[BlackDove]

I'd say that not having data on BWO, or TBP, or whatever, would be a great disservice. I think that such non-canon information should be placed not among canon information, but in its own category, under user contributions or some such.

If you really wnat that, it can be done as such, when the campaigns are finished and we can link to the download link for "user made campaigns".

Not opinions we choose to make our worlds in. Actual worlds built.

[karajorma]

I'd say that not having data on BWO, or TBP, or whatever, would be a great disservice. I think that such non-canon information should be placed not among canon information, but in its own category, under user contributions or some such. In other areas, for example the theories on Capella, I can imagine a page like this:

Canon info
----------------



Generally accepted assumptions
-------------------------------------------


Shivan BBQ Theory
-------------------------


Sandwich's Theory
-------------------------


etc...

Absolutely not. Even those who have said they don't mind non-canon in the wiki tend to draw the line at it appearing on the same page as the canon explaination. That's exactly the sort of blurring of canon and non-canon that caused this debate in the first place.

Personally I'd rather see the Wiki as a collection of facts.

[Taristin]

No.

Because my theory of events differs from everyone else's, and contradicts others. We should allow users to speculate on their own. Or... we'll end up with things like the official wiki, wth "Inferno is generally accepted as the continuation fo the Freespace Series."

With no clear consensus rom the community, and going on only assumptions, it is hardly mention worthy.


So, again. No.

[Black Wolf]

Or... we'll end up with things like the official wiki, wth "Inferno is generally accepted as the continuation fo the Freespace Series."

In some ways, though, the fact that that was there, was found, then was eliminate demonstrates why the wiki system works. Someone add three pieces of good info and one bad, someone else comes along, gets rid of the bad, adds two of their own good bits, someone else comes along, maybe 2 bad, 1 good, again, the bad gets cleared - internal moderation. It more or less works.

[Sandwich]

Personally I'd rather see the Wiki as a collection of facts.

Alright then - empty out the Wiki! Delete everything!

[WMCoolmon]

Personally I'd rather see the Wiki as a collection of facts.

Alright then - empty out the Wiki! Delete everything!

No, we can keep this page

[Fineus]

Well it looks like the poll is a tie right now.

With no clear agreement, I'd err on the side of caution and keep the Wiki 100% canon to avoid confusion. If you do that though - be sure to make a big song and dance that it is strictly canon so that people don't go wasting time typing up a piece of info on Inferno only to find it's not allowed in.

[TopAce]

What's the guarantee that:

1) If we decide NOT to accept non-canon info, people will consider it and not include fanon (fan canon) information?
1a) If they do write in non-canon stuff, we will notice and remove it
2) People who had beaten the campaign for a dozen times actually FIND something useful. I need to add that those who read the Wiki are such HLPers.
3) Because of the fact that I mentioned in the second sentence above, we cannot be sure that we have readers, not only editors. If we only expand the wiki without knowing that people find and read our articles, our efforts are pointless as long as we did not establish the wiki just to edit and write stuff in our passtime. The problem is that we have not noticed that we have a wiki hosted by the forum we all visit. Those who know about HLP are almost always veterans who had already completed the campaign at least once. How do you find HLP anyway? I found it by complete chance while I was browsing gamespy or fileplanet. I am sure that the link that led me here is now broken because we had already moved.

Further reasons for keeping non-canon articles:
- Writing about fan-made campaigns, their stories and their mods opens up more categories to browse and more articles to read
- People not wanting to suffer through the most-of-the-times badly balanced campaigns actually can read the stories of particular campaigns and get inspiration for their own campaigns
- Unlike in Star Wars, the FreeSpace universe is only restricted to games, two games. We deplete from canon info really fast. What do we add after that?
- The more articles we have the more complete the wiki looks like. We have more articles refering to each other, we can spend more time on the Wiki.
- More users would be able to contribute, supposing they know some fan-made campaigns better than the Main FS campaign.
- We could include downloads for our campaigns, mods, textures or for the SCP (which is completely non-canon). Note: We need to be able to upload files directly to the wiki if we don't want to keep all the files separated, opening up the possibility that after half a year, all the links in the wiki get obsolete because servers go down.
- There are non-canon articles already, separated with the non-canon template. I have not heard if these articles have caused any misunderstanding or confusion, just because of its nature of being non canon. Readers (if the wiki has any) are warned at the beginning of the article. Read at own risk. It's like indicated spoilers. If you are not mature enough and it causes confusion even though the article clearly states what you can find there is not canon, that is your problem.

[WMCoolmon]

Well it looks like the poll is a tie right now.

With no clear agreement, I'd err on the side of caution and keep the Wiki 100% canon to avoid confusion. If you do that though - be sure to make a big song and dance that it is strictly canon so that people don't go wasting time typing up a piece of info on Inferno only to find it's not allowed in.

Actually, the current wiki policy is to include non-canon information. Assuming this poll closes with a 'No', we'll have to remove a fair amount of information. User campaigns/mods, missions, possibly the mission design pages since those are also based on opinion, the "Freespace Lingo" pages, the "Freespace Community" page, and the Bittorrent page (If Inferno isn't relative to Freespace, I don't see how Bittorrent can be). Also the "FSSCP Introduction", since that's just my opinion on things.

I dunno, I wish I could really convey how stupid I think this intolerance of other people's work is, especially since it seems at best based on the fear that *someone*, *somewhere*, might *somehow* miss the non-canon notice, and at worst based on people wanting to keep things out of the wiki because they simply don't agree with other people. I thought the wiki was about presenting the state of things in Freespace and the Community, but it looks like there's a lot of question about this.

No.

Because my theory of events differs from everyone else's, and contradicts others. We should allow users to speculate on their own. Or... we'll end up with things like the official wiki, wth "Inferno is generally accepted as the continuation fo the Freespace Series."

With no clear consensus rom the community, and going on only assumptions, it is hardly mention worthy.


So, again. No.

So what? Then someone will edit the article so that it's correct.

Good lord, if we'd had this kind of thinking when we started the SCP, we wouldn't have a SCP. We'd have sat around and just continually worried about what someone *might* do with CVS, ignoring the fact that you can always just revert the changes.

[TopAce]

So, Coolmon. You'd remove all the SCP and user-made campaigns?

[WMCoolmon]

No, of course not. I don't see how that helps anybody, and I think it really ruins the point of a community wiki, which is why I'm ranting about it being stupid.

But if we're going to remove all non-canon stuff, that's got to go. The same reasons apply to those that apply to any other things. Hell, technically the entire SCP section has to go. I haven't heard anyone complain about it, and I think it's a really useful resource, and it's factually accurate, but it is non-canon. That's why I think this entire situation is so damn ludicrous.

[TopAce]

That's why we should have non-canon things in the Wiki. Just imagine how much data MUST remain unmentioned with this policy.

[WMCoolmon]

Yep...

[CP5670]

Well, the poll is dead even right now...

[TopAce]

Dead? [Mace Windu voice]Not yet.[/Mace Windu voice]

What majority is needed to reach a final decision? Simple one, or 2/3 one?

[BlackDove]

Simple one of course. We don't have an already set decision which we're trying to avert.

The mere fact that it's up there right now is because it was more or less of a test. If I wanted to test deleting it, it'd be very valid as well, just wouldn't have a set reason to do it.

[aldo_14]

No, of course not. I don't see how that helps anybody, and I think it really ruins the point of a community wiki, which is why I'm ranting about it being stupid.

But if we're going to remove all non-canon stuff, that's got to go. The same reasons apply to those that apply to any other things. Hell, technically the entire SCP section has to go. I haven't heard anyone complain about it, and I think it's a really useful resource, and it's factually accurate, but it is non-canon. That's why I think this entire situation is so damn ludicrous.

Oh, please - don't make such a ludicirous strawman.  The SCP is a factual documentation of the SCP features; we're talking about canonical articles referring to the Freespace universe and setting, not technical or descriptive documents.  Even in the issue of campaigns, the wiki pages just act as descriptors of the campaign setting and storyline, making it very clear (by context) that and storyline or evidenciary information is to be considered as within the campaign setting.  Not that I've seen any of that in the (few) wiki entries there are.

I'm curious - what do you peeps regard the wiki for?  I always regarded it as a source of reliable information of the story and setting, and for information upon the game as a piece of software - not as a place for posting speculative fiction.  I thought the HLP forums were for the latter; and my fear is that by allowing the likes of the SM (which isn't AFAIK even connected to any campaign, it's just an abstract statement the same as eg. Singhs stories about Bosch), means we give carte blanche to post any old rubbish so long as it has a big old tag at the top.

@TopAce; dead even.  He just means it was equal; the 'dead' part is to emphasise the closeness of that, I'm not sure of the exact etymology of the phrase, but it (dead even) just means they are exactly equal in every way.

[Goober5000]

With no clear agreement, I'd err on the side of caution and keep the Wiki 100% canon to avoid confusion.

And I would say that we should err on the side of not excluding anything.  It is a wiki, after all.

I mentioned this in the other thread, but you guys should really consider the node inconsistency pages as an example of why including non-canon information is helpful.  Mad Bomber was able to put together a number of quite interesting technical documents related to his upcoming campaign partly because of the node inconsistency reference.  If the reference wasn't there, he would have had to do his own research, and it's possible he might have missed a few nodes.

If someone wants to make a campaign or story based on a certain nonfiction paradigm, the reference should be there to ensure accuracy.  Imagine if someone wanted to make an Inferno campaign or write a fanfic on the Shivan Manifesto.  Without an easy reference point, it would be much harder to make it true to the source material.

[BlackDove]

Yes, but considering that such atrocities should never take place, all the better for them not to be there.

[WMCoolmon]

Oh, please - don't make such a ludicirous strawman.  The SCP is a factual documentation of the SCP features; we're talking about canonical articles referring to the Freespace universe and setting, not technical or descriptive documents.  Even in the issue of campaigns, the wiki pages just act as descriptors of the campaign setting and storyline, making it very clear (by context) that and storyline or evidenciary information is to be considered as within the campaign setting.  Not that I've seen any of that in the (few) wiki entries there are.

I'm curious - what do you peeps regard the wiki for?  I always regarded it as a source of reliable information of the story and setting, and for information upon the game as a piece of software - not as a place for posting speculative fiction.  I thought the HLP forums were for the latter; and my fear is that by allowing the likes of the SM (which isn't AFAIK even connected to any campaign, it's just an abstract statement the same as eg. Singhs stories about Bosch), means we give carte blanche to post any old rubbish so long as it has a big old tag at the top.

Well, I asked if there were any inaccuracies in the page, and all I heard was BD repeatedly griping that we needed a notation that the SM is trash for it to be accurate (Which I've skimmed over as a blatantly subjective opinion), and someone mentioned that 'controversial' was too light a word.

And the reason the article is up right now is because it didn't seem like people were understanding what I was getting at, and was painting adding the Manifesto in the wiki as tantamount to telling everyone that it was canon. I figured that the easiest way to clear it up was to make what I thought the Manifesto article should be, and I did. I didn't do it to test anything - I was sick of arguing a point when it had become clear that the other side was misinterpreting what I was saying and making blatant assumptions about my opinions, whether intentionally or unintentionally.

I suppose when it comes down to it, I see the FS Wiki as a source for factual information on topics relevant to the Freespace community. Obviously we've never taken a vote besides this one - but it seems like that when the wiki was established, that was the general idea, as most of the talk was about the SCP. We've also got stuff like the FS lingo in there, which makes sense to me. Overall, I suppose I see the FS wiki much the same as I do the wikipedia - it's someplace to look something up if I don't understand what it means. Obviously it should be geared towards newbies, since most of the vets will know of the stuff already. Since both forum searches are down for an indefinite period of time, IMHO this is just more motivation to add topics to the wiki.