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

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Loki" <george.williams.iv@?????.com>
Sent: Sunday, February 04, 2007 3:47 PM
Subject: Re: [SPELLJAMMER] Canon + non-canon - Was: Spelljammer NPCs


> Once Mardi Gras is over I should have the time to do some work on that. I
> work on the ThinkNOLA New Orleans Wiki. (
> http://thinknola.com/wiki/New_Orleans_Wiki )

That wiki looks to be organised well. Sounds like you lot know what you are 
doing.

> 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.
>
> Agreed. If I might suggest the following order:
>
> 1) First priority- The Original Boxed Set.
> 2) The Spacefarers Handbook
> 3) Non adventure supplements (Lost Ships, etc)
> 4)Adventure modules
> 5) Greyspace, Krynnspace, Realmspace
> 6) Other boxed sets
> 7) Dragon / Dungeon articles
> 8) Novels
> 9) Comic Books
> 10) Fan Generated

I'd agree with you on the first two at least. I'm sure that if you asked 10 
different SJ fans, you would get 10 different answers. Sadly I didn't read 
Dragon or Dungeon at the time that the SJ articles appeared in it, so I 
couldn't help out with that unless I went hunting for back issues or that 
compilation CD that people have mentioned. I also don't have the comic 
books - I never knew they had been published until fairly recently.

There will be lots of people who don't have all of the SJ products and it 
might be worth having several to-do lists that, so that people can work on a 
part of the SJ canon that interest them (i.e. if someone wants to write an 
article about the Star Knights, from Krynnspace, before we have finished 
with The Spacefarer's Handbook, then we let them do it). Any to-do list 
should just be a guide for people who want to help out.

Fan generated material is something that needs to be isolated from the canon 
material somehow. You could have a second wiki or tag articles somehow 
(maybe by adding " (fan material)" to anything that isn't canon, but it 
would take so long to get to that point that I don't think it is even worth 
talking about until we get past item 6. I would prefer not to add things 
that fail to come up to Beyond the Moons standard as this will encourage 
people to get fan material up to scratch rather than submit unfinished 
"shovelware" to the wiki.

> (Could we slip some Hackjammer in there as well? Perhaps approach Kenzer 
> and
> Co. with it as additional promotion?)

Hmm. This might have some sort of legal implication as Hackjammer is a live 
product. Kenzer and Co can probably ignore fan websites that they don't know 
about, but if you go knocking at their door they will be forced to check 
with their lawyers and if their lawyers say no then they can't pretend to 
ignore us after that. Hackjammer does get a mention on Beyond the Moons, so 
it qualifies at least to the level of "fan fiction". It might even qualify 
as a full D&D product (although I'm not sure if that makes it any more 
likely to be SJ canon). I think the project would need to sort out "types" 
of canon and label them.

> 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.)
>  100% agreement from me. One of the ideas here is to reach a broader
> audience. A new wiki wont do that, but usisng the  the one everybody
> searches might.

I'll look around wikipedia and see if I can work out how best to identify 
the articles that need cleaning up.

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/