumably the same as the source material if copying and pasting). Dcorrin 20:33, 12 July 2006 (UTC)

World - System

I was reading the definition of System and I think we may have promulgated a bunch of errors in the library data by listing descriptions as Terra (world). By definition of system we can (and should eventually, if it hasn’t already) list Glisten. But in “reality”, Glisten is a belt system, not a planetary body (world).

I am tempted to redo all the (world) entries into (system) entries to correct this minor oversight. Thoughts?

Sstefan 07-05-2006

This is a problem from the canon itself, as for example Terra is really in the Sol system. So what are we referring to when we have an entry for Terra (world)? We are talking about the planet itself, I don't see any extended system data in any of these entries, or discussions about any other planets in the system as a rule (though I may have missed one). So in our case we are really talking about the world. I understand your point that the steps are (Domain)-Sector-Subsector-System-World/Moon-... so most of our entries should really be the Terra (system) to fit in the progression, but as they don't talk about the sytem I would propose that we leave things alone, and if for some reason someone posts an article about an entire system, we put that as (system) and have (world) to differentiate. e.g. Regina (world) and Regina (system). As for the Glisten is really a belt, not a planet, the world Glisten is spread out over the asteroids in the belt, so even though it is a bunch of small planetoids, the rules consider it a "world". Dcorrin 17:32, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

The other problem is we need to be able to distingush between (for example) Antres Domain, Antares Sector, Atares subsector, Atares world, Antares system, Antares the star (and, just for laughs, Antares the constellation).Tjoneslo 17:40, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

Which is why we have the conventions Domain of Antares, Antares Sector, Antares Subsector, Antares (system), Antares (world) and now new ones: Antares (the star), Constellation of Antares (Though Antares is not a Constellation) and don't forget Antares Region. As long as we are consistant. Dcorrin 13:18, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

Needed items

• Template for out-of library information (see sector)

E.g. want to note some feature that should be a sidebar or something rather than appear in the main article

Template: Sources

I got an answer back from the Wika support staff about how to get the conditional {{if}} template tags to work properly. I've been playing with the Template:Sources to replace our current article source tag system. Please make suggestions on what this should look like or text it should have in the Discussion page. Please don't use this template anywhere just yet, it is slightly broken still. Tjoneslo 18:28, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

Wikia Ranking

I'm thinking of removing the "Ranks us 20th" line from the front page. How you rank wikis can be a delicate subject: is it good articles (which we are using), all articles (by which we rank about 75th, but only because we spend more time adding in articles and not talking about them).

According to "top wikis" section on the main Wiki talk page, the administrators feel the best ranking is number of active contributers seeing as the point of a wiki is to build a community.

Thus, according to the statistic page we rank about 96th. Tjoneslo 14:49, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

I originally put it there to attract attention, thinking that if anyone (Traveller Person) stopped by they would see that we are a large resource. I would also like to see us on the "Most active Wikias, or perhaps a featured wikia but I think we need more than just 3-4 people. Dcorrin 13:38, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

It certianly couldn't hurt to nominate us for featured wiki. What's the worst that could happen? we get blissfully ignored. Again. As usual. Tjoneslo 00:40, 2 September 2006 (UTC)

Another note: As I've been researching articles via Google, I've begun to see the Traveller Wiki articles show up in the searches. Not all of them, but the Wikia people have made an effort to be nice to Google. So perhaps we'll get some response that way too. Tjoneslo 00:43, 2 September 2006 (UTC)

I am, once again thinking of removing the "Ranked 18th" line from the front page. Due to the current decline in editorial contributions, we have fallen further in the rankings. Or rather, other wiki with larger communities have overtaken us in terms of "good pages". 2,500 pages is a respectable size for a wiki, but I'm wondering if there is a better way to indicate our breath and depth to a first time user? Largest online Traveller library has a nice ring to it. Tjoneslo 15:41, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Additions to Rules Descriptions

I've added a description of T4 and slightly modified the MT description as a result. Please feel free to check them for inaccuracies and make any modifications needed. Thanks, Gruffty

These look good. Thanks Tjoneslo 22:35, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

Woo Hoo!!

We finally made it to the Highlights Page of Wikia. Perhaps this will drive our taffic/contributions up... Dcorrin 13:31, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

Yea. I saw they changed the page. So I added us there. Then, about 30 seconds later the admin locked it. Tjoneslo 14:39, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

Special Projects

As December is upon us, I'm looking for suggestions for next months "Special Project". I have a few ideas, but if anyone else has some, please nominate them below.

• The timeline project. Some of the library entries have dates (years). I'd like to link these years to their own page, and then link the pages. I know about Don McKinney's Timline project (now 25+ PDF pages). I don't want to just dump the PDF into the Wiki, but have a set of year pages linked to various articles. This also may mean more history in the Wiki.
• The Stuff Project: The wiki needs more stuff! We need more Traveller specific Equipment, vehicle designs, starships, and neat things like that.
• The Astrogation Project: update and fill in the Sectors, Subsectors and missing world writeups. I have a better subsector page template.
• Cleanup: work on filling in the missing items (from the most wanted pages) and the incomplete pages.

Tjoneslo 19:34, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

3000 articles

We surpassed 3000 articles today, according to the "offical" count on the front page. Yay us. Tjoneslo 15:33, 22 December 2006 (UTC)

Congratulations! Angela ^talk 16:01, 24 December 2006 (UTC)

Hi all

Especially Dan, who I haven't talked with nearly enough the last 5 years. I don't know how much time I have for this, but we'll give it a good Scouts try... Georgewilliamherbert 06:11, 2 January 2007 (UTC)

Peter Gray and the Cruicble Campaign

This post is about Peter Gray and his Cruicible campaign. Quite a lot of it has been posted on the Freelance Traveller site. But if you are really interested, go dig your way through the TNE RCES archive. This would fall into the heading of "Holy crap, there's a lot of stuff". He also posts to the Traveller TNE group on Yahoo. And the Archives there contain a lot of this information too. I just had to tell someone and post the links before they get lost. Tjoneslo 16:05, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

History ordering to articles

Moved from Template talk:UWPRed

This brings to mind the issue about the dates used throughout the library. For instance the travel zone rating as per TNS 198-1119 Mora / Mora / Spinward Marches changes the rating from amber to red (for a solar flare in this case on an un-linked world)).

What about users that wish to use the library data for an Interstellar Wars period campaign... some of information within this library is not widely known during that particular epoch.

How should we handle this, if at all?

Sstefan

I think we discussed this elsewhere. The wiki here does not have any state type information where one could indicate that they want to use the wiki at year 1108 (for example), and articles or parts of articles after 1108 are not available, also for the GM articles. I was thinking that perhaps future developments, or moving to another wiki with this extra support sometime in the future might be viable (e.g. when you log in your viewing year is a parameter of the account), but for any such system to work we would need to have some date tags/categories/something in the articles. Some of the articles are presented in two sections a pre-rebellion and post-rebellion (e.g. Strephon, however without a mechanism we don't know how it might be handled in the future. If you know of an article that is only valid after a certain year, you could always put a extra category, e.g. valid_1119+ or valid_0-1108 etc. Dcorrin 13:58, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

There are a number of wiki tricks to enable this sort of historical split. Dan mentions two: Using categories to identify which articles belong to which era or setting. Or using a naming convention (like the GM) one, so we would have (for example). "Mora (world)/IW", "Mora (world)/Classic", "Mora (world)/TNE". I know of a couple of more exotic ones: Using namespaces (all the TNE articles start with "TNE: " for example). There are some CSS tricks to enable hiding or changing sections of an article. If you look under preferences/Skins for your user, we could create a "TNE skin" and a "Classic Era" skin. This requires more CSS programming than I'm up for currently.

We haven't solved this problem yet because it hasn't been a problem to this point. I think the solution will be a combination of these. But we should have a groupthink decision on a solution. Tjoneslo 16:26, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

I've noticed some articles where this has begun to be a problem. My suggestion is that we make the period just before the OTU and the GTU splits the default period. (I'm formulating it like that because the split manifests itself at different times at different distances from Capital. Thus an article about Capital should definitely be dated before 132-1116 whereas my writeup of Forboldn for early 1117 is prefectly valid for both universes.) Anyway, articles that would look different if read at different times should be marked with the appropriate date. Thus "Santanocheev, Frederick" would describe Santy as a retired Sector Admiral whereas a writeup describing him as a rear admiral in charge of Naval Intelligence for Regina Subsector should be indexed as "Santanocheev, Frederick (1105)" and one describing him as a recently promoted Sector Admiral should be indexed "Santanocheev, Frederick (1107)". (Assuming, for purposes of argument that anyone cares enough for him to write him up for 1105 and 1107 of course). It's not enough to mark articles with milieu, because there can be quite drastic changes from one year to the next (As my Santy examples, which are all Classic Era, shows). For some of the articles copied from early publications this does mean we either have to update them to 1116/17 or index them with the appropriate year but others (like the entries for the first four frontier wars) from 1105 would be valid in 1117. Rancke 09:33, 6 May 2007 (UTC)

Happy Birthday to us

According to the More Statistic page, Dan's first edit was Febuary 6th 2006. This makes the Traveller wiki one year old today! Tjoneslo 15:44, 6 February 2007 (UTC)