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Onion Knight
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Yeah, well, trying to upgrade and at the moment something isn't quite working. May be a day or two before it's back up and running, for all I know. :)

Edited by Ran
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It would be great to have a more modern style in depth encyclopedia.

I don't see why you don't count The Tower of the Hand as an encyclopedia though. Seems like one to me, and it's pretty good.

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It would be great to have a more modern style in depth encyclopedia.

I don't see why you don't count The Tower of the Hand as an encyclopedia though. Seems like one to me, and it's pretty good.

It is good, but they usually restrain themselves to quotations from the books and tend towards brief summaries. They don't always bring in other sources (such as GRRM's comments in the SSM, the RPG etc) either.

The Concordenance in the Citadel here on Westeros.org is also an excellent resource which I was using many years before I joined the board :) And the map there is the most definitive one of Westeros so far.

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The wiki is (sort of) up again. I don't think uploads will be working at the moment, as there's a problem getting the settings in place (will need Sparks to change the ownership of an auto-generated settings file from root to our user account to be able to change that). And for some reason one of the templates which worked just fine on 1.14 seems borked on the front page, but won't mess with that just yet.

ETA: Fixed the template issue -- needed to reinstall extensions. My shiny new logo refuses to show up now, though. Not sure why, but too tired to mess with it longer. Something to look at tomorrow. Uploads ought to be working, I think -- again, not absolutely sure, so if someone would test and report back it'd be much appreciated.

Edited by Ran
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It seems to be working, in a very slow and creaky fashion, but yes it is up again :) No shiny logo, but uploads seem to be possible.

May have spoken too fast. The 'edit page' button has vanished so you can't change anything.

Edited by Werthead
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Okay, that should be fixed too, I think. The editing I mean. I did notice 1.14 seems a little slower, probably some configuration stuff. I do know uploading will be rather slow, because there's a firm cap on how much bandwidth we have for uploading, IIRC. I'm going to see about putting in an extension that will allow multiple file uploads, so one can just start a bunch and forget about it rather than having to wait for one upload to end before starting another.

But for some other day. Today's enough fooling around with it, I guess. :)

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Surely there must be a different situation on Wikia though, as many other Wikias have absolutely tons of copyrighted pictures…

As far as I know Wikia content is GFDL, just as Wikipedia. If there are copyright infringements, I suspect it’s because the user base is too small and none of them cares. Wikipedia also had lots of copyrighted material (including Amok images on the Song pages). These are only removed by shitstorm and a large group of users (like me) who are willing to undertake this task. For free.

I wanted to ask about that map as I wanted to use it on the Wikia. So I can go ahead, modify it for specific purposes and put it up on there without a problem as long as I credit it to you?

Absolutely.

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It would be great to have a more modern style in depth encyclopedia.

I don't see why you don't count The Tower of the Hand as an encyclopedia though. Seems like one to me, and it's pretty good.

And let me reiterate that after years and years no wiki-based effort has come even close to the level or depth of coverage that Tower has. There is no reason to assume that infrastructure (such as licensing or ease of editing) is the determining factor for that.

But if suddenly, after years and year, a large group of contributors manifests itself that is able to make content that is almost as good as Tower – surprise me.

But it would be much better if we as a community would channel that kind of enthusiasm into improving Wikipedia. Because Wikipedia is huge. The fandom, the work, GRRM, — it would all benefit much more from stellar Wikipedia coverage than from something that is “almost as good as Tower of the Hand, but without the images.â€

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I see Wikia seems to come with a very long list of extensions, which may also explain some of the apparent features that it has that Mediawiki doesn't have out of the box. I'll start going through the list and see which of them seem like interesting additions.

If any stand out that people would like to see added, just say. I have had to remove the TheoryTab, from Lostpedia, because the code doesn't work on 1.14 and the updated code doesn't seem to have been released.

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As far as I know Wikia content is GFDL, just as Wikipedia. If there are copyright infringements, I suspect it’s because the user base is too small and none of them cares.

The Star Trek and Lost bases are small? :stunned:

Looking through Memory Alpha and Lostpedia pretty much all the images are covered by the Copyrighted-but-it's-Fair-Use clause, which as I said I'm guessing extends to publicity photos (although a lot of those pictures are screen-grabs rather than official screenshots released by Paramount or ABC). I conclude that means that the various TV series articles can be illustrated with screenshots once it gets underway, but that actual physically-created media, like artwork, is out of bounds unless specifically released into the public domain (like your map) or justifiable under fair use for illustrative purposes (we can put up the cover of The Art of Ice and Fire but none of the interior art).

But it would be much better if we as a community would channel that kind of enthusiasm into improving Wikipedia. Because Wikipedia is huge. The fandom, the work, GRRM, — it would all benefit much more from stellar Wikipedia coverage than from something that is "almost as good as Tower of the Hand, but without the images."

Didn't the Wikipedia team conclude that we'd gone as far as we could without getting hit with tons of AFDs? Personally I think we were pushing it with Historical Wars, War of the Usurper and Strongholds of A Song of Ice and Fire (some of which I created but hey ;) ), which are not really notable outside of the series itself. The benefit of the Wiki (either one) is that there is no limit to notability. If you want an individual article on the birds nesting in the Red Keep's roof you can do that.

If you mean we should try to campaign to change Wikipedia's rules, I'm not sure that the current system (broad pages on Wikipedia, detailed pages on the franchise's dedicated Wikia) isn't a decent way of dealing with the issue.

But if suddenly, after years and year, a large group of contributors manifests itself that is able to make content that is almost as good as Tower – surprise me.

Meh, you just need to start the ball rolling and others will eventually turn up. If we rustled up a dozen people willing to work on modding Medieval 2 for Westeros, I'm sure there's plenty of people out there willing to write a two-paragraph article on the Inn of the Kneeling Man.

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I wonder if there were a way to create a randomly generated list of articles and sort of have those show up here on the forum as a kind of RSS feed in a sidebar. Hmm... Might increase the visibility of the wiki and lead to more editing.

I am going to see about whether something like that is possible. I know there's a way to pull RSS feeds into wikis, but not sure if the reverse is possible.

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Personally I think we were pushing it with Historical Wars, War of the Usurper and Strongholds of A Song of Ice and Fire (some of which I created but hey ;) ), which are not really notable outside of the series itself.

Don’t forget Tourneys in A Song of Ice and Fire, my own attempt at pushing the Wikipedia notability envelope as far as possible.

If you want an individual article on the birds nesting in the Red Keep's roof you can do that.

I understand. My point, several years ago, was that we don’t seem to have the volume of contributors to even keep an articles on the major characters alive. Birds nesting in the Red Keep are a pipe dream.

One of the conclusions of wikiing is that infrastructure is easy. Content is hard. Put up a new wiki, and some enthusiastic geek will immediately start constructing Categories of pages, and build navigation boxes, and stubby articles for Septas of a Song of Ice and Fire. He will then step proudly back and leave the playing field to the mere mortals who he thinks are eager to fill that scaffolding with Good Content.

But that’s not how it works. Ever.

It works by mere mortals producing Good Content. If and when the Good Content overflows its own article, somebody can start thinking about infrastructure. So far, that seems to be the only way that collaborative content production actually Gets. Stuff. Done.

Content is Hard Work.

So if and when the Birds in the Red Keep of a Song of Ice and Fire actually threatens to overflow the lenient boundaries set by the Wikipedia content policy, them maybe we can think about doing something about the pressing need for a new outlet.

But that doesn’t seem to be the case. At all.

The “board wiki†did not much else than copy existing Good Content from Wikipedia and massage it a bit. Very little new content was added, and certainly not much that couldn’t have existed perfectly well under Wikipedia. (Not that such content could not conceivably exist. The board wiki would be a good home for a speculative, collaborative timeline, for example. Such a think could not exist on Wikipedia.) So the board wiki is a good proof of my point: infrastructure (in this case, a fresh wiki with different policies than Wikipedia) is easy. But infrastructure doesn’t lead to content.

But if the next two or three years prove me wrong, you’ll find a big and happy smile on my face. Get writing, folks!

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The “board wiki†did not much else than copy existing Good Content from Wikipedia and massage it a bit. Very little new content was added, and certainly not much that couldn’t have existed perfectly well under Wikipedia.

I can't agree with this assertion. I'd suggest you to have a look on the articles from the category, read some of the entries for the Targaryen Kings, or just see the huge Years after Aegon's Landing. There was plenty of good original work done on the wiki. And it still has great potential.

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And it's a shame that there is no appropriate asoiaf encyclopedia on the internetz(no, nor the Citadel or tower of the hand applies for "encyclopedia").

SOMETHING MUST BE DONE!

Ideas?

In fact, there is one. But not in English.

The French ASOIAF wiki encyclopaedia is very very complete : http://www.lagardedenuit.com/wiki/index.php?title=Accueil

More than 3200 articles, images, categories... All you want to know about ASOIAF is on it. If you wanna translate & use content to complete english wiki, you can of course, it's free content... Well you just need French-English translaters. You can also contact me for more informations, I'm one of the admins of this wiki.

Edited by Evrach
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Wow, amazing work. I love the organization you've put to it, too! Marvellous work from the French fans. :)

Wish I had time to learn more about the templating system. Scafloc did a lot of work importing and creating templates, and continuing that would be very nice. Particularly those organizational tabs at the top, which are a great idea.

Edited by Ran
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If you wanna translate & use content to complete english wiki, you can of course, it's free content...

Great stuff. Could you point us to the agreement you got from Amok for this? We’ve tried something like that for a long time at Wikipedia.

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Thank you Ran. Did you notice you had your own page ? (well... sort of ^^) :thumbsup: http://www.lagardedenuit.com/wiki/index.ph..._l%27Exil%C3%A9

Template system is not so difficult to learn. I didn't know anything about wiki & CSS when I started, and I created all the website structure. It takes one year and a team of four (absolutely no-life) people to do this. Well it is not absolutely complete of course. Some arms are missing & some articles are missing too or have to be re-written.

The tabs - in fact, a portal system like on wikipedia - are very recent, we decided it when wiki became so complexe that categories weren't enough to organise articles.

Great stuff. Could you point us to the agreement you got from Amok for this? We’ve tried something like that for a long time at Wikipedia.

It's not me that were in contact with Amok, but I can ask to the people who were. Amok refuses the first time we asked him, but he changed his mind when we asked again few moths later when the wiki had grown-up. He allowed us to use his images with the condition of display the « Image by Amok© » on every image, a link to his website in each image page & a link to his website on the Main Page.

Edited by Evrach
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He allowed us to use his images with the condition of display the « Image by Amok© » on every image, a link to his website in each image page & a link to his website on the Main Page.

Well, for his sake, I hope you’ve done your homework on this. As far as I can see from the page footer, all your content is released under GFDL. I’m far from an expert in these matters, but to my untrained (but paranoid eye) this looks like a contradiction.

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