Forum:Articles in time and place
This is an extension of the previous rant about cataloging articles, to discuss the issue of time and place for articles. The place of an article is its in-game source. As Dan has said, this is supposed to be the Imperial Encylopeda. The articles are written from a neutral (but Imperial) point of view. If an article was to be included that was written from a different point of view, we could include that as a sub-page.
The difficult subject was the one of time. The Traveller history covers eight eras (Interstellar wars, Milieu 0, Milieu 990, Classic era, the Rebellion, New Era, Fourth Imperium, GT Alternate) and 3000 years (or more). And some of the data in an individual article changes over this span of time (how could it not).
Hans' idea of fixing a point in time as the source time for all articles is an interesting one. The Wiki would be an Encyclopeda from 1116, with any later articles split by era. We could take that a step further and split all the articles by era. I don't think using sub-pages for marking articles by era is going to work for several reasons:
I feel quite strongly that the text of an article should be under the natural heading of the article, not under an era heading. For example, the Virus article should be under the title "Virus" not "Virus/TNE", not "Virus/1130", or any variation.
This leads to the issue of articles which cross the eras. As an extreme example, Naasirka. This mega-corporation exists in all eight eras, meaning there now needs to be an article for each era, specifically written for that era. And no place to see the overall history of the organization from beginning to end.
Even if we use the 1116 as a split date, it means that most of the articles from MegaTraveller, HIWG, The New Era, BARD, New Era: 1248, and GT now all require two pages; one to say: "There is no article in the encyclopeda on this subject, but see here" and another to have the text. This covers three of the most productive canon publishers and two of the largest Traveller fan projects. I object.
The important idea I had regarding the use of sub-pages as an organzational tool was the number of articles with sub-pages would be small, a process rarely used If there are 22 articles with meta-data and 19 with secrets out 4200, this was ok. But if the number gets into the hundreds of pages, this says to me we ought to think through the organizational process again.
So enough of my negativity. I was hoping some really brilliant idea would strike me out of the blue to be able solve this conundrum, but thus far it has eluded me. So I go back and ask the questions:
- To whom is it imporant that an article be notated as belonging to a specific era?
- How obvious does this notataion need to be?
- If an article crosses eras (especially the critical one of classic era -> rebellion/GT), it is more important to have a single article, or multiple articles for each era?
Tjoneslo 19:38, 22 May 2007 (UTC)