Talk:World of Greyhawk Timeline

Establishing a Working Plan for the Timeline

I think we (being as many wiki users as possible) ought to get together and decide exactly what the Portal and the Timeline are going to be.

There's certainly a need for a "Timeline" page, beginning with that word, for search engine optimization reasons. When a user makes a search looking for a "timeline", something starting with "World of ..." isn't going to pop up automatically, and they'll have to sift through all the pages mentioning the word "timeline" to find what they're looking for.
Honestly, I think we ought to move "Timeline (Greyhawk)" to just "Timeline" so the page will direct to that page when they enter it, just like "typing "Procan" in a search goes directly to that page without the need to look for results. The word "timeline" is in the top two search words on the wiki. #1 being gods/deities. It *really* needs to have a page of its own.
Either that, or delete it altogether, and put in a page simply called "Timeline".

I think, however, that page needs to have its Redirect go to Portal:History to give readers options about what exactly it is they want to look at. We can include different sections for timelines from published sources, GH authors, LG, Dragon, and OJ sources all separately in various places, if we like. And this page can be linked from there like the other varieties of pages. If this is done, though, we ought to work on a plan to make them uniform, rather than changing details or information on one page and letting the others languish with different versions or information.

When we began working on these pages, it was with the intent of merging all the various timeline pages that had cropped up over the years on the wiki. But it was not to move all the information which had been pooled into Portal:History away from that page and subsume it all into a separate project. If we prefer to separate the timelines, and we're interested in not including some work, due to an "Apocryphal" status, maybe we can find time or way to have a conversation about it. This talk page isn't a bad place to do that kind of thing. We should define what is and isn't aprocryphal.

But, most importantly information needs to be moved, rather than deleted. We definitely do not want to be deletive.
If we decide some of the material shouldn't be on one timeline or another, it can have its own. And we can build out several versions, like Age of Worms Timeline has its own. --Icarus (talk) 01:44, 3 July 2020 (CDT)

First, sorry for overwriting your article to World of Greyhawk Timeline just now; I had been adding events from Expedition to the Ruins of Greyhawk, and had to either overwrite or lose these edits.

However, I'm also of the opinion that the "Source required" notices are important. Every entry should reference a primary source so that readers can be confident that the information is reliable and accurate; in the absence of this, "source required" informs editors that they have a duty to research the topic and find a source, and I've added sources for several "source required" entries so far as I've managed to find sources.

My assumption is that the wiki exists as a reference to official Greyhawk material only. Recently, I removed several timeline entries which had no source other than Oerth Journal #1, a fan work, on the basis that this is not official content.

At current, "World of Greyhawk Timeline" contains all entries from all timeline articles, including the timeline at Portal:History (except non-canon entries). This is why I removed the timeline from Portal:History, since it's outdated duplicate content. Additionally, according to Wikipedia:Portal, portals should be indexes to articles on a topic; the Fandom wiki may have moved its "Timeline" article to Portal:History, but this is not what the Portal namespace is intended for.

I'm not certain whether "World of Greyhawk Timeline" or "Timeline" would be superior SEO. I redirected "Timeline (Greyhawk)" to "World of Greyhawk Timeline" on the assumption that the reader wants the timeline when they go to the timeline, and "Timeline (Greyhawk)" was just a redirect page which nothing else on the wiki links to. I've also set up Timeline as a redirect to "World of Greyhawk Timeline" for now, so that if someone types Timeline they'll get the timeline. Rexidos (talk) 03:11, 3 July 2020 (CDT)

Good morning!

There's a couple of things I want to spotlight first, because you made some very good points, and they're some of the most important in this discussion.

I'm going to break out each topic, to make it easier to respond, so replies don't get lost in a thread.

Thanks for taking the time to discuss all of these things here, so hopefully we can get others to pipe in, as well. <hope>

--Icarus (talk) 12:03, 3 July 2020 (CDT)

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Purpose of a "Portal"

The first is about what a "Portal" is supposed to be and how it's supposed to function. You're absolutely right. the Portal should be a place where people can find different information about a topic and find varying directions their research can go, depending on the list or table of things shown. Not unlike a Differentiation page, in concept. That's absolutely what we want Portal:History to be. A good example of this would be Living Greyhawk:Main Page - though, when that was made, the author wasn't aware of the "Portal" page type. The catch of it is that the Timeline wasn't even close to complete. It was barely beyond its first step, which was to simply consolidate all the information, rather than having information scattered or fractured in several different places. The process had begun of collecting the data so it could be seen what needed to be broken out where, and it would be clear (in the Edit History) what information had been moved, and to where.
We agree with you entirely that the Portal needs to be something more than just a single stream of data with everything dumped there. Portals have purpose and a certain way to function, and I think we should work on codifying that to be what it's intended.
--Icarus (talk) 12:03, 3 July 2020 (CDT)

My thinking is that a portal should present more or less a complete overview of the content available on that topic. For example, there might be a Portal:Geography which would include a map, a list of regions, kingdoms, terrain, and so on; or at least links to articles titled like "Regions of Greyhawk", "Mountains of Greyhawk", etc. The general idea is that you should ultimately be able to get to all geography articles from Portal:Geography, all history articles from Portal:History, and so on; and get to all portals from the front page. Rexidos (talk) 18:50, 3 July 2020 (CDT)

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Citations needed

The next point I absolutely agree with was when you said, "Every entry should reference a primary source so that readers can be confident that the information is reliable ...".
Seldom have more true words been written.
This with a doubt is the way any wiki should be. And it drives me absolutely bonkers when I can't tell if someone wrote something pulled from a published source, or not. There's no disagreement there, in any way. The only caveat is that if we put "Source required", that's kind of a formatting policy for the entire wiki. If we do it on this page, it needs to be done throughout the wiki for sake of consistency. Generally, if it's not cited, one should presume that it needs to be cited. That's true anywhere on the wiki.

There's actually a huge variety of "source needed" templates. I think we should consider using something like those, if we see this kind of notation as necessary. Otherwise, I don't think adding it to most (or many) entries in timelines is a necessary note - unless we use a template to make that note everywhere, it should just be assumed citations are always needed for everything. I will let the reversion putting "Source required" back in stand, because I don't want to go back and forth over a stylistic preference to how an editor likes to see it. Thus, here we are having a great conversation about ways to improve the wiki by adding a new template. :D
Do you have any thoughts on which citation templates you might like to use? Do we just need {{Citation needed}}, or do we also need things like {{Chronology citation needed}}, {{Citation needed span}}, {{Chronology citation needed}}, {{Incomplete short citation}}, or {{Verify source}}. And do we also need things like {{Who}}, {{By whom}}, {{When}}, {{Vague}}. {{Clarify}}. {{Dubious}}. or {{POV statement}}, as well?
--Icarus (talk) 12:03, 3 July 2020 (CDT)

For general articles, I feel that citations aren't mandatory on every sentence, but they are very useful, for a few reasons:

• They reassure readers of the veracity of content
• They allow readers to give preferential weighting to sources; e.g. to ignore Living Greyhawk content, or
• They let readers know which sourcebooks to consult for further reading
• They let editors know which sources have already been assessed
• On suspicious or particularly unlikely statements, the absence of a citation lets editors know that they need to research the topic, and allows readers to be skeptical; a "citation required" notice also serves to advise other editors to do the same

I don't think we need to put "citation needed" on every sentence, but such a template would be useful for cases where a statement is particularly dubious. I don't think the other citation templates are required just yet; lets see if they become necessary.

One perhaps significant suggestion is that, if you look at other wikis (Wikipedia, Forgotten Realms wiki), they've actually abolished their Bibliography sections in favour of References only. The old Canonfire Greyhawk wiki used Bibliography because that's what Wikipedia used in its Greyhawk articles when they were imported, but it was superceded at Wikipedia by References, which link specific sections of text to individual sources and page numbers. With Bibliography-only, the reader would have to read the entire bibliography to prove any one statement to be unsourced. If the references are complete, the References section would include everything that was in the bibliography. Rexidos (talk) 18:50, 3 July 2020 (CDT)

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Sources

This topic is a little more difficult. But I want to be careful to not have this devolve into a canon-debate.

"Canon" is hotly debated in many circles. I tend to try to simply avoid them in most forums. But, it's something that's come up on the wiki time and time again. We've even tried considering a way to have more than one namespace where officially published content can be put in one namesspace, fanon in another, and aporyphal things in a third, just to avoid these things.
Our goal is not really to define what canon is, or who should use what.
We'd rather present information that's most useful to our readers; information which our users are looking for. And if that includes making pages that are clearly stipulated as creating apocrypha, we'll simply note it somewhere on the page ... as some pages including LG material already have in separate sections. (But, we need to not simply remove all reference to some content.) The OJ is difficult to quantify, since it has canon, things which later became canon, completely fanon things, and things written by official GH authors but never placed in official products.

But, if we remove OJ content, then we also ought to remove reference to LG and Canonfire content or not use them in citation. If we're sticking strictly with "canon", those were fan-written, too.

But, as far as the Suel timeline, it was written by Len Lakofka. That's not quite the same as a fan making up new material. But, it's difficult to quantify where information goes that's from a published GH author who's the only one who wrote on the topic at the time. He was publishing stuff on the Suel about which he wrote so much early content, because Gygax gave him sort of carte blanche to expand the lore on them. No, it wasn't "official", but, that's where the sticky wicket comes in, and places the content in an unusual category. It doesn't matter whether it was in the OJ, or in The Official Star Trek Guide to Dumbledore's TARDIS. ;) LOL. It's not about removing it simply because the OJ isn't "canon". It's about including it because it's from Len Lakofka.

That being said, as I said above, I think we can find a way to work on the Portal, and make it into a more index- or table-structured format, where we can put different timelines; Suel Timeline, Age of Worms timeline, WoG Timeline, GH2000 Timeline, as well as using the space to define terms like some of the Ages, Epochs, Eras, etc., in addition to providing other links to things like calendars, historical events, important in-character dates of published boxed sets, and giving out-of-character information about when some timeline elements were created and by which authors.
--Icarus (talk) 12:03, 3 July 2020 (CDT)

Canon is a tricky topic. The Forgotten Realms Wiki canon policy has it that Ed Greenwood's word is canon, superceded only by official published works. The Greyhawk canon article at this wiki suggests three divisions (canon, apocryphal, fanon), with fanworks by Greyhawk published authors promoted to apocryphal.

My suggestion is that article should focus primarily on canon, but articles should have a section at the end titled Apocrypha which details non-canon and notable fan works; additionally, side-notes in the article may give apocryphal details where relevant. This approach is used well by Star Trek wiki Memory Alpha.

Perhaps the timeline in particular should have two separate articles: a canon timeline, and an apocryphal timeline. Individual events or series of events which are too specific to appear in the main timeline might get their own detailed timeline or history articles. Rexidos (talk) 18:50, 3 July 2020 (CDT)

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SEO

On a last note, the search-thing is something that's already been having data recorded for a year. But, just to be specific, I'm not talking about where it ranks in Google searches - that'd certainly be debatable which way SEO would work best. I'm referring to only the search function within the wiki, and what people who are already on the GHO wiki are searching for. It's that search I'm trying to improve: funtionality for current users. At some later point, we can talk about how best to improve Google (or other) SEO by adding meta-data to the pages, or sitemaps, indexing, or whatever.
--Icarus (talk) 12:03, 3 July 2020 (CDT)

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