Forum: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 and Secrets
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)