[Wot-l] Re: Greetings from A Wheel of Time Wiki

[Gherald]

I'm keeping wot-l at wikicities.com in the Cc:  I hope that's ok.

On 10/30/05, Aaron Humphrey <alfvaen at gmail.com> wrote:
> >  I just discovered http://concord.wikicities.com and left a note on your
> > talk, but I noticed you haven't made an update for about a week so I figured
> > I'd paste it below:
>
> Yeah, I get a little bit intermittent.  My other major contributor,
> who did a big whack of Pern stuff, has been AWOL for a few weeks, too.
>  I hadn't seen it yet.
>
> >  ---
> >  Completely unaware of the existence of this wikicity (Why, oh why, is it
> > not linked from Wikipedia:The Wheel of Time ? Light!) we recently started A
> > Wheel of Time Wiki.
>
> And here I thought the Wikicities people were a bit more vigilant
> about making sure that Wikis didn't duplicate each other.  :-)  I
> suppose I could've linked from Wikipedia, but since I started this
> Wiki I've barely been there.  Well, to look things up, but not to
> contribute.
>
> > Obviously we should merge our efforts!  You have more
> > existing content here, but, well, http://wot.wikicities.com is kind of...
> > nice.
>
> I guess it depends on our approaches.  My current approach is, for the
> most part, not to try to write a definitive article on one topic and
> then move to the next one(though I did do that for some of my early
> geographical articles), but to fill in information as it is revealed
> in the series.  And it's also beneficial for me, to be actually
> rereading the books at that level of detail, to keep up with what's
> actually going on.

Well we have Template:Definition for small glossary-like articles, and
{{stub}} for those we know deserve more content.

> So while in principle I know I need help to get
> the whole series done within my lifetime, on a less rational level I
> keep wanting to say "No!  No!  It's mine!"  At the very least I would
> like to have a great deal of input, though I know I'm not an absolute
> dictator or anything like that.

We operate using Wikipedia's principles of consensus (you can find a
link at the top of all our policy proposals) so basically everyone's
say should be equal.

> You may not have seen
> http://concord.wikicities.com/wiki/Talk:The_Wheel_of_Time_%28series%29,
> though, where I discuss the reason why, for instance, I'm working on
> _The Fires of Heaven_ and _The Eye of The World_.  Since I already
> went through the first four books and did chapter summaries, and then
> lost it all, I'm still wondering if I want to go back and do it all
> over again.  That's where having a collaborator or few might be handy.

No, I didn't see that.  But happily I'm currently in the middle of
reading TFoH, and could easily backtrack to chapter 11 and try to pick
up where you left off.  I don't know if I'll be able to manage nearly
as good a job as you have, though, so I'll be hoping for some good
peer review!

> Also, you might've noticed that I'm working on other series as
> well--Harry Potter and A Song of Ice And Fire, mainly.  I could devote
> more time to those, too.

Yes I did notice that..  Among other things, the advantage of having a
dedicated wiki is that it is much easier for us to structure our
categories e.g. http://wot.wikicities.com/wiki/Category_index#People

...Instead of having everything except characters and books jumbled
together on one page like your enormous Wheel of Time category, which
has almost burst past the 200 limit.

It also avoids disambiguation (e.g. your Seeker page), suffixes like
(Wheel of Time), category prefixes like Wheel of Time--, and article
name suffixes like (novel) and (author).  Perhaps _most_ importantly,
you can feel encouraged to litter everything with in-jokes ; )

> I don't feel a particular need to include only information which isn't
> already in Wikipedia...but that may be because I've never spent much
> time at the Wikipedia WOT pages, oddly enough.

We've decided to fork pretty much all of Wikipedia's content except
for the book pages, series page, and RJ's page.  I basically feel that
those are very complete encyclopedic articles that belong on
Wikipedia, and that they can offer much more complete and objective
coverage that we shouldn't pretend to duplicate.  Everything else, we
can probably do better, which is why we've _begun_ forking their
content (see for example our Aes Sedai and Rand articles)

> > I'm looking forward to your comments, especially on our chapter
> > summary layout --Gherald 23:52, 30 Oct 2005 (UTC)
>
> Well, I'm not sure I like the chapter index on every page, especially
> with the first section squished between that and the table of
> contents.  (I'm at 1024x768.)

I don't think I've seen more than a couple lines get squished, but I
can change the summary layout so everything below the chapter title is
also below the table of contents.  And note that the TOC has a hide
button.

Proposals for shrinking the chapter index (a vertical list of just
numbers, perhaps?) are also welcome.

> I've contemplated adding POV to
> chapters, though it wouldn't be as useful as it is in ASOIAF, because
> WOT often has more than one POV per chapter, once you get past book
> three or four.

One could also argue that multi-POVs make noting them even more
useful/important, just more work ;)

When a new POV starts, our current policy proposal is to indicate this with just

*POV: [[character]]

And start a new paragraph.  Same for setting, which can be done on the
same line when they both change.  We may use something like
template:pov eventually, but that can be worked out later.

> I'm not attached to "Mentioned" vs. "Referenced",
> particularly.  The biggest difference I see is the many subdivisions
> of what I have simply as "Terms".  I thought about having more
> categories than "places", but I couldn't decide what they should be,
> and I was afraid of having to subdivide things too much and put things
> in arbitrary categories(though there's always "Misc.") or shoehorn them
> in where they don't fit.  But this is Wiki, and I'm open to other
> approaches there.

Well what do you think of our "items", "concepts" and "events", with
their corresponding subsections? Culture is mostly for songs, books,
prophecies, etc.

> I'm not attached to my character-page format, which is, quite frankly,
> mostly a Wikification of my outline-form Word document that I started
> doing my character lists with.  Still, I like having specific lists of
> chapters appearing in, though I suppose that once they're all filled
> in one could just use "What Links Here".

We're still thinking about how to do this.  Obviously we're trying to
avoid manual lists.  One proposal is to list first appearances on all
character pages, and rely on the search or what links here functions
for later appearances.  I brought up the idea of a custom "Summary:"
namespace for limiting searches to summaries, but I'm not yet
convinced that is the way to go, since it means all our summary
articles have to start with "Summary:".

On a somewhat related note, what do you think of my proposal that we
only link to something once inside the plot/synopsis.  e.g. if Rand
occurs 20 times in a chapter, only the first would be a link?  We have
the ==Characters== list below for quickly finding a link when needed.

 > >  After poking around a bit more, I did notice that one of the things that's
> > different about us is that we are still very cautious about KoD spoilers,
> > which must be preceeded by {{spoiler11}}.

> I try to be up-front about my spoilerificity.  I'm not sure if I'm
> going to continue doing KOD, but I had fun doing the lists for the
> Prologue, at least.

Yeah, that's an impressive list!.  I actually found your site
/through/ your talk page, by searching wikicities for "chapter
summaries" (!), so it took me awhile to notice that up-front
disclaimer.  Fortunately so far I've only been spoilered to know what
Galad did in the Prologue, which of course wasn't very surprising!

I did search google extensively for terms like "wheel of time" with
"wiki", but wasn't able to find anything.  It didn't occur to me to
search wikicities for wheel of time.... I was under the unfortunate
assumption that it was more of an original idea, heh.

-Gherald