PlentyWiki:Community Portal

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"First, let me introduce you to yourself."

• Please take a minute to edit your own page by clicking your username (you should see it on the top right corner among the preferences etc links). Just write a couple of lines about yourself, make a link to your homepage or such. Thank you. --Mervi 01:59, 24 April 2006 (EEST)

• Please sign your comments here and on the talk pages. Just add --~~~~(that's two straight lines and four tildes) to the end of the last line you wrote. This way we can follow the conversation more easily (it prints out the time as well).--Mervi 03:24, 19 January 2008 (EET)

"To Do" list

Here's a few ideas of things you can start working with.

• list of books, editions and translations: I just received the material from Willem's old site. Does someone (Sini? ;)) want to start working with it? Mervi 21:36, 29 May 2006 (EEST)

• Liveship Traders books need indexing. Even a list of every character/place/important object would be really helpful, you don't have to add them to the database one by one yourself.

• List of most wanted pages: these are articles that don't yet exist but other articles are trying to link to. Maybe you could help by adding content to some of them so they are created? Just click on the red links and start writing.

• And there's also a list of all existing pages if you don't want to create new pages. Simply choose one of these and start adding information.

• Fitz needs some attention. It's the second most popular page, the most linked to page and the one with most categories, and we only have the draft I made in the beginning. I realize it's going to be one leeeeenghty article, but even if some of you could devote a little time to write a section or two for starters, that would be great. :)

• The friendly folks over at the French site Rivages Maudits have agreed to exchange information with us. I don't know if many of you know French, but at least the bits about the French editions are quite understandable - even to me! :D Feel free to dig in and use anything we don't yet have. :)

updated by --Mervi 02:39, 2 October 2006 (EEST)

If you'd like to "reserve" a portion of work for yourself, for example characters that begin with the letter F, or place names of the Six Duchies, please edit this page and mention that you are doing so. This should help everyone avoid working on the same things simultaneously.

Mervi is currently working on

• characters from Homecoming listed
• listing Farseer trilogy characters A-W is complete, as well as the place names from Jarmo's site.
• Characters and places from Fool's Errand have been listed, but the articles of course still need more material
• the Golden Fool is in the process of being indexed, and Fool's Fate is next in line after that
• I've just upgraded the script, please let me know if you find anything that doesn't work or acts strangely. I've been trying to get rid of the unnecessary and annoying "Jump to: navigation, search" line on top of every page all day, but so far haven't managed to do that. (Edit protection was broken as was file uploads, both have been fixed.)
• most of the material from Willem's concerning the Lindholm novels (but not short stories) is listed now - the pages are still very incomplete, though. I think I'll finish indexing FF first and then go back to the book editions unless someone else wants to take them as a project.
• the script has been updated (yes, again) and the layout changed a bit. Please let me know if you have any problems!
• editing works again! I'm so sorry it took this long to find a fix. Please let me know if you have any problems with the wiki now. :)
• the script has been updated once again, please let me know if you encounter problems!
• fighting spammers. Last night, I upgraded the script to the latest version, hoping that there might have been a security fix included, but obviously there wasn't since the spamming continues. Mediawiki doesn't allow even the SysOp to delete members, only block them. I could do that manually at the database, but that is strongly advised against, as it might generate errors in the script. I'm currently looking into hacks and other tricks to make spamming more difficult - the sad news is that this will further increase the steps everyone has to take in order to edit articles. I'd love to keep this site easy to access and edit for everyone, but as things are, I must require registering etc.
• I've installed an extension that asks you to perform a simple math task (even I can do these, they're so easy ;D) whenever you're trying to add external links to an article. It also prompts new users to do the same when registering. I hope this will help, but please let me know if you have any problems using it!
• The MediaWiki script has been upgraded to the latest version - please let me know of any possible problems, I did see some minor errors during the installation. I'm also working on a skin that would "merge" the wiki with the rest of the site, making navigating back and forth easier, but completing that might take awhile.

Ehlana-Bane is currently working on

I'm going to be working on the history of the Elderlings, and doing some research on them. If nobody else minds.

I was thinking of doing this, too, although I was going to concentrate more on their physical appearence. Would you mind terribly if I put up a basic template for the Elderlings? that way we have something to work with, at least, even if it gets edited beyond recognition. I imagion it's going to be one of the hardest articles to write. Silly Elderlings, being all elusive and things. Voici 00:15, 21 April 2006 (EEST)

Cool. Yes, those pesky elusive Elderlings. Ha.. I will be trying to get something in the form of research and writing done sometime this week, then I will put it up.

Sini is currently working on

• Burrich! I have an old article I wrote about him, using some material from that one. Done, a long time ago...-- Sini 17:31, 29 April 2007 (EEST)
• Characters and other articles of the short story the Inheritance. Done. --Sini 21:28, 5 May 2006 (EEST)
• Re-read the first trilogy and added stuff :) --Sini 17:31, 29 April 2007 (EEST)
• Just doodling around, adding minor details when coming up with a random page which needs it. Sini 10:43, 21 January 2008 (EET)

Voici is currently working on

• Indexing 'The Ship of Magic'.

Qlberts is currently working on

• Hi, I'm new here. I would like to suggest setting up a book cover page, like on the Redwall Wiki over here. I'll just go ahead and set it up, if anyone disagrees we can just take it down. Qlberts
  • Welcome! Sounds like a good idea, go ahead. :) - Mervi 15:28, 5 May 2007 (EEST)
    • Alright. Thanks! Book Cover Gallery

References

On the site Trader Bay. An unofficial Robin Hobb page by Adam Rosser. (with (incomplete) Character List and Timeline), a reference system is used for the Timeline. For example: "I.1" for Book I chapter 1. Maybe we can use a similar system to refer to the books of Robin Hobb. For example: "FT I 1." for The Farseer trilogy Book I chapter 1. Evil berry 22:55, 16 May 2006 (EEST)

Yes, we could do references by book and chapter. Another option is to build a timeline (or probably several) with a tool like this. As I've tried to keep the articles free from references to the books, I'd prefer a timeline system, but I'm always willing to hear other opinions. Timelines might be more difficult build, I think we'd need to figure out some kind of "x years after Fitz was born" or "so-and-so's reign" system. Referencing to books on the other hand makes reading the article more messy - in my opinion. Mervi 02:41, 17 May 2006 (EEST)

I've created a timeline (not with EasyTimeline, because it doesn't seem to work on this wiki) on my Userpage. It's only a rough sketch, but it gives an impression of how a timeline could be. Evil berry 20:53, 19 May 2006 (EEST)

It doesn't work because I haven't installed it yet. :) The one you've started looks like a good listing, but it doesn't show things like the fact that most of the stuff listed towards the end are within Shrewd's reign etc. I'll see if I can install EasyTime tomorrow or later this week so you can experiment with it if you want to. :) Mervi 22:03, 21 May 2006 (EEST)

Ouch. I took a closer look at the extension and it isn't as easy to install as I thought it would be. I'm going to have to postpone even trying to do that though, because I want to first update the script to the latest version. Sorry for the delay, I'll get there eventually, I promise! Mervi 18:35, 29 May 2006 (EEST)

I've started to wonder whether we should have a reference system after all. I didn't want one in the beginning, because my experience with book-ish wikis is that they are quite unneeded and make the article pages look messy. Minor characters would be easy to handle, because it would probably mean a very short note like "introduced in AA (chapter) 3, mentioned again in GF 15" but how should we handle references for characters that appear in 6 to 9 books? I feel that the time and energy would be better directed to just adding more things to the wiki in general. Of course this wouldn't be such a problem with new articles in the future as we could make those reference notes at the time of adding the article. Because I'm going to start expanding this wiki to cover other Hobb/Lindholm works as well soon, this would be a good time to decide whether we need/want references or not. --Mervi 02:16, 21 January 2008 (EET)

Giving references to every bit of info about main characters would really be a really big job. I personally don't feel a need for it, but perhaps those who aren't as familiar with Hobb's work would like it... Tough choice. But I'm voting no, our time is better spent in doing the articles themselves. As long as we have the templates so there is reference to the right universe & books. Sini 10:41, 21 January 2008 (EET)

Perhaps we should make categories for books too, so that the minor characters would be in the category of a certain book / story or a second template placing them into a certain book / story?Sini 10:47, 21 January 2008 (EET)

Templates

For a long time I have planned to "open" this wiki to other Hobb stories besides the RotE ones. I figured that the best way the script allows us to do this, is to use little boxes that are really templates to mark all the articles depending on which fictional universe they belong. I have made some drafts for those and added the RotE one to the Fitz article for example - please let me know what you think. The idea is that the template can be altered at any point without having to go through hundreds of pages making the same change (of course the template has to be added to those pages first though! :D) So it doesn't matter if we've used the template already to mark articles and then want to change something in it. Anyway, it would be good to hear everyone's thoughts about this. -- Mervi 03:24, 19 January 2008 (EET)

• I think templates would be easier to notice on top of the page. Like the ones you've already done. Sini 13:42, 20 January 2008 (EET)
  • I think I actually placed them all over the place when I tested them. It shouldn't be too hard to fix though once we reach some kind of a consensus about this. I do agree that they are more easy to spot when they're on top, especially if the article is lengthy. But I fear that they will look a bit odd on top of those pages that only have one or two lines, ie the minor characters that are barely mentioned in the books etc. --Mervi 02:07, 21 January 2008 (EET)
    • But to avoid people getting spoiled, it would be a good for the template be on top. Sini 23:04, 21 January 2008 (EET)

Licensing

Also, I picked us a license, you can see it here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ This is something I've meant to do for a long time. If anyone feels it should be different, feel free to suggest changes! My main concern is to keep this all non-profit, and I would like to allow copying, because it makes collaborations with other sites easier. I chose "No Derivative Works" because I don't see the point of someone copying everything and then adding stuff to it elsewhere - although I don't know how likely that scenario is. What do you all think? Should the derivative works be allowed? --Mervi 02:34, 19 February 2008 (EET)

• I'm really starting to think we should allow derivative works since I've already agreed to let the Rivages Maudits people use our material (and we can use theirs) so it would be kind of pointless to keep making exceptions to the rule, right? If noone disagrees or has any comments, I'm going to alter the license next time I upgrade the script. -- Mervi 16:09, 13 March 2008 (EET)