Re: Canon + non-canon - Was: Spelljammer NPCs

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Asa Benjamin Winkler" <abwinkler@???????????????.com>
Sent: Tuesday, January 30, 2007 3:50 AM
Subject: Re: [SPELLJAMMER] Spelljammer NPCs


> On Jan 29, 2007, at 10:42 PM, David Shepheard wrote:
>
>> I really think that a SJ wiki could be helpful, because someone  like you 
>> could create a template and upload a to do list and  everyone could work 
>> on whatever they wanted to (that way someone  could do a chapter of one 
>> of the Cloakmaster Novels if they didn't  have time to finish the whole 
>> thing).
>
> Here's an ancillary idea - a wiki with separate categories for canon 
> material and for user-contributed material.  That way there could be, 
> e.g., categories for "Magic items which appear in TSR products" and 
> "Contributed magic items ".  The former to serve as the master  reference 
> which you were describing, and the latter for an easy way  to browse for 
> flavor to add to one's SJ campaign.

I'm not sure that would work for two reasons.

Firstly non-canon material is sometimes connected to official material, so 
canon articles could be "polluted" with non-canon material if cross 
references were included in them. The only workaround I can think of would 
be to create a second article that dealt with fan-material for canon 
subjects. For example: there could be a Rock of Bral article that listed all 
the canon material related to this location and another Rock of Bral 
(non-canon) article that included fan material.

Secondly, Paul was right when he said that listing the canon material would 
be a major job. If we encouraged people to add their own fan material then 
the canon material would be neglected. Canon material is a finite thing - 
although it would take a long time to sift through there would be a point 
when the project would be finished. Non-canon material is something that 
could grow and grow. We would never have a wiki like that finished. The only 
way that we could control the size of a non-canon project (and avoid 
including two dozen different ideas that all conflicted with each other) 
would be to apply some sort of rule to decide what got included. If we only 
included things that were on Beyond the Moons then the project would be 
slightly more manageable.

I think that the *only* way to do this would be to use Adam's idea of doing 
things in chunks. We would need to find a way to prioritise the work that 
means that meaningful information gets onto the wiki at a pace that works 
for amateurs. We would need someone (hopefully someone on the SJ Council) to 
choose what gets first and stick to working specifically on that sort of 
information until it was finished. And I would definitely say that non-canon 
stuff should go to the end of the queue.

So *if* we had a wiki and *if* we followed Paul's idea of compiling a list 
of SJ NPCs then we could create a wiki that was initially a cross-index of 
SJ NPCs. It would take a long time to do, but if we had a to-do list and 
people stuck to the list things would slowly move on until each item could 
be completed.

However, I see a bigger problem here - there are not many SJ fans that know 
how to edit a wiki. When I went to wikipedia's article for "Spelljammer" I 
was appalled at the number of inaccuracies that it *used* to have. I managed 
to get a lot of that material corrected or removed, and a bunch of 
wikipedians came along and tidied up things that I wrote. (You should see 
the amount of flak I got on my user page for not following wikipedia editing 
styles - actually it was very useful advice - there is no Wikipedia user 
manual [just a list of random articles that would take weeks to search 
through] and you kind of have to learn by your own mistakes.) I still see 
major issues with Wikipedia's articles (or lack of articles) on Spelljammer 
and I believe that it would be more useful to get the SJ articles up to the 
same standard as something like the Dragonlance articles. Sorting out 
Wikipedia itself (rather than creating a new wiki) would help us spread 
knowledge of SJ to a bigger audience. (Plus we could work out how to edit 
articles from looking at how things are done on Wikipedia.)

David "Big Mac" Shepheard
Virtual Eclipse Role Playing Club
http://uk.groups.yahoo.com/group/virtualeclipselrp/links/d20_system_001071937434/Spelljammer_001071430476
http://www32.brinkster.com/virtualeclipse/