That's either a misinterpretation or a deceptive strawman. At no time did I tell him to get rid of the entire list; in fact I commended him for it. The issue I have is with the order of campaigns.
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This is not about how many columns (voice acting, number of missions, etc.) to include or not include. This is about overall format: sections, organization, and ordering. Again, you're misconstruing my objection to one aspect of his contribution to apply to his entire contribution.
Fair 'nuff; I must have misunderstood you then.
The wiki has regular users, moderators, and admins, just like the forum. It's not a free-for-all. It's the responsibility and duty of the moderators to step in when necessary. I don't want the FS Wiki to turn into the tediously idiotic bureaucracy that Wikipedia is prone to.
It's funny you should say that, because your comment actually reminds me more of the way that Wikipedia is done. I would be concerned with the moderators if I was writing to wikipedia, because there's a fair number of established guidelines that they use to prune articles. If I were writing an article, I'd be concerned with some moderator randomly jumping in, disagreeing with something he didn't understand, and then popping back out, and I'd have to go back and defend my change in order to get things my way, needlessly costing me time, etc. From what little I've seen, people are awfully hostile on wikipedia to those they consider to be trying to use it for popularity or humor.
It's not really a pleasant environment to write for, and in large part I think it stems from the division of the 'serious' wiki moderators, and the 'ignorant' wiki folk.
And as for moderation, again you're trying to shoehorn the situation into your own interpretation. Moderation is not all-or-nothing pass/fail on every single page. It's guidance, and sometimes it's firm correction. Although I have the authority to take a heavy-handed approach to the wiki moderation (and to forum moderation) for the most part I avoid doing so. But I have stepped in to make corrections in the past, and I will do so again in the future.
Furthermore, a decision executed quickly does not imply a decision made hastily. This is not a snap decision; its a consistent application of the principles I've adhered to for as long as we've had the wiki (see the core principles below).
That's actually what I have a problem with. "Guidance" and "firm correction" are the sort of things you'd expect to hear from two parents discussing a child, the terms imply that the individual using them does have superior wisdom to offer the other. They also have a very one-directional meaning. And while I'm not going to argue that I have a better understanding of the state of the wiki than, say, Wanderer, I do think that my opinion and everyone else's is perfectly legit input for this sort of page. In fact, I think that the less knowledgeable the better, since then people are more likely to spot the things that we've left out without even meaning to.
The wiki is supposed to enlighten the ignorant, so we need more ignorant people around.
To a certain point, I can understand where you're coming from. Moderators do have to assume that the decisions they're making are correct or they wouldn't do much moderating. I don't think this situation is the same as somebody trying to mix their own fanon stuff from their campaign into the ship descriptions or biography pages, or at the very least it's a lot more gray than that.
There are a set of core principles that apply to the FS Wiki, just like they would apply to any similar project.
1) The wiki is first and foremost a reference, so it must allow users to find what they need without jumping through hoops or getting confused.
2) The wiki is not a sandbox for speculation. To a certain extent, reasonable inference is allowed, but it should not conflict with principle #1.
3) The wiki prioritizes canon information over non-canon information.
The thing that strikes me about these principles is that they're fairly limited. I can see these being good for a "Lucifer" description page. With (3), the relevant data from Freespace 2 is prioritized and put front and center. With (2), some comment is made that the fact that AAAf beams penetrate shields and the Colossus has a good number of them suggests that the GTVA expected the Lucifer shields to be vulnerable to beam bombardment. With (1), everything is put neatly.
That doesn't work so well for this page. (1) immediately overrides (3), since the point of the page is to provide information on non-canon campaigns. The page is filled with (2), regardless of what you do, and most of the information is literal facts rather than canon.
In general, for any page which provides information on something other than fiction, the guidelines fail to provide functional guidance. I'd convert them to something like:
1) The page communicates the information on it in such a way that the majority of readers will interpret it correctly
2) The page contains only true statements. If nonverifiable statements are relevant (eg postulating, beliefs) then they are stated as being such and include whatever information is believed to support them, to the extent reasonable.
3) The page provides the information in such a way that is most relevant to the expectations of how it will be used.
Yes really. They are incompatible. The five canon FreeSpace eras take place in the FreeSpace continuity. Every other campaign takes place in its own continuity (or a continuity it shares with a handful of others) and all those individual continuities overlap, intersect, and conflict.
That's one way of looking at it, but it's not a very good one. All of the campaigns based on Freespace or Freespace 2 and set in that universe do acknowledge those events as being canon to their own universe. In a way, if this were coding, the Freespace universe would be the base class, with all of the other continuities extending it. Even though each of the campaigns may have things happen in their own continuity that doesn't happen in any other campaign, they all use the events of Freespace as a landmark to build their own storylines off of.
Divorcing them from the Freespace 2 timeline makes them confusing and it also implies that they are isolated and happen separately from all other events. In actual fact, you may have the events of Freespace 2 occuring between two Inferno-continuity campaigns.
You said it yourself: the order is speculative. It's not objective. The only possible objective ordering is alphabetical. Ordering the campaigns alphabetically according to era loses no information, because "ordering" them chronologically had no information to begin with.
The placement of many campaigns in the timeline is outlined by many of them. Derelict, IIRC, takes place two years after the Capella supernova. That means it must come after a campaign which starts one year after the Capella supernova. If another campaign claims it takes place two years after the Capella supernova and isn't part of the Derelict timeline, then you've got a conflict, and you have to use your best judgment as to which should come first in the list. That doesn't mean it's speculative bull**** like you keep on suggesting. Your reasons can be objective and they can be correct. If a campaign happens in another corner of the galaxy from Derelict, takes place over the course of a week, and explicitly states there has been no Shivan contact since the Capella supernova, then it should obviously go before Derelict.
Now you can call that subjective speculation if you like, but I believe that most people would agree with that decision.
Mathematically, a well-founded total ordering does not exist. Awakenings comes after Silent Threat according to date, but before Silent Threat according to plot and technology. It makes no sense to put one before the other. There is no order that can be applied to every campaign without bias save alphabetical order.
Alphabetical order is biased.
No, seriously. There's no logical reason for alphabetical order. There is no mathematical relationship between A to Z. For that matter, why should we use alphabetical order? And what happens if a campaign has "The"? What if it starts with a number? Blockbuster, I think, orders its movies by the letter that the number begins with in the English language. But most internet sources do it by number. And it's all up in the air as to whether you count "The", "An", or anything else like that at the start of a title.
For that matter, the information provided on the page is biased. What makes the number of missions so important? What about the development time - or some kind of rating? What about the number of new mods? Why should the description get all that base, that's
totally biased! It's probably written by the guy who made the campaign, or somebody who played it and doesn't have a clue about what the author intended! What if somebody reads the description and decides to play another campaign just because it wasn't written as well as it could have been? How is it fair to that person who spent all their time on that campaign?
There's no way you're going to eliminate bias from the page, and the idea that just because one campaign comes before the other is silly when you're dealing with a list of 106 items. For the most part, I'd imagine that what will happen is that some campaign maker will disagree with their campaign being placed someplace and move it somewhere else. Now there's a miniscule chance that two people with adjacent spots will keep on doing this, but I'd imagine that someone will notice and eventually it will resolve. For the most part people will look at the list and figured that a campaign goes in a certain spot.
Also, your choice of categories is biased. Silent Threat is just as canon as Freespace 1 and Freespace 2, yet it doesn't get a category of its own.
There is one fundamental difference here, and that is that TV episodes all take place in a single continuity. Not several. Each TV episode is designed to come after the one before, and events in one episode are intended to be consistent with all the events that happened before it. In contrast, FreeSpace campaigns are all developed independently, and all take place in different continuities. They remain compatible with the canon FreeSpace universe but they make no attempt to be compatible with each other.
Exactly - they remain compatible with the Freespace universe. My point wasn't that FS2 campaigns are written like TV shows and are all canon with regard to each other. My point was that in a list of interconnected fictional stories, people expect things to be ordered in chronological rather than alphabetical order. FS2 campaigns are in most cases only connected with the base campaign, but in many cases you can derive a sensible place with regards to other campaigns.
We're not making this wiki to be mathematically correct. We're making this wiki to be read by people.
And if each campaign's position is an approximation and can be altered, then the page suffers death by a thousand bureaucratic edits, everyone putting the campaign where he wants it to go. Witness what happened to BlueFlames's campaign Artifice, as described on the Talk page.
That's a pretty poor example:
Okay, I've moved Artifice to the Post-Capella section of the list at least twice now, and I'm wondering why it keeps getting moved back to the Capella era.... It takes place in late 2369, two full years after the destruction of Capella, and the campaign is most certainly not an anti-shivan mop-up operation. -- BlueFlames 14:15, 13 August 2008 (CDT)
Probably my mistake when I put back a chronological order for Capella / Post Capella. The first time it was intentional (wanted to group the campaign that are "together", this time wasn't. -- Narval
Problem was solved and fixed with two messages, and it turned out to be more related to grouping campaigns together by continuity than it was because of grouping them by chronological order. Furthermore, even with the campaigns organized in alphabetical order, it still would've been a problem because the "Capella" and "Post Capella" categories are not exclusive to the chronological order idea.
