Well honestly I'm handling the backend code but Luna's doing the hard lifting as far as getting everything uploaded properly and formatted correctly.

Honestly, I think I probably have the more exciting job, so Luna probably deserves more praise for sticking with it

Thanks though. It's weird knowing that if everything works properly, a lot of what I'm doing with the code is going to be completely invisible.

EDIT: Also if anyone feels like easing Luna's burden, a good place to start would be the redlinks in the archive page for Planes and Planeswalkers, since all of those are things in the archives and just need to be dropped into the system using the same basic format that the other pages use. Use Vasilias's page as guide for Planeswalkers and use... actually we don't have a full Plane article yet so feel free to totally set the standard for Plane pages I guess

I have a tiny window of time tomorrow and Sunday where I have nothing to grade and no commitments. I might try to make some stuff for at least my own characters and planes.

HOWEVER, during that relatively short time, I also have to read Barinellos's stories, read Tevish's stories, and I really need to work on some of my own stuff. So, I will certainly try to get some stuff written and uploaded for planeswalkers and planes, but I can't, in good conscious, make any promises.

Luna, who loves ya, baby? Two thumbs pointing at this guy!




I'm not going to pass up this chance to reference one of my all-time favorite Futurama moments:

God Entity: Bender, being God isn't easy. If you do too much, people get dependent on you. And if you do nothing, they lose hope. You have to use a light touch, like a safecracker or a pickpocket.
Bender: Or a guy who burns down a bar for the insurance money!
God Entity: Yes, if you make it look like an electrical thing. When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.




I'll try my best to do my duty this weekend.

I feel like reading other stuff is probably a higher priority. We'll manage

First, Thanks for the praise, but honestly the actual act of formatting and proofreading and all gives me a twinge of enjoyment. The reason I tend to put it off is the sheer amount of time it seems to take -- I have to keep up with school, try to make time to read things, and I tend to get seriously sidetracked by various things (most recently I've been spending hours a day on 2048 (seriously I can't stop please help)).

Secondly, the main problem of upholding a wiki/making a page for every work/linking everything correctly is due mostly to small number of people we have doing it. Even considering all M:EMbers currently active, that's what, a dozen or so people? Some people, of course, won't even be involved in maintaining our portion of the wiki, and I doubt anyone outside of the project will be helping. If, hypothetically, we had a large group of visitors helping (or a large M:EMbership), it wouldn't be too difficult to uphold the model. I still maintain that a properly set-up wiki would help navigation immensely (not that I know how I would go about properly setting it up).

Don't forget also that the hardest part of something like this is usually the initial build. Like how currently our Archives are probably less than half full. Once things are formatted, it's usually easy to apply minor edits across a few projects (like, say, adding "appears in" to character dossiers). Creating pages to begin with, and decided on what a proper format to start, is the early learning process of the difficulty curve.

Third, if that was a massive wall of text, then we need a new term for sized. That between a medium to a medium-rare level of text size for me.

Lastly, the problem of feasibly mapping out the Archive is why I'm constructing an interconnectivity-flowchart for the Archives as I work through them. Knowing where the links are to begin with is where the bulk of time is going in that.

Just de-redlinked Larasa and Morgan and... ye gods, that was not as easy as I thought it would be, getting the formatting to line up right.

As a side note, noticing that Aria (does ANYONE remember her?) wasn't in the NGA archives yet made me think I want to make her an Open character rather than Public as I think she was (While Illarion is going to turn out public, much to my chagrin. I just can't lay enough groundwork to justify Open. If he builds work as public I might release it once we have a body of precedent to go off like the one I intended to make), but that we don't have a "small questions" thread.

I just did Fisco and yes, it's definitely not as easy as it might be.

Now imagine if you had to format the full infobox table each time you wanted to create a new page...

And yes I do remember Aria. I should poke Yxoque to see if he's going to do that story with her and Gruff. That was him, right?

In fact I should poke him in general since he's been rather absent of late and I don't want him to miss all this wiki stuff.

In other news, I've created a new template after de-redlinking Before the Dawn. {{NoStub}} will apply the handy "Not a Stub" text to short articles like our spoiler-free story articles.

That's handy! And will be useful for shorter character pages and the like, as I'm sure we'll end up with a few of those for characters that recur but don't have major roles to play.

I'm still really not sold on the idea of story articles in general though. The more I think about it the less sense it makes to me, honestly. It feels like adding wiki functionality for the sake of adding wiki functionality, and while I've laid out numerous downsides I don't think anyone's actually presented an upside to doing things this way. Like, if we're doing this, we might as well move literally EVERYTHING to the wiki and just have the stories live on wiki pages. Why add an extra step for people? What does that accomplish?

Incidentally, if anyone wants to see my proposed functionality for the archives as grouped by character/plane, the "Stories About Fisco Vane" link in the archives works properly now. I actually really like it. It feels very smooth and intuitive to me, regardless of whether the links go to wiki pages or to the stories themselves.

I don;t think we should Wiki the project. I think a Project Gutenberg/JSTOR distribution model is the future, but for this point in time, when we have a Wiki, I can think of a reason for the story NoStubs: when we're writing more substantive articles and need to reference we can reference the [[story]] not the [omgoutsidehyperlink.NGA.wtf/127.0.0.1/story_Lives_here/&page=666 story]

I think it's a fine line to walk, and as Tevish says, there are certain works that have information attached to them that isn't in the story itself that I think should be preserved. Examples I can think of:

• Kiss of the Shorecerers is a satire piece
• Two Bullets is our longest work so far and also the first work voted in involving Jakkard
• numerous works set in Jakkard that got voted in before the Jakkard style guide was finished
• Erik and the Wishmonger was written as a challenge to write a story involving unicorns and happy endings at a fourth-grade reading level
• Song of Dominia was originally written as a reply to someone looking for a quick summary of the Magic timeline
• numerous works that were submitted to pre-M:EM story challenges

I'd like others to know these things. We don't have to include summaries for every works - and, in fact, looking at Fisco's page makes me think we may need to re-think the way we make dossier and style guide pages - but there are a number of things I'd like to see from a wiki. For one thing, I have become aware lately how we've never actually explained the terms M:EMber or M:EMperor despite how often we throw them around.

Hmm, alright, that does make sense. I see what you're saying. And it wouldn't really make sense to put that information on an archive page since it would get too cluttered...

although maybe to get around the extra click step problem in the archives and on character pages we could just include a link to the story and to the wiki page? So,

?

That seems like it might be a viable compromise, since it preserves all the necessary information without creating a two-stage access process and not necessitating the creation of wiki pages for stories that don't need them.

Doesn't solve the problem of the labor that goes into creating all those pages, of course. That might just be something we have to grit our teeth and accept as inevitable though

What about Fisco's page is making you rethink the formatting for dossier pages, Luna?

I mean... the thing that jumps out at me is that WOW that page is LOOOOONG. Mostly because of the story introduction and the lengthy Q&A. And also there's a whole list of spells, which is great, but I don't think there's actual autocard functionality on the wiki yet so at the moment it's like barely useful. We should ask Sapper or Welder whether they can add autocarding for us...

It does solve the problem, mostly

As far as re-organizing the Archives page... I think that should be done overall. By setting/theme seems reasonable to me, though I don't know about everyone else.

Setting and Character should cover... well, almost everything, actually. There's only a handful of stories that would fit something else, and I think they ALL could be grouped under "block"--i.e. the Future Sight stories.

I'm not opposed to adding a by-theme organization too, since y'all know I love themes. What would that look like?

Well the big ones are setting and character: Fisco stories, Adrisar stories. Some would have to appear in two lists or based on what's more major (for instance, I would probably define crooked house as Adrisar). We could have a few categories for other themes where neither setting nor a repeat character applies.

Ok so I updated the Archive page to mirror the functionality we're talking about.

I like how this looks, and I like the two-link solution for stories with wiki entries.

Like you say, Fisco's page is long. But look at where most of that bulk is coming from: a full short-story introduction and the archived dialogue from an "Ask Fisco Vane" thread. Both of those, I feel, don't need to be included in a wiki if we're not hosting story works on it.

But then removing them brings a major problem. For one thing, inconsistency. More importantly, removing just those story elements will result in a huge drop in people who would actually read that portion, because everything else about the dossier would remain and only a few curious people would follow the forum link to see if maybe there's something in the Archive pages that they missed.

I think we may need to re-think how these pages are set up, to perhaps not include all of the dossier // style guides in them, but rather broad overviews with a "More info can be found [http://forumlink.M:EM_Archives.com.php?&f=5709834&pid=4 | here]." link. It would, perhaps, solve issues of establishing set parameters for every walker's Archived dossier page, by setting it up something like this:



This should compile at a glance the information I feel would need to be included in a character's page.

A few things of note:

• Delete the "He speaks" section. It's good characterization, but it doesn't fit with a wiki page.
• Now that the art thumbnail is working and assigned to the infobox, I feel the portrait should be excluded from the Art section, because it's just sitting there as a huge duplicate.
• Should his status be changed to "Active & Public" since he's still in limbo with the Renn story?

I do like the look of the double-links, though. Since not all works are going to have wiki pages, I think it's a nice compromise.

Adrisar is a proper blue link now. I'd like the opinion of our other participants on whether or not its format makes a good one for Planes. (it is missing an info box with author/status details, but I have no idea how to design those.)

I'll have to check it out later.

I just wanted to mention, another character page that has non-dossier information: Atalan & Katalin, having been written for Yanmato and my flavor voting game The Gathering.

I added the infobox template. Sorry, I forgot to put documentation into the template. It's there now. Didn't know what you wanted for the information so I left it blank