(urth) Wiki draft proposal

[Jesper Svedberg]

Hm, you seem to have recieved my original mail, but I didn't get a copy. 
Strange. Anyway, I apologize for the double posting.

maru dubshinki skrev:
> On 5/9/06, Jesper Svedberg <jsvedberg at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> - I don't think it's necessary to put these articles in different
>>categories based on which work they appear in, it should be enough to
>>create structure by linking the articles in a careful fashion (you could
>>have an article called "Characters in TBotNS" filled with links the
>>separate articles) and by clearly stating in the articles where the
>>persons/objects appear.
> 
> Well, why not? Links are great, but there are some things categories
> are just better at. See alsos can grow awfully long, you know.

OK, after looking around Wikipedia I see that they have a pretty nice 
system for categories. Putting a [[Category:The Soldier Series]] in the 
the article on Hypereides is good way of doing it, but when you 
initially mentioned categories I thought you wanted to separate the 
articles in different directories (such as 
http://www.wolfewiki.org/wiki/soldier/Hypereides), and that I think 
would be a bad idea.

> Yes, we could use external links, but those have the problem of being
> both more unreliable *and* harder to use than wikilinks. There are
> more subtle reasons to prefer internal links to external links, but
> they're hard to talk about.

Well, the Wikipedia seems to manage. When it comes to the mailing list 
archives, you could copy it to the wiki (or preferably to a parallell 
wiki (I think the mailing list should be clearly separated from the 
general wiki in a way that allows for no confusion as to what belongs 
where), but it seems a lot of work for very little gain. To link to a 
mail you still have to search for it and either copy the wiki name for 
it (I suppose one would have to give the mailing list postings 
individual ID numbers) or the URL and then paste it in one's article. 
Maybe it is much easier to search in another wiki to find the posting 
and the copy the ID number, but it doesn't seem like that great a 
difference to me.

>> - One thing that must be discussed is the problem of the sender. In
>>Wikipedia, the articles are presented as facts and the sender is
>>considered secondary, but if someone writes an article theorizing about
>>a subject in the WolfeWiki, then it might be wise to clearly mark out
>>who the writer/sender is.
> 
> I disagree. We can source it to emails, which should be enough, and
> besides, theories should stand or fall on their own merit.

If all theorizing intially takes place here on the list then this isn't 
a problem, but what if people start writing directly for the wiki? I'm 
just saying that at least I would be interested in knowing who's behind 
the theories.

>> - I agree that it would probably be a good idea to give it a short and
>>clear name. OTOH, i also think that it would be pretty cool to call it
>>"Tracking Song", even it if could be somewhat confusing.
> 
> 
> Hmm. Don't get it. Where's that from?

It's the name of a novella in _The Island of Doctor Death and Other 
Stories and Other Stories_.


   // Jesper