Forum:Proposal for articles in time

Forums: Index > Watercooler > Proposal for articles in time

This is a old topic which has gone through many iterations of attempts to resolve it. The core problem is Traveller's Future History spans thousands of years. And some articles have detailed information at several points along the timeline.

Previous discussions are here:

• Forum:Proposal for Policy for article time
• Forum:Default date for articles

The lesson learned from previous attempts to resolve the issue is attempts to put the different milieu / era data on the same page do not work. With the wiki's adopting more sophisticated templates and layout standards, adding another layer of Era / Milieu / Date information is simply confusing. Several of the bits of information from later dates are considered spoilers for earlier times, so hiding them just makes the whole more confusing.

Division of Articles

From this the solution is the data for each Milieu exists on its own page. Question is now how to distinguish them. From this there are two approaches: sub-pages or namespaces.

A subpage is a second page attached to the first using a predefined, agreed upon name. This idea is referenced in the first proposal listed above. So the Regina article would have a Regina (world)/New Era and a Regia (world)/Galaxiad articles covering those eras. Adding new Milieu is simple by just using an agreed upon name.

A namespace is a wikimedia construct to prefix the article with the Milieu name. So there would be a New Era: Regina (world) and an Galaxiad: Regina (world). Creating a new Milieu requires an administrator to add the new namespace to the wiki configuration. But it does allow the wiki software to do better searching and filtering as the articles are now semantically labeled.

Selecting between these two comes down to how important you think the Place in time is relative to the article itself.

The wiki has, since the founding, assumed the articles in the Main namespace are from the Milieu 1105/1116 of the CT/GT/MGT publications. This proposal would continue the practice.

However, by forcing the Main namespace to be a single milieu, what do you do with articles about topics which do not exist in the Milieu 1116 time frame? For example, anything to do with the Regency or the Virus. This highlights one advantage of the Namespace approach, there would be no "Regency" article in the Main namespace, it would exist only the "New Era:" namespace.

Notification to the readers

One of the reasons for trying to put all the era article information onto the same page was the need to alert a reader there may be more information in other eras.

Borrowing an idea from the Wookiepeida (The Star Wars Wikipeida on Fandom.org) we would add a template to the top of the page which would alert the user of the existence of additional historical items. The link would go to the era specific page for the article.

Milieu 0	Milieu 990	Milieu 1116	New Era	Galaxiad

This is just an initial proposal. The final would include additional elements like better looking layout, perhaps graphics to go with the names. And the template would be dynamic based upon which sub-pages or namespace articles existed.

Second option, there are only ever three options. Hovering a mouse over each would give a drop-down list of possible existing era based articles you can select from. As you select the different sub-pages/namespace the selection of what appears in the past/future drop-down list changes.

Past	Present	Future

A design decision: Use Colours for the background of the text based upon the topic of the article, or select a new set of colors for each era? Add the era specific graphics from T5 for the ones that have it?

The Milieu

From the Milieu page there would be the following starting set of Milieu namespaces / suggested sub pages names:

• Milieu 0 - Covers -25 to 10 (Foundation of the 3rd Imperium)
• Milieu 990 - Covers 985 to 1104
• Milieu 1116 - Covers 1110 to 1116 (Golden era for CT & MgT1/2)
• Milieu 1130 - Covers 1117 to 1130 (Rebellion)
• Milieu 1120 - Covers 1116 to 1130 (Lorenverse ATU)
• Milieu 1200 - Covers 1190 to 1220 (New Era)
• Milieu 1248 - Covers 1240 to 1260 (New New Era)
• Milieu 1900 - Covers 1890 to 1910 (Galaxiad Era)

The Milieu page lists some other ones, but not given the short time frames where campaigns are set.

Discussion

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General

There are two classes of entries:

• Era dependent entries
• Era independent entries

Neither the namespace nor subpage options seem relevant for Era independent entries. These stay as is.

Is Metadata to stay in Main namespace if the namespace option is taken?

[[XXXX]] is currently used as a reference to a page.

For Subpages this would become [[XXXX]]/eraname e.g. [[XXXX]]/Milieu0

For namespaces this would become eraname:[[XXXX]] e.g. Galaxiad:[[XXXX]]

Both are a pain to get right on an ongoing basis. This may generate lots of Moves to correct.

If we take District 268 as an example this is currently [[Dictrict 268]] and becomes:

• NewEra:[[Plankwell Subsector]] or
• [[Plankwell Subsector]]/NewEra {In this case there is no [[Plankwell] for the Golden Age - What happens here?}
• both options would require redirects for the non-GoldenAge eras for [[District 268]] to point to [[Plankwell]] equivalent.

There is a lot of review and edit work here! AB-101 may not be up to splitting pages sensibly. Could we automatically tag candidates in a category e.g. "Category:Era-Review" and remove those tags as pages are reviewed?

Yes, all of this true. I had forgotten about re-names of things as they moved between era's. Especially the load for editing. The potential load for updating hundreds or thousands of articles has served as a block to starting many projects. I've found that simply staring on the project once defined works best. Tjoneslo (talk) 20:28, 3 July 2021 (EDT)

TravellerMap and (world) pages

• Since worlds are era dependent items, the TravellerMap would need to link to the correct world description page whatever solution is selected. We need Joshua's buy-in before we break those links.
• When making this change (if we do) it would this be a good time to ensure we automate the link between the Sector Data in TravellerMap in the various eras and the data tables for sector in the Wiki.
• We will touch every world page. For every new page can we use the Template:StellarDataQuery (or updated equivalent)?
• Particularly for worlds, this is not a trivial change whichever way we go.
• Do we need to create redirect pages for each era to point to the Main namespace page to make TravellerMap links work sensibly?
  • or is there something clever TravellerMap can do?

BackworldTraveller (talk) 16:02, 3 July 2021 (EDT)

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When Joshua asked about including links from Traveller Map into the wiki, the request was "What is an API for doing this"? That is, what is a simple and consistent URL for each world that can be created given the data available to the Traveller Map server software. If we want to change the URL to include the Era information, we just need to let Joshua know.

Most of the worlds currently use Template:UWP for showing the sidebar. Worlds in a few sectors use the Template:StellarDataQuery to display more data, but only if it has been generated. While I've not created a process, it should be possible to directly update the UWP template directly in the page if needed. It's certainly possible to create new pages with the UWP template. Tjoneslo (talk) 21:17, 3 July 2021 (EDT)

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I think the point I was trying to make is that we are about to embark upon a task that will touch every page for all eras other than 1105-1116. So if we set the templates up and the data connections up then we can minimise the overall work.

e.g. If the underlying data by planet is there we could fill out the port, size, atm, hydro, pop, gov, law and TL sections with entries driven off PAGENAME only. And the underlying data by planet is just data by sector from TravellerMap BackworldTraveller (talk) 05:02, 4 July 2021 (EDT)

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That all makes sense. The first decision to make is namespace vs subpage for the other era's. I'm leaning toward namespaces but still open to being convinced subpages are the better way. The reason is the templates and data generation needs to know this information so they generate the links correctly. Tjoneslo (talk) 06:29, 5 July 2021 (EDT)

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Related question: Where a category is era specific (e.g. worlds belonging to the Republic of Regina vary vastly between 1248 and 1900) how will this work in each option? BackworldTraveller (talk) 06:38, 6 July 2021 (EDT)

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The idea of a Milieu was that it would cover a short span of time, around a decade or two. Effectively this is a "point in time". This allows for a detailed "current time" history for running a campaign. There is a broader Timeline (with overlapping names) for covering broader swaths of time, divided by arbitrary, human derived, events.

So the "Galaxiad: Republic of Regina" article would have the current (as of 1900) membership. The history of the Republic would include the description of how the republic added or lost worlds.

Any objections to using namespaces over sub-pages? Tjoneslo (talk) 06:36, 7 July 2021 (EDT)

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Nope, no objection...but please (a) standardise the eras and (b) tie them to the periods for which map data is conceivably available in travellermap.com...otherwise we get a host of tiny, partly populated pages. {Main}:X with references to Galaxiad:X, etc. Is Timeline a namespace of its own or a section in {Main}?

For {Main}:X (world) there is {Main}:X (world)/data. Would that structure be replicated for each era?

What will be the process for splitting the articles? BackworldTraveller (talk) 09:25, 7 July 2021 (EDT)

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The milieu's listed above, which will serve as the starting point for the namespaces map to the list for Milieu's in Traveller Map. So the Traveller map Milieu's can all be reflected exactly in the wiki and vice-versa. The Timeline discussions should remain in the Main namespace, as with most everything.

The /data page for each world, which would hold the Template:StellarData which is generated by the Trade Route process will/should remain in the Main namespace. The template stored data in an underlying Cargo semantic mediawiki table. It will make the upload process simpler and has no real effect on the output template.

Splitting the articles. It is my preference we don't create hundreds or thousands of pages which consist only of cut/paste templates and headers with "No information yet available". While I understand the desire to have a workspace for the New Era, or Milieu 1248, or Galaxiad, let's create the pages as we work through them and have content for them. 19:48, 7 July 2021 (EDT)