Forum:Second Survey

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Second Survey discussion (2016)

What a can of worms..

I've been digging (part of the job description of a minion) up data for Beyond Sector, and found loads of issues here in the Wiki; so here is a bunch of questions

1. Should we base our astrographic data purely on T5 Second survey data as shown on TravellerMap?
2. What should happen to valid data that does not mesh with TravellerMap?
3. I've marked multiple Beyond Sector related links for deletion; should I undo them?
4. Should we differentiate the "no longer valid data per TravellerMap" as I did for Northstar (world)?

Ssteve (talk) 22:29, 26 February 2016 (EST)

As I hope https://travellermap.com/doc/credits makes clear, TravellerMap hosts various types of data:

• T5SS "Reviewed" data - this will change only via an "Act of God" i.e. Marc Miller. Which happens frequently (or at least it did before Don McKinney passed away, as he was working closely with Marc and together they were actively trying things out, like more Amber Zones)
• T5SS "In Review" data - sectors that have been added to the T5SS dataset but have known issues or simply haven't had enough eyeballs yet. These would progress to the "Reviewed" status, but I'd expect significant changes.
• "Apocryphal" data - this currently includes only the Judges Guild sectors, but you could imagine that any data that got published but is unofficial could fall in here, e.g. Precipice subsector from Disappearance on Aramat. At one point Group One's Theta Borealis, Paranoia Press's Beyond and Vanguard Reaches and FASA's Far Frontiers were in this bucket but Marc liked them so they got the T5SS blessing and are "In Review"
• Unofficial data, which has several flavors:
  • Fleshing out Charted Space. This can be stuff written years ago preserved for posterity, or stuff being actively developed. Authors of the stuff being actively developed may hope to get this into the T5SS process, or may just be doing it to fill in blank spaces on the map.
  • "Faraway" sectors, which includes broad categories like the Zhodani Core Route (which is a canonical idea but the data is not necessarily representative), isolated clusters (like the Orion OB1 Association that WG Zeist is working on) or one-off sectors (I'll host anything!)

Fundamentally, I'm the curator of TravellerMap - I get to say what's there and what's not there. (Within FFE's Copyrights and Fair Use Policy, of course.) Practically speaking, I'm honored to host the T5SS data and try and support Marc and his compatriots in building a consistent dataset for the OTU, but (and with Marc's blessing) don't limit the site to only official or even OTU data.

• The T5SS/Reviewed stuff is the easy category. It should be mostly stable, and ideally get even more stable over time.
• The T5SS/InReview stuff is by necessity in flux.
• The Unofficial stuff that's fleshing out Charted Space could go through several possible paths:
  • It could be scooped up by the T5SS, have the data tweaked a bit, and enter the InReview state (as happened with several sectors recently).
  • It could be overwritten by new T5SS submissions (say a new sector book is published by a licensee that discounts previous data)
  • It could be overwritten by new but just as unofficial data because I think the new data is better. This happened recently with the Solomani sectors Canopus, Aldebaran, Neworld, and Langere because Randy Dorman did an amazing job researching what was published about them and produced a T5-friendly dataset.
  • It could be declared a "preserve" like Foreven was and have all data retracted.
  • It could linger in unofficial state forever - the T5SS process may simply peter out, or not bother with every far-flung sector

Now, personally I hope the T5SS process does scoop up most of what's there, but with Don's passing the momentum has stalled and the 1105 Milieu won't necessarily be center stage forever.

So it really depends on what you want to do with the Wiki. Do you want to slavishly track my curation decisions about TravellerMap regarding Unofficial data? Do you want to jump on every edit made to InReview sectors? Do you want to only focus on the Official/Reviewed subset?

(btw, feel free to edit my text and linkify more things; I'm not all that nimble with mediawiki syntax)

Inexorabletash (talk) 23:46, 26 February 2016 (EST)