Hard Light Productions Forums
Community Projects => The FreeSpace Wiki Project => Topic started by: Goober5000 on August 12, 2008, 09:45:02 pm
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WTF, mate. :wtf: While the merging of the three separate pages is good, screwing with the order is not. Within each section, each campaign must be in alphabetical order. Chronological order is of purely fan interest and is hopelessly dependent on subjective interpretation. It makes no sense anyway, since most of the campaigns take place within their own continuities.
The only grouping that should be permitted is the macroscopic grouping by approximate time period (pre-Great War, Great War, Reconstruction, Capella, post-Capella). If you want to put the campaigns in your own schizophrenic fan-chronological order, do it on a separate page.
Re-alphabetize each of the sections or I shall be forced to take punitive admin-type measures.
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Re-alphabetize each of the sections or I shall be forced to take punitive admin-type measures.
WTF, mate. :wtf:
This guy's gone out of his way to make one hell of a good campaign list, and you want to screw him over because he didn't put them in alphabetical order?
(don't hurt me please)
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WTF, mate. :wtf: While the merging of the three separate pages is good, screwing with the order is not. Within each section, each campaign must be in alphabetical order. Chronological order is of purely fan interest and is hopelessly dependent on subjective interpretation. It makes no sense anyway, since most of the campaigns take place within their own continuities.
The only grouping that should be permitted is the macroscopic grouping by approximate time period (pre-Great War, Great War, Reconstruction, Capella, post-Capella). If you want to put the campaigns in your own schizophrenic fan-chronological order, do it on a separate page.
Re-alphabetize each of the sections or I shall be forced to take punitive admin-type measures.
Where the hell were your objections when this was being discussed previously, Goob? You had a chance to stop it long before this...
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WTF, mate. :wtf: While the merging of the three separate pages is good, screwing with the order is not. Within each section, each campaign must be in alphabetical order. Chronological order is of purely fan interest and is hopelessly dependent on subjective interpretation. It makes no sense anyway, since most of the campaigns take place within their own continuities.
Er, no, I notice most of the campaigns state which year they occur in...and as discussed previously, some campaigns rely on/assume the events of other have happened. You can also make some pretty clear assumptions about where campaigns would happen if they were in the same continuity. Some people are interested in playing campaigns in what would be the chronological order. The same can't really be said of campaigns in alphabetical order.
If two campaigns can be swapped and not contradict anything (at least not more than they already did), why is it wrong? I don't see any objections about "disturbing the mood" happening. Maybe objections about "This campaign contradicts the other", but if somebody doesn't know enough about Freespace campaigns to know that, I'd consider it a good thing that we hooked in a newbie at least enough to raise a fuss on the forums about it. At least he cares that much.
Sure, it's fan conjecture, but I don't really care if somebody else has gone to all the trouble to look through the campaigns and put them in an order that they think causes the least number of inconsistencies - as long as they did a good job about it. I've always been curious about the apparent order that campaigns happen in, even if it wasn't 100% perfect. I'm not the only one, either.
If the official list includes the campaigns in that order, any future campaign makers who add campaigns will be able to choose where they appear in the timeline. That puts the creative choice back in the hands of the person making the campaign, not somebody making another list based solely on their own opinion. As is the nature of the wiki, if something is wrong with the order, someone will make a complaint here or on the edit page, and it will eventually be resolved.
The only grouping that should be permitted is the macroscopic grouping by approximate time period (pre-Great War, Great War, Reconstruction, Capella, post-Capella). If you want to put the campaigns in your own schizophrenic fan-chronological order, do it on a separate page.
Wow. So this guy comes out of nowhere and offers to help out, spends several hours to do things himself, listens to all the input he's given and takes the time to make corrections, and then you come out of nowhere and start trolling.
Re-alphabetize each of the sections or I shall be forced to take punitive admin-type measures.
And then you threaten to ban him if he doesn't do things your way. As if not putting things in alphabetical order is somehow against HLP regulations, and as if the people who read the campaign list can't figure out that "A" comes before "B" and so on (Why anybody would have a desire to do such a thing, I can't say. I'd just use the search feature built in to every browser to find the campaign by its name or some part of it, if I didn't know it.)
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I think this isn't a case of misuse of power as much as misapplication. ITA Master ****ed up the Wiki real bad with all his non-canon crap, he just gets some stuff on his talk page, but some guy does something helpful and gets threatened to be banned. It makes no sense.
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Well, I admit in order makes little since in post-Capella. The order that exists right now for the post-Capella era isn't based on my preference ,it is a remnant of my different attempts (and failures) to give some orders to the stuff.
Yet, for the other time periods, and ESPECIALLY the Great War period, since the Original campaign used a strict timeline (date were given before almost every mission), FREDer used this to give a starting date to the campaign. Moreover, while most post-Capella campaigns are going in their own direction, GW campaigns are relying heavily on the canon and are therefore rather (not perfectly) consistent with one another.
For the Capella Era, it's a mix. Some campaigns are clearly happening before or after some others, and sometimes one don't know. I'll try just to differentiate between the NTF war events (campaigns that starts in 2366, one year before FS, and deals primarly with the NTF - GTA war, and campaigns that starts in 2367, dealing mostly with Shivans. I am not sure this is gonna work, as the main FS2 campaign show, one can fight the Shivans and the NTF in the same campaign.
Similarly, I'll try to put together the "immediate post Capella" campaigns (between themselves in alphabetical order, prolly) and the "distant post Capella campaigns", in alphabetical order. I'll keep the current order for the Pre GW Era and the GW. I don't know yet for the reconstruction era.
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I did some kind of alphabetical order, in most eras but the first 2. I divided the Capella era in 2366 and 2367, I added an "Capella aftermath era", which includes all the campaign which assume the war is not finished after the supernova, and happens immediatly after in events that still could be considered the second Great War. The post Capella era includes either events long after the GW2, or events immediatly after which can't be considered as GW2 (piracy, rebellion, bad guys popping out of nowhere but still not being Shivans, ...)
You could tone the blue down a little - it doesn't need to be eye-catching, just evident. It's already clear that the sections are broken up due to the headers so the different color is more of a guide anyway.
Well, it was eye-catching so that I could differentiate between main eras (bright blue) and different continuity (dark blue)
Also, when I said "The column headers should remain after each time period." I was referring to "Voiced", "Requirements", "Authors", etc. It can get a bit gnarly to understand what's what when you're halfway down the list. That was actually an improvement on the "Campaign List".
I'll try to do this next step, but in my attemps it looked terrible. If someone can do it better than I...
The other thing is that there's no download link for most of the campaigns. I think that a little down arrow button that goes to the campaign's download site, or the download page on Freespacemods, or the the download thread if there's no other recourse, would be nice. It would save some clicking. But it would take a lot of time to do it for every single campaign and there was some resistance to the idea the last time this came up (For the old campaign list).
Actually I thought about doing it, but then I think it would be redundant with the dedicated wiki page of each campaign. I might link to a website, if any, though. But I have a problem of (horizontal" space. Plus it's gonna take a long time.
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Ok, I tried to add a "link" column. I only did it at the beginning of the list for now, since obviously some people are against this idea, so it would have to be discussed.
By order of availability, I put either the website, the release thread, the Freespacemod page or a direct download.
Most important problem IMO is that in the case of a direct download, I don't have the space to have the courtesy to put the download host...
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Most important problem IMO is that in the case of a direct download, I don't have the space to have the courtesy to put the download host...
Generally linking directly to downloads pisses people off because random people click random things without caring, killing bandwidth.
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No I kill the direct downloads then ? Fine with me.
I ll just keep the link to page or threads, if there is no problem with that.
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I think I was thinking about something like that. Would it be wiser to do it so that if a campaign is hosted somewhere, add a link to the site, or the download page. And maybe if it is hosted at FreeSpaceMods, add a link to the download page.
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1) I have no objections to this guy devising a way to put the campaigns in chronological order. I have a strong objection to him trying to take his personal project and impose it on the campaign page, which is supposed to be a universal reference.
2) We already discussed the order that the campaigns should appear in when we first put together the campaign pages several months ago. The issue was definitively settled with a format that appealed to all sides. There's no reason to change it.
3) "Punitive admin-type measures" does not imply banning. There are other actions, such as edit-protecting the page, that can be done.
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And what would be this guy personal project ?
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Arranging all the campaigns in chronological order. This doesn't belong on the reference page because there's no possible way to put them in order; most of them take place in different continuities. For example, Awakenings takes place three years after Silent Threat yet contains no Silent Threat ships and contradicts some of the plot points.
If you want to put the campaigns in order, that's fine. But do it on a separate page, not the campaign reference page. The wiki is first and foremost a reference, not a sandbox for speculation.
EDIT: If you wanted to return to your previous solution, "List of campaigns in chronological order", that would be fine. Then we'd have a chronological sandbox list in addition to an alphabetical reference.
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Is there a way to shuffle the page like how you can shuffle lists in Windows/Finder?
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Actually, the only thing I now would like to order in loose chronological order are the GW Era campaigns.
While is it true Awakenings and Silent Threat contradicts each other heavily on the plot points and the technology available, a great number of campaigns made for GW are closely tied to the main plot of FS1. I am thinking of Orpheus campaigns, Phantoms, Echo Gate and a few other.
Sure, you WILL probably find stuff in the Orpheus campains that contradicts, say, Echo Gate. So what ? Still, together, it is RATHER coherent. You can find elements in the TVWP that contradicts the FS canon, too ; and it doesn't hamper you to put it in the "pre GW" and not in "alternative universe".
[Man, I hate to argue in a different language than my native one, I am too short on vocabulary]
What I thought when I arrived here was that "OMFG... these guys I fantastic. All those hi-quality campaigns for free. Now I wish I could help them and contribute but I suck at modelling and FREDing a mission is probably not as easy as creating a Panzer General II campaign. Nor do I have the time that. So I am going to help them with their wiki."
Now, yes, my plan was to improve the wiki with a comprehensive campaign list, and not being fond of the alphabetical order when an alternative exists, I tried in the first place to find another order. My attempt at having a chronological order proved impractical or even stupid for most eras, so I stopped, but it is not the case IMO for the GW era.
I tried to play by the rules by asking the communauty opinion on almost every step, which explains why I have started 3 threads already.
About this list remaining in some sandbox category, I don't think that would be a good idea : either get rid of it or replace at least one of the current list with it ; since I think having 4 different lists on the wiki for basically the same thing is... well... weird.
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No, this is good, we appreciate your contributions. But there are a couple of ground rules for the wiki. A lot of changes took place in a short amount of time, without the chance for the moderators to double-check whether certain things were the best solution.
I agree that there should not be four separate wiki pages for the same thing, which is why I complimented you on the merge. But the reference page should stay with the order it had before. Your changes are good, but they should not interfere with the reference page.
So here is what I recommend:
1) There should be a "Campaign List" page that lists all of the campaigns for FS1, FS2, and FSO. It should have five eras: Pre-Great War, Great War, Reconstruction, Capella, Post-Capella. Inside each of the categories, the campaigns must be in alphabetical order. (This is the arrangement that was established previously.)
2) There can be a "Campaign Continuities" page that groups the campaigns by their continuities. This should not be as detailed as the "Campaign List" page because it is not a reference, just a list. It should provide groups for the Volition continuity, the Derelict continuity, the Inferno continuity, the Shrouding the Light continuity, the 0rph3u5 continuity, and so on. (This is what you were doing before it got merged with the reference page.)
So there you go, two pages for two different perspectives. One is a reference page, and one is a fanon page. How does that sound?
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A question before answering on how it sounds : what do you mean by "not as detailed" ? Does it concern the number of campaigns featured or the number of information on each campaign you can find on the list ? I
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If they could be merged (somehow) into one table-thing that could be shuffled like some pages on Wikipedia, would that be acceptable? If that's even possible.
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Shuffle ?
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1) "Not as detailed" means that it shouldn't have the extra information like number of missions, voiced or unvoiced, mod requirements, etc. The primary purpose of the "Campaign List" page is to serve as a reference, so it should have all the details. The primary purpose of the "Campaign Continuities" page is to group campaigns by continuity, so it should only have a series of lists.
2) I don't think table-shuffling is possible (at least not without some special code or wiki mod). The main problem is that campaign continuities are a fundamentally different grouping than the five canon FreeSpace eras, and it's not possible to change grouping in addition to changing order without setting up some sort of database interface.
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We could go into this direction, but having a list with little information but continuity and another without it would be in my opinion impractical. Say I found Derelict excellent and I want to play the following campaign. I find the following campaign in the "continuity list", and have to switch back to the "campaign list" to have the information on this campaign (not saying that I have to browse a huge list to find it, even though it is in alphabetical order). Then only, I discover that it's not the same author. So I am back to the other list (alt-tab) to find another campaign in the Derelict continuity, and then I have the same surprise when checking again.
It's a bit extreme as an example, but having separate list you would have to compare is in my opinion to be avoided.
As for putting the same information in both the list, it would be better in my opinion but would double the work of everyone who would want to add a campaign to the wiki. Plus it would be just the same list in a different order.
The best would be to have a continuity list with details, and a simple alphabetical campaign list, used to access easily to one campaign's page.
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2) We already discussed the order that the campaigns should appear in when we first put together the campaign pages several months ago. The issue was definitively settled with a format that appealed to all sides. There's no reason to change it.
The problem with the reference page was that it was nowhere near complete. It had 35 entries compared to 106 in the new list, which is much more detailed. Asking Narwhal to delete all that information after he already put it up is not only inconsiderate of him, it's a stupid idea to get rid of a list as useful as the one he's made.
2) We already discussed the order that the campaigns should appear in when we first put together the campaign pages several months ago. The issue was definitively settled with a format that appealed to all sides. There's no reason to change it.
Those two statements are correct, but the first sentence doesn't actually have any connection to the second - even though you might think it does. We actually started talking about it and then the conversation got derailed about whether we needed to have download links or not. Since Narwhal has already spent the massive amount of time to research all of the campaigns to put in the wiki, I think that's worth revising the format for.
The campaign list doesn't have to look pretty, and if I had all this information to make the previous campaign list with, I wouldn't have been near as conservative in its design. There's no reason to force people to click through all of the campaigns just to be able to look at the number of missions, when the number of missions could be a deciding factor on which campaign to play.
No, this is good, we appreciate your contributions. But there are a couple of ground rules for the wiki. A lot of changes took place in a short amount of time, without the chance for the moderators to double-check whether certain things were the best solution.
This statement is unrepresentative of the wiki power structure as a whole and it gives unfair weight to your side of the argument, since it suggests that moderators must somehow approve every article that goes into the wiki. First of all, that's never been the case. Moderators do look at articles, but generally only revise them when something needs correcting, and only reject them when needed - not because they weren't the "best solution".
Secondly, the very nature of a wiki moderator should be one that causes them to not make snap judgments like this one. Somebody who instantly jumps to the conclusion that their opinion is the right one, and who has the misguided belief that their "best solution" is automatically better than the one that they're evaluating, should not be someone who is a wiki moderator. Anybody who should be documenting things in the most objective way possible should be open to the possibility that they're wrong, or that there is some information they're not aware of.
Thirdly, there has never been a clearly defined set of ground rules for the wiki, so it's not like Narwhal is ignorant of some obvious rules that everybody else knows. Mostly the wiki policy has been defined by precedent established by debates. So far he's been willing to listen to criticism and cite support for his edits.
2) I don't think table-shuffling is possible (at least not without some special code or wiki mod). The main problem is that campaign continuities are a fundamentally different grouping than the five canon FreeSpace eras, and it's not possible to change grouping in addition to changing order without setting up some sort of database interface.
"Fundamentally different" - not really. All of the campaign continuities for the campaigns based in the Freespace universe do establish connections with the Freespace universe continuity. If a good-faith effort was made to organize all campaigns by their apparent chronological order, you could go down the campaign list and pick out only campaigns with an "Inferno" continuity icon and you'd come up with the same list that you'd have if you had a second continuity page.
I do agree with you that the current method of continuity grouping isn't really a good solution. However, I also don't think that having two campaign pages is really a solution either, since it's hard enough just to get people to update one campaign list - and as Narwhal pointed out, if they ever fell out of sync it'd be difficult to get them fixed.
If the list put the campaigns in chronological order, stated what the order of the campaigns was and noted that it was speculative, and added continuity icons to campaigns (possibly drawn from avatars) that reference other fanon, it would be pretty clear what was going on. I don't think anybody would care if there were problems because one campaign contradicted another. Even if the order isn't 100% right, the order of the campaigns would give people an idea of what the campaign would be like, and where it lies in relation to other campaigns.
Ordering the campaigns in alphabetical order loses this information. Yes, putting information about where definite time dividers lies helps a lot. However, if two campaigns lie between the Great War and the Second Great War, but one uses FSPort and the other uses retail Freespace 2 data, it's pretty clear what order they should go in if no other clues exist.
I'd also like to add that ordering things in chronological order is pretty common. TV episodes, book series, and more are all listed by the order that they occur in the 'fictional' universe. It's the expected order, and trying to switch that around just makes the list more confusing rather than less. What's more, due to the format of the list, there's no way to record if one campaign happens over the course of several others. So it's suggested that each campaign's position in the list is only an approximation and can be altered.
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The problem with the reference page was that it was nowhere near complete. It had 35 entries compared to 106 in the new list, which is much more detailed. Asking Narwhal to delete all that information after he already put it up is not only inconsiderate of him, it's a stupid idea to get rid of a list as useful as the one he's made.
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.
Those two statements are correct, but the first sentence doesn't actually have any connection to the second - even though you might think it does. We actually started talking about it and then the conversation got derailed about whether we needed to have download links or not. Since Narwhal has already spent the massive amount of time to research all of the campaigns to put in the wiki, I think that's worth revising the format for.
The campaign list doesn't have to look pretty, and if I had all this information to make the previous campaign list with, I wouldn't have been near as conservative in its design. There's no reason to force people to click through all of the campaigns just to be able to look at the number of missions, when the number of missions could be a deciding factor on which campaign to play.
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.
This statement is unrepresentative of the wiki power structure as a whole and it gives unfair weight to your side of the argument, since it suggests that moderators must somehow approve every article that goes into the wiki. First of all, that's never been the case. Moderators do look at articles, but generally only revise them when something needs correcting, and only reject them when needed - not because they weren't the "best solution".
Secondly, the very nature of a wiki moderator should be one that causes them to not make snap judgments like this one. Somebody who instantly jumps to the conclusion that their opinion is the right one, and who has the misguided belief that their "best solution" is automatically better than the one that they're evaluating, should not be someone who is a wiki moderator. Anybody who should be documenting things in the most objective way possible should be open to the possibility that they're wrong, or that there is some information they're not aware of.
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.
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).
Thirdly, there has never been a clearly defined set of ground rules for the wiki, so it's not like Narwhal is ignorant of some obvious rules that everybody else knows. Mostly the wiki policy has been defined by precedent established by debates. So far he's been willing to listen to criticism and cite support for his edits.
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.
2) I don't think table-shuffling is possible (at least not without some special code or wiki mod). The main problem is that campaign continuities are a fundamentally different grouping than the five canon FreeSpace eras [...]
"Fundamentally different" - not really.
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.
If the list put the campaigns in chronological order, stated what the order of the campaigns was and noted that it was speculative, and added continuity icons to campaigns (possibly drawn from avatars) that reference other fanon, it would be pretty clear what was going on. I don't think anybody would care if there were problems because one campaign contradicted another. Even if the order isn't 100% right, the order of the campaigns would give people an idea of what the campaign would be like, and where it lies in relation to other campaigns.
Ordering the campaigns in alphabetical order loses this information. Yes, putting information about where definite time dividers lies helps a lot. However, if two campaigns lie between the Great War and the Second Great War, but one uses FSPort and the other uses retail Freespace 2 data, it's pretty clear what order they should go in if no other clues exist.
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.
Mathematically, a well-founded (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well-founded_relation) total ordering (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_order) 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.
If people want to invent their own reasons for putting campaigns in a certain order, they should do it on a separate page and mark it speculative. But a speculative page has no business masquerading as an objective reference.
I'd also like to add that ordering things in chronological order is pretty common. TV episodes, book series, and more are all listed by the order that they occur in the 'fictional' universe. It's the expected order, and trying to switch that around just makes the list more confusing rather than less. What's more, due to the format of the list, there's no way to record if one campaign happens over the course of several others. So it's suggested that each campaign's position in the list is only an approximation and can be altered.
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.
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.
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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. :p
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 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well-founded_relation) total ordering (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_order) 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.
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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.
Which is why, in the version of the page before Narwhal came along, the campaigns were divided into the five canon eras. That's the arrangement I favor. Beyond separating them into those eras, which is fairly clear-cut, there is no sensical way to put them in order.
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.
I would call that illogic, or perhaps doublethink. If you can order Campaign A before Campaign B on the basis of dates or technology, and then order Campaign B before Campaign A on the basis of plot events, there is no unambiguous ordering of the two. Someone could objectively put Campaign A first, or they could just as objectively put Campaign B first. But their objective reasons would be in conflict.
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.
:wtf: Alphabetical order is a fair ordering, it's in common use, and it has widespread precedent in other reference works.
Also, there is a mathematical relationship. If the letters from A to Z are finite, and you can always say that A comes first, B comes second, etc., then you have a well-founded total ordering. And there are well-defined standards for handling A, And, and The -- you just alphabetize based on the next word.
Nobody has complained that the HLP hosted project section is in alphabetical order. :p
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?
The columns that are included -- missions, voice acting, game requirements, etc. -- are the ones most often used by users looking to play a campaign. So they serve a valuable reference purpose. And if the campaign designer notices that some information is inaccurate, he can correct it. It's happened before.
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 again, this is why the previous list was divided into the five canon eras. All campaigns can be put into one of those eras; beyond that, no ordering exists.
And people are used to seeing things in alphabetical order. This list is random-access, not sequential-access.
That's a pretty poor example:
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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.
If there's uncertainty, the campaign designer can correct it, which he did.
The point is that grouping campaigns by continuity is subjective. If campaigns can get moved around once, they can get moved around again.
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I am sorry I am not saying much but WMCoolmon says exactly what I would have wanted to say - just better.
I think user-made campaign list are not "canon", therefore, slightly subjective inputs in it (chronology) is not necessarily bad, all the more since many campaign designers did the effort of actually stating their campaign was happening at that moment and not at any moment.
Moreover, I plan to expand the list (even though I'll wait for this "debate" to be settled to carry on working on it) ; hopefully there will be 150+ campaigns in the list. Someone who wants specifically NTF campaign, or play a campaign that happens after the destruction of the Lucifer. If we want the users of the wiki "to find what they need" as you put it, it is best to put a kind of chronology. When people want to play a campaign, and have no specific campaign in mind, they won't do them alphabetically, they'll want a campaign "against the NTF", "at the beginning of the GW" or whatever.
Besides, while you may have agreed previously on a division between five eras, this is not set in stone and a wiki is evolutive. Consensuses needs to change if the situation change, the situation may change for instance if many people change their opinion. It also changes because we're not trying to give a logical order to 40 or so campaigns but to largely more than one hundred campaigns. A division in 5 time-period was accurate enough before, it can be too crude right now.
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I would call that illogic, or perhaps doublethink.
Why, thank you. :D
"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function."
If you can order Campaign A before Campaign B on the basis of dates or technology, and then order Campaign B before Campaign A on the basis of plot events, there is no unambiguous ordering of the two. Someone could objectively put Campaign A first, or they could just as objectively put Campaign B first. But their objective reasons would be in conflict.
You can make a judgment call. Suppose that a campaign would make sense if it took place before the events of Silent Threat, in every single way, save for the date mentioned at the start of the campaign. If placed after Silent Threat, nothing would make sense except for the date. The obvious solution is then to place the campaign before Silent Threat. Just because you're making an objective decision doesn't mean that you have to treat every single thing as equally valid.
:wtf: Alphabetical order is a fair ordering, it's in common use, and it has widespread precedent in other reference works.
As does chronological ordering.
Also, there is a mathematical relationship. If the letters from A to Z are finite, and you can always say that A comes first, B comes second, etc., then you have a well-founded total ordering. And there are well-defined standards for handling A, And, and The -- you just alphabetize based on the next word.
The letters A through Z do not have any inherent mathematical relationship defined in them. The order that they come in is purely convention defined by culture. Thus, somebody from a different culture might think it was more appropriate to group the letters in order of increasing surface area (Which does have a solid mathematical relationship). Our perspective on the order that A through Z should go in is purely defined by our expectations set in place by our culture.
I also just gave an example of how handling "A", "The", #s, etc differs among places.
And again, this is why the previous list was divided into the five canon eras. All campaigns can be put into one of those eras; beyond that, no ordering exists.
And people are used to seeing things in alphabetical order. This list is random-access, not sequential-access.
Again, if I'm looking for a campaign called "Inferno", I can find it using my browser's search functionality. I could also find it by going to the campaign category index and looking under the "I" section. Most users on HLP have enough technical prowess to do the same; the question is whether the links will be placed in an obvious enough spot for them to be able to find the campaign list and index.
However, if somebody wants to find a campaign based on where it occurs, they can't do that in any kind of efficient way if the campaigns are in alphabetical order. They can check the short descriptions, or even click on every single campaign and check the descriptions, but it's going to be extremely slow going, and they'll have to either build their own list - which will take hours or days - or do it every time they complete a campaign. What's more, you'll have a lot of duplicate work because it's not recorded anywhere. In general, though, I'd guess that people will just not try because it's a disproportionate amount of effort to go to just to play a game.
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...However, if somebody wants to find a campaign based on where it occurs, they can't do that in any kind of efficient way if the campaigns are in alphabetical order....
Why would someone want that search criteria, anyway? I have never wanted to play a campaign/game based on "where" they are played, but rather "how" they are played or "how good" they are. How they are played is answered by the short descriptions.
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As does chronological ordering.
And as I said, chronological ordering doesn't make sense here. An encyclopedia does not put things in chronological order.
The letters A through Z do not have any inherent mathematical relationship defined in them.
Neither do the symbols 1 through 9. Somebody came along and invented a mapping function that assigned each one to a quantity. For letters, somebody defined a relation that always puts A first, etc.
However, if somebody wants to find a campaign based on where it occurs, they can't do that in any kind of efficient way if the campaigns are in alphabetical order. They can check the short descriptions, or even click on every single campaign and check the descriptions, but it's going to be extremely slow going, and they'll have to either build their own list - which will take hours or days - or do it every time they complete a campaign. What's more, you'll have a lot of duplicate work because it's not recorded anywhere. In general, though, I'd guess that people will just not try because it's a disproportionate amount of effort to go to just to play a game.
You keep ignoring the standard five-era categorization. :doubt: If people want to play a great-war-era campaign they'll look in the Great War section on the Campaign List page. If they want to play a campaign in a particular continuity then they should look on a page dedicated specifically to arranging campaigns according to continuity, not this page.
I'm beginning to repeat myself, and I really don't have time to continue arguing on this thread when I have other projects to do. I need to keep in mind not only the people who like to edit pages but also the people who just look on a page to find what they need to know, without posting on the forum or making edits of their own.
So I'm invoking the right of moderation that I mentioned before, and that WMC recognized...
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.
...and putting a temporary edit-protection on the Campaign List page.
Again, as I said from the beginning, feel free to create your own separate page dedicated to continuity. Just don't pass it off as the reference page. There are obviously enough of you interested in it to make it worthwhile, but the two pages serve completely orthogonal purposes and should remain distinct.
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I don't know why you blocked the pages since I wasn't going to edit until this issue was settled.
Now the fun part is that you actually blocked the "List of user-made campaign" stating that this page "needs to remain a reference and not a sandbox", even though this page never was a reference since I created this page from scratch (with some help from Snail and a couple other for correction), with the objective, it is true, to replace the 3 other separate campaign pages. So now you have 4 separate lists of campaign which should be "reference". You ought to erase one. Moreover, blocking it means the page is noy in alphabetical order.
As for blocking the other page, I never edited it. Well, once to create the other page, basically.
I won't blame you because having been active a lot on a large forum as a modérateur sometimes you don't have the time to get involved in the 10 or more issues that arise every day so you want to take a quick decision, but I consider this conclusion really less than satisfactory (obviously) and I'll let other finish this page in the way you want. I'll still might complete it, even though I am slightly upset right now.
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Yeah, while doing the alphabetization, I came to realize that the page was actually the continuity page I had proposed. So I unprotected it, rolled it back to the chronological version, and renamed it to Campaign Continuities.
I've also unprotected Campaign List, as I see that you're right, you never changed anything around. Sorry about that.
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Well, I sympathize with you (for the first time since you called me "that guy") for the hassle of ordering that huge list for 20 minutes or so, only to discover you had to revert your change.
So seeing you go all this sterile work un-upset me, all the more since the "continuity campaign" page being the most complete list, I know it's the one that's going to be used.
I still believe having 4 different lists is going to be an issue one day or another, but when it will be an issue, I will have had time to complete that CC list and make it perfect, so that everyone wants this list to be the "featured" one ;)
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Just don't pass it off as the reference page. There are obviously enough of you interested in it to make it worthwhile, but the two pages serve completely orthogonal purposes and should remain distinct.
Uh, if it's not reference somehow, it really shouldn't be in the wiki. And it really is a reference page anyways.
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It doesn't really matter. The Campaign List was already woefully incomplete, and thanks to Goober, it's going to stay that way.
Even though I don't agree with the organization on the Campaign Continuities page, I'm still going to refer people to it because it's much more complete and there's somebody willing to work on it.
Given the choice between a small, less-informative, and out-of-date list that nobody can fix, and the Campaign Continuities page, which do you think is going to be more popular?
Sometimes being uncompromising and winning the battle can lose you the war.
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What "war"? :wtf: There is only one issue here, as I see it.
Uncompromising would have been not rolling back to the unalphabetized version after Narwhal's post. I'm trying to work with you guys here.
I can still restore the alphabetized version you know; it's right there in the wiki history.
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My point is that in freezing the main campaign list, you've left us with an inadequate campaign list, which is exactly what the now-Campaign Continuity page was supposed to fix. So everybody is simply going to ignore that first list in favor of the Campaign Continuity list.
And I think it's incredibly inconsiderate of Narwhal to threaten to overwrite his page in a way he explicitly disagrees with, when he's spent several hours to make the page, tell everybody he was making the page, fix the page in response to criticism, and hasn't overwritten any other pages.
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I un-freezed the main campaign list almost immediately, as I posted (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/topic,55845.msg1128284.html#msg1128284) above.
Both pages are unprotected now, as they have been since yesterday, and Narwhal's page is back to the "list in chronological order" that it started at, so you guys do whatever you want. :sigh:
It would be best if we could have a sortable table, like somebody found here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamebryo#Gamebryo_games).
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I tried, but sortable table doesn't work on this wiki I believe .
Plus, there are a few other problems, mainly :
- Now the dates are included in the description, so it's not so easy to sort (or I could rework on this, but well, as long as it's NOT working)
- Continuities like Inferno would be grouped.
I would try to find a way around if it was possible, though.
Why have you changed the name to "fan-chronological order" ? Means nothing. Moreover and it's not MY page, but it sounds like it's like MY thing. If it was the case, I would have created my own website, and not let anyone edit it. The date I give are objective, they're the one written in the description of each campaign. The continuities are objectives, and in all categories except GW I used an alphabetical order. The only thing that's not ovjective is the immediate post Capella and normal post Capella differentiation, and I plan to find a way to modify it since I am not satisfied with it . So it's not a "fan-chrono order". Campaign continuity sounded much better, even better than the previous name actually.
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how about a family tree sort of aproach , the main list the same ..alphabetical and another list as a family tree , chronoligical or such .....
but then again ..
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Alphabetical makes sense to me, another page could be linked to from it though.
Also what happens if Two campaigns overlap, which comes first?