Discussion

A page for discussion of content, standards, etc.

Suggestions for new editors/contributors/whatever the current correct term is

  • I strongly suggest that everyone wiki'ing here check out the links on the left-hand side of the page, under PmWiki, and particularly the ones titled "Basic Editing" and "Documentation Index." There's lots of useful information in there about how to make pages look the way you want them to. The FAQ and Philosophy pages might be worth your while also, but at least the "Basic Editing" page is a must-... well, not a must-read, exactly, but a must-look-at, so you can get a general idea of what can be done and how. There's a lot more available than what's in the little buttons at the top! --Sturgeons 20070727
  • Also, PLEASE sign comments in the discussion pages! (And, yes, do by all means use them; they're a great way to sort out what we need to do next.) I mean, yes, one can figure it out by looking at the history page, but it's in the spirit of the thing to make it easy on each other. --Sturgeons 20070727
    • Re the "current correct term", I've preferred to use "contributors" because to me "editors" sounded a bit gatekeeperish, demanding of expertise and potentially offputting to people who might like to, well, contribute. But words mean different things to different people of course, so if anyone thinks another term would give a better impression of what we're doing, please do pitch in -- Mo 20070803
  • Hey, Mo (or anyone): This probably isn't the right spot for this, but: I don't seem to be able to access any of the discussion pages that haven't already been created. Know what I mean? For example, I wanted to post something under the "Discuss" tab for The Book of the Short Sun, but I couldn't, because (I suspect) no-one's written anything there yet. Advice? -- Matt 20081002
    • Matt, any page can be created by making a link to it by name somewhere. I just added a Comments.WolfeWiki-Discuss-TheBookOfTheShortSun discussion page for you. DaveTallman 20081002
      • Also, if you click on a Discuss tab and see the "The page 'blah-Discuss-etc' doesn't exist" message, you can just click on the Edit tab there to create it -- Mo October 05, 2008, at 03:33 PM

Current suggestions for discussion

A "Things You Might Have Missed" Section?

  • I was wondering if we should have such a section -- for things that are not explicitly stated in the text, but do not relate directly to analysis of the story. E.g. That Greene gives a lousy 10% tip to the cab driver who complains about never getting good tips in "There Are Doors." -- Xenagie August 28, 2009, at 10:06 PM
    • That sounds like a great idea -- Mo August 29, 2009, at 07:03 PM

Character List?

  • Since having articles on the books themselves might be too given to spoilers, what about having a (spoiler-heavy) characters section? I think that might make discussing and understanding Wolfe's works a bit easier than going at it title by title. Just a thought.... -- Travtaylor 20090116
    • That sounds good to me -- Mo January 17, 2009, at 01:26 PM
    • Do you mean one big character section for all characters together, or would they be broken up by book? I can see doing this for a series like UotNS where so many characters carry over, but not for UotNS plus Wizard Knight plus An Evil Guest. -- DaveTallman January 18, 2009, at 05:23 AM

Interpretation Question/Suggestion

  • How do we want to handle interpretations of Lupine texts? My own preference, which is not very strong and I'm very open to alternatives, is something like this...
    • When the main page is initialized, an "Interpretation" section is included.
    • If the interpretations exceed a certain size (1K words?), or if there are complex and competing theories, create a linked "Interpretations of Text" page.
    • For particularly complex situations, like the many competing attempts to understand what's going on in The Book of the Short Sun, it may be necessary to create special pages for the main theories (i.e., a page for the "the Trees are the Neighbors" theory).
      • Submitted by Sturgeons, 20070703
        • That sounds fine to me as a practice to work by for the time being at least -- Mo 20070704

Spoilage

  • Back to the root here. It occurred to me as I was plotzing around with the "Peace" page just now that the elephant in the room is spoilers. It's almost impossible to "interpret" without spoliation. I put a question on the discussion page there but it really needs up front discussion, so I'm asking people to look at the question, then come back here and discuss...
  • A possible solution for the spoiler question: digging in the PmWiki cookbook, I found this way of including a "show/hide" button or link. If I understand it correctly (and I'm not good with this sort of thing) it would involve
  1. Adding a ready-made PHP script into the configuration file for the wiki
  2. Defining areas with spoilers in them as divisions (or divs or something?)
  3. Putting a directive into the page that references the PHP script and points to the div.
  • This may turn out to be more work than it's worth, but maybe one or two of y'all who understand this whole PHP thing can give it a look and see if it's worth trying.--Sturgeons 20070813
    • Can certainly give it a go, anyone else any thoughts? -- Mo 20070815
      • If it's easy for the contributors to handle, it'd certainly be worth it -- Stone Ox 20070815
  • OK, I've added this facility now. You can (at the moment, although this can be changed) do it either with a button or with a link. Examples below, click 'em to see!

I am a spoiler, hidden by default

Show

I am also a spoiler, hidden by default

It might be good to have some standard formatting of the spoiler section (eg. it's always on a grey background, or something). See the link Sturgeons gives above for more documentation on usage. -- Mo 20070816

  • Great job! Aside from the front pages of stories, are there any other places where we need to hide spoilers? Also, it looks to me as if we give all the spoiler divisions the same name, we can hide and show all the spoilers on one page with the click of the same button. Do we want to do this, or do we want individual buttons for each spoiler, or maybe one button for minor spoilers and another for major spoilers? -- Stone Ox 20070816
    • I wouldn't expect the "same name" trick to work -- I would expect only the first one to be shown. But I haven't tested it... -- Mo 20070816
    • So let's test it... If it's true then the second button should hide/reveal this text:

Does it?

But, it appears that it does not -- it just stays hidden. Unless I coded it wrong, of course.. --Sturgeons 20070816
  • I guess I should have tested it before proposing it, then. Sorry. -- Stone Ox 20070816

Proposal: Structure for story pages

  • This might be too simple for novels (let alone novel series), but I've worked up a proposed structural template for pages for short stories, and would like to elicit some discussion for how to improve it, or even some just-going-ahead-and-improving-it, in the true wikian spirit. I'm putting it here: Story Template -- Sturgeons 20070706
    • That looks great -- Mo 20070707
    • ''Now that I've tried (in a small way) to start putting a little flesh on the bones you guys have put in place, I have an issue with the format. It seems to me that perhaps "Comments" could be switched to "Comments/Synopsis/Description" or something less cumbersome even better, and this should be the first bullet point logically. Also I'm hard-pressed to think that there will be much demand for "Unanswered Questions," since that seems more like a place for editorial suggestions than actual content. After all, from a content point of view that would more accurately be "Unanswerable Questions," a concept I don't like, since as far as I'm concerned one can always put out an interpretation. I didn't want to just change this since it seemed worth discussing, as perhaps you can say what you envisioned in that space Dan'l. -- alanarc 20070808
      • I'm happy to support switch to "Comments/Synopsis/Description", and don't have an opinion as to whether it should be first or not (I see good arguments either way). As for Unanswered Questions, I was taking this to mean not so much "unanswerable questions" as "things pending comment / interpretation" -- ie. not definitively unanswered, just not yet covered. But that may be different to what Sturgeons meant -- Mo 20070809
      • Alan, I'm totally good with the changes re: the Comments section -- perhaps "Synopsis and Discussion" would serve? Let's find some consensus and I'll make the change.
        As regards the "Unanswered Questions" section, take a look at the page for Unrequited Love for a sense of what I was after: things left hanging in the story, that may or may not be answerable by clever manipulation of the provided information. So it's sort of a space between what you're saying and what Mo's saying: questions that have not yet been answered and may or may not be answerable. A question which is definitively unanswerable would not belong there but in the discussion area (though there might be an interesting second-order question regarding why GW chooses to make certain questions explicitly unanswerable). --Sturgeons 20070809
      • All right Dan'l, I see what you're after with the "Unanswered Questions," even though in Unrequited Love you have it as "Unresolved Questions," which does seem a bit better. I personally think it's a bit like those "Questions to Ponder" section in English Lit books, but whatever works for you. I hate my suggestion of "Comments/Synopsis/Description" and "Synopsis and Discussion" is certainly better, but it still doesn't feel right. Closer would be "Factual Analysis," and although that doesn't do it quite either, it's the best I've thought of. BTW, I hate this dating system for our comments, but again that could just be me. --Alanarc 20070809
        • Dating comments is pretty standard in wikiland -- helps people coming along later determine the sequence of events (and so not accidentally restart something that was hashed out long ago; on purpose is another matter...) At least we're not doing GMT timestamping, the way Wikipedia does! For the same reason it's common (but not required) to indent one more than the comment you're replying to.
          For "Factual Analysis," maybe just "Analysis?" "Anatomy"? I can't think of a single word that covers the whole ground -- which is why I had "synopsis" separately to begin with. But I'll change "Unanswered" to "Unresolved," definitely what I really had in mind. --Sturgeons 20070809
    • Adding a template for novels. Novel Template -- Sturgeons 20070721

Proposal: WikiTrails

  • In the process of "eating my own dog food" and looking again at some of the left-hand links, I noticed something called "WikiTrails," and think they might be of some use in organizing this Wiki. (It's on the FAQ page.) Some trails that might be worth creating:
    Contents of a collection
    Books in a series
    Characters in a novel/series/story
    etc.
  • What do all y'all think about this? If there's no objection to the idea I'll set up one for the stories in TIoDD&OS&OS, since Matt's so helpfully instantiated pages for these stories. --Sturgeons 20070727
    • I'm all in favour of this -- Mo 20070803
  • Okay, let's start with a master trail index page linking to all other trail index pages. I'm putting it here to get things started.
  • LATER: I've implemented it, and learned as I went. The WikiTrail for TIoDD&OS&OS looks pretty decent but it's actuall a kloodge.

    The "ideal" in some sense would be to use the actual collection home page as the index page for the WikiTrail, but that would involve putting some restrictions on what people could do on that homepage -- mainly, the only "paragraphs" that could begin with links, anywhere on the page, would have to be the stories.

    If people want to accept that limit, I can pretty easily rebuild the trail working that way. It would save us creating these lame single-purpose index pages like what I created for this one, but would, as I say, put some limits on creative editing.

--Sturgeons 20070804

  • I would be happy with such a restriction, it should be easy enough to operate around that, provided there's a clear warnign about it on the page itself -- although I do also think it would be good for all wikitrails, even those which are also collection home pages, to be within a separate "WikiTrails" group, for ease of identification / administration -- Mo 20070806

Proposal: Cave Canem

I wrote to Robert Borski a little while ago asking if he would allow the contents of his Cave Canem website to be added to this wiki. He's replied that this would be fine provided certain conditions are met:

  • original material to be non-editable except by him;
  • people can add content to the Concordance, and maybe some of the Essay section (but he will not moderate);
  • he can withdraw it whenever he might want;

which seem pretty reasonable to me. (And he wished us luck with the wiki in general.) If people generally think this would be a good thing, I'll go ahead with wikifying the material (which I already have) and making it comply with these conditions. I think it would be best to initially do so in a separate wiki area unlinked from what we have at the moment, so the structure, restrictions etc can be approved by him (should he wish to) before sending it live. If people have any comments, thoughts, animadversions or whatever, please fire away! -- Mo 20070810

  • Sounds excellent! This material will add hugely to the wiki, even if it's semi-external.--Sturgeons 20070810
    • Great, I'll push on with it shortly -- Mo 20070815
  • OK, it wasn't exactly "shortly", but I've now started on this. The idea is that I'm uploading the existing pages as is, and they (at Robert Borski's request) can't be edited by WolfeWiki contributors -- but each has its own discussion page, on which the material can be critiqued / added to / whatever. If someone can test this for me, I'd be grateful -- you should be able to edit the discussion page as normal, but if you try and edit the main page, it should ask you for a username / password and refuse to accept your normal ones.
    I've added this under Web Resources rather than under 5HoC, but I'm not sure that's right -- any thoughts? -- Mo 20080110
    • Re: editing, I believe this is working as desired; I can edit the discussion page but not the main page. Putting it under Web Resources is fine, but I do think there should also be a prominent link somewhere inside 5HoC. -- Matt 20080112

Implemented suggestions

  • Add discussion page -- done by Mo 20070629
  • Remove individual stories from the main contents page -- instead just link to collection page -- done by Mo 20070702
  • Make look more like Wikipedia -- done by Mo 20070704
  • Removed redundant double-titling of pages by using the :title directive -- done by Sturgeons 20070711
  • Set up automatic discussion page for each page
    • Apparently there's a "cookbook" for this -- I don't know if it's what we want but if people want to give it a look, it's at: http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/DiscussionTab -- Sturgeons 20070705
      • I've had a go at getting that particular cookbook recipe to work, but without any joy so far -- the documentation is kind of sketchy. But if I get the time to open up the bonnet and tinker a bit I would expect to be able to get it working -- Mo 20070707
      • woohoo! -- I managed to get this working, albeit by rewriting half of it from scratch. Each page should now have a "Discuss" tab. If you click on this it takes you to that page's dedicated discussion page. This discussion page, instead of the "Discuss" tab, has a "Back to article" tab, which takes you bak to the original page. Please do some testing around this! -- Mo 20070707
  • Added section to contents page for "articles" -- meaning articles within the WolfeWiki about various topics that aren't specific to a particular Wolfe book or story: recurring thematics, onomastics as a concept (as opposed to the names of specific characters), Lupine biography, etc. For the moment this is basically a place to store wishlists. -- Sturgeons 20070717
  • Proposal: Personal pages - No, I don't want to start making personal Webpages for contributors -- but -- I note that a username links (if done properly, which I haven't figured out yet, but let that be) to a "profile" page which is open-editable. I suggest we start using these. Why? Because I like the work a couple of other people have been doing lately and I want to send them a bit of wuffie and encourage the good work. -- Sturgeons 20070711
    • Sounds good suggestion. They're automatically generated in a special directory "Profiles", so eg. yours is Profiles.Sturgeons -- Mo 20070712

Pending / rejected suggestions

  • Would people like to see pages editable by section, like in Wikipedia? -- suggested by Mo 20070704
    • That might be a nice add in the future, when pages start getting large -- right now it would be a low priority item I think (unless it's easier to set up now than later) -- Sturgeons 20070705
  • Would people like to see pages having "Categories:" boxes, and corresponding Categories pages (automatically generated), like in WIkipedia? -- suggested by Mo 20070704
    • This looks a bit more complicated than we need. This is important for a broad-spectrum wiki like the 'pedia but I don't see us developing enough categories that they can't fit on the contents page, or maybe one layer down. -- Sturgeons 20070705

Dividing Lexicon Page

Hello-- Thought it might be a good idea to reformat the lexicon so that each word linked to its own page. The individual pages could have the definition as well as miscellanea. Would you mind if I went ahead and did that and migrated the existing content over to the new pages? Carnifex42 April 02, 2011, at 03:36 PM

  • I guess it's a question of weighing the convenience of being able to see everything on one page vs. the awkwardness of some of the entries being rather long. I could see it being a bit tiresome if one had to constantly click back and forth to read a bunch of short entries... what would you think about initially only doing this for those entries that are lengthy? -- or on the main page, keeping a one-line explanation plus "click here for more detail" going to a separate page with the full entry? I am pretty open-minded about it though, so happy to trust your judgement if you feel it strongly. -- Mo April 05, 2011, at 03:28 PM
    • I'd probably vote for keeping it all on one page (more convenient that way), but I don't feel strongly about it either. -- DarthEd April 06, 2011, at 02:38 AM
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