I have gone ahead and created a wiki page to serve as a collection of elevator pitches for our characters and planes. You can find our new M:EM Elevator...

Here!

Admittedly, I was sort of winging the formatting here, so if anyone wants it to look differently...well, it's a wiki, so knock yourselves out! Incidentally, I have only written in elevator pitches for my own stuff, and while I might try to upload preexisting pitches for other characters and planes, it will likely be a while before I do. Therefore, everyone should feel free to do their own if they want.

Also, please note that despite what you all may think of me, I'm not perfect...

Okay, stop laughing...

...anyway, I may well have made mistakes here, so if I left anyone or anyplace out, let me know or feel free to fix it!

I read Raiker Venn's pitch and immediately Sympathy for the Devil started playing in my head.

Credit where it's due, I believe Keeper wrote that. (The pitch, not the Rolling Stones song...)

Thank you for starting this Raven!

1. I don't know anything about editing the NGA wiki, do I need an account and stuff?

2. The winning entries to the Future Sight and Mirrodin anthology contests each included at least one story that introduced planes and/or planeswalkers. Are those included in M:EM?

3. I would like where possible to add the symbols for public, private, open, active, contested, and so forth, and colors, species, and homeplanes of planeswalkers. Is it OK for me to add that info?

4. I'd also like to separate Planeswalkers from other Characters, and add a section for Artifacts. (I guess "other Characters" would include members of the Dominia Cabal who may or may not have been planeswalkers.)

The wiki is NGA just like the forums. It's my understanding that if you have an account over here, you should be able to use the wiki just like the rest of us.

I'm not familiar with either of those anthologies, unfortunately. What I put up is solely based on what's been ported over. As much as I would like to, with teaching four classes and writing an average of 6000 words a week, I just don't have time to hunt down everything, nice as that would be.

3. I have no problem with you adding those, if they're available. I tried to add species to my own (way more humans than I realized...) but I didn't mention color, although that should be fairly easy, I believe.

4. The only reason I didn't separate planeswalkers from characters is because there is, I believe, only one non-'walker on the list I uploaded (Jackie). I know there are others, though, so I have no problem if you think that division is important.

I intended to add an artifact section at some point, but I didn't want Barinellos (who has the lion's share of artifacts) to feel like he was obligated to make pitched for all of them.

But yeah, mostly I just wanted to get it started. Feel free to edit it as you like.

1.

2. There's a lot of implied canon. If you're interested in finding and listing all of them, feel free. Don't expect the rest of us to jump when you say, though.

3. You might need to ask the mods to add the symbols to the wiki; it's my understanding that pretty much the only symbols supported on the wiki are the mana symbols.

4. Sounds good to me, though with the with the way things are growing recently and the unwieldy-ness of the Archive map, I'm thinking of transferring the map information to an excel-type file.

What happened to the rough list someone put together a while back of other significant implied canon characters? Some of that info might be available for copying and pasting.

Yeah I don't think the old symbols are really used anywhere on the Wiki so far, since they always kinda confused people and since I didn't feel like fiddling around with them when I was first porting stuff over. We could try adding them but I'm not sure there's a huge need for them at this point.

The red-eyed woman sighed, and shook her head.

"Forever relegated to the kiddie table," she said. "Oh well. Like the food here better, anyway."

Hey! I'm trying my best to create you up some company here!
I mean.... Lilin and you will.... okay, you might end up killing each other, but you have so much in common!
which is... why you might end up killing each other.

Jackie shrugged. "I like people who remind me of me," she said. "Just so long as they don't try to help themselves to what's mine. I've never been one for sharing."

Lilin is VERY good at sharing.
The problem is you might not actually want what she's going to give you.

In all seriousness, I wonder what sort of criteria we should have for characters in general, and non-'walkers specifically. I mean, Merritt from "An Angel Blinked" is a non-'walker main character that's in the archives. Likewise with the Orzhov characters Ruwin and Tevish made for their respective Ravnica stories. But all of those sort of feel like one-off stories. Of course, I don't think anyone (including Orcish) expected Jackie to get a second story, and look how she took off?

So, does a non-walker need to have more than one story? Or is it more than that? And is it fair for 'walkers to get a pass on that guideline? I mean, one or two of the 'walkers don't even have one story! What do people think?

"Now that's a problem I have experience dealing with," Jackie said. "People have been trying to give me things I didn't want for a long time now. Mostly small, metal things, moving at high speed."

The red-eyed woman grinned, revealing her gold teeth.

"In which case, I have found it is much more fun to give than to receive."

For lack of a more objective answer, my instinct is to use lists like these as judgment criteria in and of themselves -- any character who someone thinks is interesting enough to go on the list, they should feel free to put on the list?

I think it boils down to impact.
How much impact does the character have in a singular story? If the answer would be "enough narratively" then they could probably carry another story and might benefit from the list. If the answer is "enough per setting influence" then they might should go on the list too.

Is that a go-ahead to specifically include planes and planeswalkers named in the anthologies?

As far as I'm concerned, that would be perfectly fine. Eventually, we will probably expand it to name-dropped planes that currently mean nothing, too. But that's pretty ambitious, all things considered.

For clarity's sake, my strategy with the main index of the archive has been to add people to the main index and give them pages of their own if they A. occur in two or more stories and B. appear in works that otherwise would not be findable directly from the index except by way of "Other Stories" OR C. are Jackie OR D. have a dossier.

So, Raiker has a PAGE but not a DOSSIER because he fulfills both conditions A. and B. despite failing D. (And C. obviously.)