PlentyWiki:Community Portal

From PlentyWiki
(Redirected from PlentyWiki:Community portal)
Jump to: navigation, search

"First, let me introduce you to yourself."

  • Please take a minute to edit your own page by clicking on your username (you should see it at the top right on any page) if you haven't done so already. A quick introduction will do - and it's also a good place to practise formatting and stuff if you're new to wiki editing!
  • Please sign your comments here on this page and on the talk pages. Just add --~~~~(that's two straight lines and four tildes) after your message, or click on the signature button (the blue pen with the scribble in front of it). It's easier to follow the conversation when we know who's talking and it prints out the time as well, so we know when something was done/started.
  • Before you start editing, take a look at the help page to get familiar with some of the characteristics of this particular wiki. There are also helpful links if you're new to editing wiki text in general! --Mervi (talk) 13:11, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

"To Do" list

Where to start? Here's a few ideas (updated in March 2017):

  1. List of most wanted pages: these are articles that don't yet exist but are being linked to from other articles. Maybe you could help by adding content to some of them so they are created? Just click on a red link and start writing. Don't worry about links and categories and all that stuff, someone else can add them later!
  2. Looking for a specific page to edit? Choose one of all the existing pages or use the search box.
  3. Fitz always needs some attention. You don't need to summarise his whole life on one go, just adding bits and pieces helps a lot.
  4. The cast of characters of Blue Boots is listed but haven't got their articles yet. Just click on the red links, don’t be shy!
  5. Good, short, spoiler-free summaries are needed for almost all of the books and stories articles.
  6. As to the editions/translations info, most of what was published before 2003/2004 has been covered thanks to Willem's records. Anything after that is ~forever~ under construction, as it seems that every time I try to add another edition I come across three more split French translations and get distracted chasing them! If you have the name of a translation that's not yet listed, feel free to jump in and add it! It doesn't matter if you don't have the publisher/ISBN/cover etc, those can be added later.
  7. We need more magic! There's no article yet for Hedge-magic or scrying for example.
  8. The friendly folks over at the French site Les Rivages Maudits have agreed to exchange information with us. If you know French and can mine information about their editions, sweet! (Site seems to be down as of March 2017)

"Claimed" projects

If you'd like to "reserve" a portion of work for yourself, for example Russian translations, or place names of the Six Duchies, please edit this section and tell us what you're working on! This hopefully prevents several of us doing the same thing needlessly. A lot of these "claims" are several years old now, so if you see anything uncompleted here that you'd like to work on, please don't hesitate to do so. --Mervi (talk) 23:49, 28 June 2014 (EEST)

Mervi is currently working on

  • General updates about the wiki can now be found at the forums : things like new features, added extensions etc.
  • 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
  • most of the material from Willem 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.
  • We're reading AA over at a Tolkien forum I co-admin, and I'll be going through the chapters adding bits and pieces here. Our schedule is quite slow, so it will probably be January before I'm through the whole book. --Mervi 11:31, 3 August 2010 (UTC)
  • Trying to get the rest of Willem's info published, that mostly means early editions and translations of RH titles. --Mervi (talk) 23:49, 28 June 2014 (EEST)
  • I've been copying cover art from the massive galleries to individual title pages. They're more handy there, and editing the gallery pages has started to be quite cumbersome even after splitting it into three. This has worked okay so far (I've mostly been working on ML titles where there are fewer editions and translations) but I think with RotE stories I might have to start individual gallery pages for each book and link them back to the articles. I'd ask for everyone's thoughts but it seems to be pretty empty here at the moment...? --Mervi (talk) 16:24, 5 July 2014 (EEST)

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)
  • Re-reading the Liveships and adding stuff. --Sini 10:55, 30 September 2008 (EEST)
  • I'm back! And re-reading again! Let's see what I could do here... I think it will have to wait till I get to the newer books - the original trilogy is pretty well done already I think! --Sini (talk) 18:36, 26 March 2014 (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
        • As I'm sure some of you have noticed I've taken the liberty to split and reformat the gallery/galleries somewhat. Since the wiki has been really quiet lately I thought it's better to "act and revise if necessary" than to just wait for comments that might never appear. ;) So, I've a) split the original gallery into 3 parts: ML, RH and RotE. I suspect the last will need to be further split by the trilogies at some point b) altered the gallery format to show 5 books in a row, this shortens the pages even a bit (6 would have looked better but creates a horizontal scrollbar in smaller screens) If anyone knows a way to make the gallery fluid (well, we'd need to replace html tables with css for that I guess) let me know! -- Mervi 21:50, 27 February 2010 (UTC)

Joost is currently working on

Characters from Dragon keeper/Dragon haven --Joost 16:52, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

Nuytsia is currently working on

  • Plants and animals mentioned in the Rain Wild Chronicles. --Nuytsia 07:25, 28 May 2010 (UTC)

Farseer is currently working on

  • Completing info/links for characters in Words Like Coins, including pecksies --Farseer 14:56, 28 May 2010 (UTC)
  • Kettricken's Guard --Farseer 15:06, 28 May 2010 (UTC)
  • Great Sail Fleet --Farseer 15:06, 28 May 2010 (UTC)
  • Magic --Farseer 02:40, 27 August 2010 (UTC)
  • Characters for Blue Boots --Farseer 09:19, 18 February 2012 (EET)

Chivalry's Ghost is currently working on

Other notes on possible projects

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)
  • There's now a template for disambiguation pages. The text needs re-phrasing, but the template works and includes a link to the category, so any page with the template is automatically listed in the category. --Mervi (talk) 13:11, 8 March 2017 (UTC)
  • Contemplating templates for "this characters appears in books x, y and z" which would be a sort of compromise solution to my previous thoughts on in-world references. --Mervi (talk) 13:11, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

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)
Looks like I forgot to mention it here although it's linked to in the footer of course. The Creative Commons license we're using here is this http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ --Mervi 00:04, 29 May 2010 (UTC)

File licenses

  • I've started to look into licensing for images, more on this later. --Mervi (talk) 13:11, 8 March 2017 (UTC)
  • I've crated the first bunch of file licensing templates - some of the wording still needs a bit of work but I was staring at the coding for so long I need a little break from that. :D These were basically designed to fit the files we already have, which are mostly cover images. Once I've gone through all the files applying them (I've got 600+ out of ~1000 left atm) and figured what needs to be added/changed, I'll also look into ones that could be applied to fan art (currently the only one for that is "grant permission for this wiki specifically" but ideally I'd like to add all the CC licenses at least). --Mervi (talk) 10:39, 18 March 2017 (UTC)
  • I also started adding categories for files. Some of them (images of character x, art by y) could actually be useful in the future, mostly it's just categorising the mass into smaller chunks - it might make it easier to find a certain file though, especially since some of the old file names are just random numbers and the descriptions are half empty so the Search function might struggle to find them. I'm keeping the resulting categories "red" on purpose until the work is done because I'm still deciding what the category tree will look like. --Mervi (talk) 10:39, 18 March 2017 (UTC)
I've still got about 180 files to go, but the categories started to make sense so.... Category:Images is the top level category under which goes everything else. --Mervi (talk) 15:22, 25 March 2017 (UTC)