Forum:Articles covering different eras

Forums: Index > Watercooler > Articles covering different eras

Secrets & Mileus (2007)

This is a long rant/discussion about the need to have a policy about making overlapping or very specific articles identified approprately. The challenge is as follows:

Traveller is a game of secrets. Or at least, that is one of its attractors. A prime example is the secret of the Ancients. It would be nice to include the secrets in the wiki, but keep the secrets, well secret. That is not part of the original article, but still easy to find.

Traveller also covers eight official milieu's (Interstellar wars, Milieu 0, Milieu 990 (for T20), Milieu 1116 (for Classic Traveller), Milieu 1120 (for GURPS), Rebellion, The New Era, and Fourth Imperium), plus others from various non-canon campaigns. In some cases the article may be split year-to-year based upon changes.

There is also the topic of canon vs. non-canon information about the same topic. The original canon article was a short paragraph or two, followed by a much longer writeup by another non-canon source. Or two conflicting sources of writeups, where we would like to keep both.

I've also had two requests to include alternate Traveller Universe information within the wiki. Information which is close to, but not in the same, universe as the Third Imperium.

Another challenge is I would like to keep as much of the Meta-Game information out of the articles as possible. That is, I don't want to include "GURPS Timeline" or "T20 Era" or similar information in the article title or body as much as is possible.

Thus far there has been a scattershot manner of dealing with these issues. I would like to have a consistent, and agreed upon, way of doing this.

There are two ways of implementing Article marking if an article requires notation that it belongs in a specific place. First is use of categories. The Canon and Non-canon categories are a prime example of this. There is also the Library and Dictonary. If an articles is written specifically for a single milieu, contains the secret information, or written for meta-game information, it should include the appropriate categories. Many of these categories already exist, I will suggest a naming policy when I think of one.

Second is to add identifiers to the title of the article. For example the base article is "Imperialines" and the secrets article would be "Imperialines (GM)". I'd like to suggest instead to use a "/" with this (e.g. "Imperialines/GM"). The reason for using the sub-page method is the wiki processor helpfully (and automatically) includes a link back to the base article. This means less work for us to maintain links between articles. Similar to the categories, I'd like to propose a specific set of sub-pages to cover most of the issues we've seen so far.

Summary: Where articles are specific to an era, meta-game issue, or have overlapping and conflicting information, we need to consistenly mark them.

• There will be a specific category to include for each of these type (and set) of articles. We need a (suggested) list.

• Conflicting or overlapping articles will be included using a sub-page (e.g. article titles will be "Main Article/Specific Article"). Is this an acceptable idea?

• It would be nice to have a 90% list of Specific Article titles to cover the expected ideas we need to create items for.

Feedback Appreciated.

- Tjoneslo 17:05, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

---

When I originally envisioned having a Wiki for a Traveller database I thought that I would like the articles to appear as if you were actually making a query to a ships library. This would preclude any game mechanics (such as specific reference to attributes), any meta game comments, etc. While we can re-write attribute references e.g. instead of stating that armour reduces DEX by 1, state that the armour is clumsy to use, the rest is hard to hide, because we actually do want to have meta game information and various bits of information stored.

Even modern articles can come from several sources with some less credible than others (this could reflect canon/non-canon/alternate versions). Some information is also withheld from public record (e.g. stats for current military aircraft).

If we could attach attributes to users such as GM, Milieu, Canon, Meta then present article information based on these attributes we could have a system that would display things appropriately. However wikimedia does not support this to the best of my knowledge.

What we could do is present articles in a series of linked pages, with only the first one of the series indexed. e.g. we could have a page "Emperors" which shows the imperial lines up to 990 with a "more" at the bottom, then the next page could show 990-1116, then a "more" and "more alt" which would show either the post collapse list of pretenders or the list up to 1120. The problem is that a lot of the articles here are already short, so why split them up by pages, just split the page (as we do) with headings for the systems/years and people can read what is appropriate, who knows maybe the attribute thing can be developed at some point... Dcorrin 13:37, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

---

The idea of writing these articles as if they were part of a library data system is a good one (and one that I've had myself ;-), but it has two huge problems that we have to resolve: Time and place. You've already mentioned the time problem. The article for the same index phrase can be radically different for different eras and even for different years. In that connection, I'd like to repeat my suggestion that the default date be just before the OTU and the GTU splits. So, taking one of the recent new entries as an example, the default entry should say something like "There is no such organization, but if you want to read about one that exists in the Rebellion Era, look [ [Interstellar Development Service/1120|here] ]".

The other problem, Place, is really tricky. LD entries can also be very different. Look up Solomani Rim War while you're in Solomani space and you'll get something like "Imperial name for the War of Imperial Aggression", and you can bet that the Solomani entry for the War of Imperial Aggression will read differently than the Imperial entry for the Solomani Rim War.

I'm not quite sure how to best handle this.

- Rancke 13:32, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

---

The place is already decided, this is an Imperial Encyclopedia, not Solomani. The articles would look completely different in Gvegh, but we don't have a translator. (actually I was going to use the Zhodani Language as an example, but I don't know what it is...). While rimward articles might be a little different than spinward ones, we are assuming that this wiki is the standard library program that is issued to ships all over the imperium. This is one reason why the Imperium has articles for things like Sector with the data centered on the imperium, as opposed to it being on the main empire page for others Dcorrin 17:42, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

Meta & Secrets (2007)

Two types of information that really need seperate pages are the meta information (out-of-game perspective information) and secret (GM Only) in-game information.

I've already started the meta information sub-pages by using "/meta" for the page name, and created a template to allow automatically linking the base article to the metadata article.

Currently the Traveller secrets are marked as "(GM)". I would like to chanage this to "/secret", and move the articles to a Sectrets category. This will remove the out-of-game "GM" reference from these articles.

Does anyone have any objections?

- Tjoneslo 23:15, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

---

Sounds fine to me. Rancke 13:32, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

---

Secret is fine by me too. Dcorrin 17:42, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

Milieu-1116 to Milieu-1105 (2017)

I am increasingly of the opinion that Milieu-1116 should be more accurately called Milieu-1105. That is the baseline date for the T5SS data sets.

- Maksim-Smelchak (talk) 07:08, 15 April 2017 (EDT)

---

The point of a Milieu is to cover the (adult) lifespan of a character plus the campaign where they are played. It's not supposed to be a fixed point of time. The historical reason for the name was to distinguish the split point between the MT Rebellion and the GT Imperium Eternal. And since the Milieu 1116 time span covers 1105, I'm not sure what changing the name buys us. Tjoneslo (talk) 12:20, 15 April 2017 (EDT)

---

I have a different view and I'm not sure I could overcome your current view.

It would be nice to collect the data under consistent designations.

But, I'm not sure it would seem logical to you until you've seen much of what I do since I'm a long range thinker and planner.

I'm very glad that you and I have revolutionized the trade codes, nobility codes, and so much of the rest of the suite that is greatly improved compared to about three years ago. Our two minds together combined with the rest of the team have made a huge impact.

- Maksim-Smelchak (talk) 19:50, 15 April 2017 (EDT)

---

I'm still not clear on what you are proposing. You are correct in assuming that I dislike the suggestion. What I'm missing here are the starting points and assumptions you are using for your logic. And what is the goal? Tjoneslo (talk) 00:10, 16 April 2017 (EDT)

---

No worries then. The goal is to match up the datasets and correlate with the timeline.

But I don't work at odds with you anymore than is normal. Thanks for your reply. I think it will make more sense in time.

- Maksim-Smelchak (talk) 08:11, 16 April 2017 (EDT)

---

I am worried about it. It is an issue you feel strongly enough about to bring up as a topic of discussion. So let me be more specific about the questions I have about your proposal.

Q1. Is your idea to simply rename the Milieu from 1116 to 1105, but keep all the other details the same? That is it would still cover the data and years from 1100 to 1117 or so? or are you thinking of splitting the the milieu 1116 into two or more parts?

Q2. I also got the (perhaps mistaken) impression there is a new set of campaign milieus in the works by the secret cabal. Are they going to overlap with existing ones, requiring further changes, or are they going to simply be new ones?

- Tjoneslo (talk) 13:20, 16 April 2017 (EDT)

---

Response to Q1. Same details. Different re-naming. No split. Leave everything else alone. Make the people using T5SS data sets happy.

Response to Q2. Galaxiad (post-1115) is under development. No secret cabal. New time periods. Working on details with others. Your input and excellent advice is always welcome.

We sometimes clash here at the wiki, but I both like and respect you. Please understand that our disagreements are only form. I am very glad that you lead the wiki project and try to support you however I can. If you want more, let me know and I'll work on it. Until, I just plug away, day by day. We have different strategies.

I am looking forward to Don's timeline hitting print in the future and I hope the near future. RIP, Don.

- Maksim-Smelchak (talk) 13:48, 16 April 2017 (EDT)