Forum: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:
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?
Discussion
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?
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)