Wiki draft proposal

I've been thinking about this for a while, and I think any wiki we start on Wolfe's work should be categorized tripartitely: One section should be for Urth ML emails. This would make it much easier to reference assertions and theories, especially since it seems that a number of messages are primary sources, not merely secondary sources. And of course, if they are hosted on the wiki itself, one could run a bot or some sort of bot to auto-link phrases to their pages. (Now that I think of it, one could compile a list of words, phrases, and subjects from the mass of texts). I'm not too sure about the copyright status, however: I'm pretty sure the list owner can allow them to be posted on a wiki (since he already has the right to so post them in a publicly accessible archive), but I don't know how that factors into reditributions and licensing. So having a separate section would allow us to segregate non-Free content from the Free content. The second section would be articles. Straightforward factual articles on Wolfe, relevant authors, his books and short stories, etc. Think like what Wikipedia currently has. I guess we could import Wikipedia policies wholesale for this section: verifiable, NPOV, no personal attacks, etc. This section we could grab straight from Wikipedia. About all we'd have to do is add a GFDL notice (assuming we decide to go with a non-GFDL license, or cross-license) and perhaps swap out internal Wikipedia links for interwiki links. Of course, these articles would link (perhaps in the relevant sections) to the third section... which is the section of interest to us all: The third section would be distilled discussions and theories. The idea is to condense all the verbiage and back and forth into a single page of pros and cons (ie. the evidence that, say, Thecla is the hermaphrodite lover of the Autarch would be presented on its own page, perhaps titled "Theclas as hermaphrodite"; the evidence for it would be presented, linking to the relevant emails, with textual citations and such, and then the opposed side. Talk pages can be used to hammer out the list, or it can be done on-list.) Categories could be very useful for sections two and three. An off-the-cuff example: A top-level category could be Authors, with Gene Wolfe in it, and then Books and Short Stories in the Wolfe cat, books being divided into Short Sun, New Sun, Peace, Soldier etc. categories. Then one has the articles on the individual novels. If a character appears in all the books, and so doesn't fit into a single book's category, they would go in the New Sun category, but minor characters could go into only one book's category (ie. Triskele would go into the New Sun cat, but the serving boy at the restaurant in SotT would be in the Shadow of the Torturer cat (if that's the right book)). Now, no doubt someone will suggest that the wiki host the various Wolfe interviews and miscellany available online. I won't address these: technically those are copyright violations (at least, I haven't seen any under any sort of Free license), and so it would be unconscionable for me to advise Ranjit to set up a wiki and work to populate it with stuff that exposes him, the hoster, to legal retribution. Now, perhaps he doesn't mind the risk, or perhaps Wolfe has made known an intention not to prosecute any fans, but it's up to Ranjit, not me, or us, for that matter. We also need a name. Lupinepedia, Wolfepedia, the Wolfe Wiki, the urth Wiki, just plain Urth.net... are all possible names. Now, the perfect name would be short, clever, clear, and be easily compressed (ie names based on Urth or Wolfe are good, as they make it easy to refer to, and they also make interwiki links from, say, Wikipedia, easy to do, so they look like [[w:c:Wolfe:Article|Article]] or [[Urth:Article|Article]] instead of something much longer). Just some thoughts. We also need to decide on licensing. Using the GFDL is a possibility but there are severe drawbacks that may more than counterwiegh the ease of using Wikipedia articles as a base: it's long, complex, cumbersome, unclear, and there are some bad features. I'll provide some links for further reading, if you want to know more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Free_Documentation_License#Criticisms_of_the_GFDL http://wikitravel.org/en/Wikitravel:Why_Wikitravel_isn%27t_GFDL http://home.twcny.rr.com/nerode/neroden/fdl.html http://people.debian.org/~srivasta/Position_Statement.xhtml There are quite a few possibilities w/r/t Free license. We could use a modified BSD license (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_license), a Creative Commons license (I like the Attribution-SA myself: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/1.0/), or a public domain license (no rights reserved, essentially). My personal preference would be to go with PD; it's simple, it's definitely Free, and it's not like we really need the protections of copyleft- who'll steal our content? And of course, if we decide to merge with Wikipedia some day, PD interoperates well with GFDL. Ok. So those are my thoughts on the subject. Look forward to hearing your comments and criticism. ~maru "A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct." _______________________________________________

On 5/9/06, Jesper Svedberg <jsvedberg at gmail.com> wrote: I have a few thoughts on how the Wiki should be structured. - There should be a bibliography on all stories and books with a synopsis and publishing history. A standardized format of structure of these articles should also be developed (for instance: 1. Title, 2. Publication data, 3. Synopsis, 4. Theories, 5. External links).

- There should be separate articles on important persons, objects and concepts that can be found in his works.

- 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.

- Theories and facts should be clearly separated. If there are theories about a subject, there should be a "Theories" section in the article with short descriptions of the theories and links to the separate articles. - I don't think there really is a point in copying material that is already online (such as interviews and the mailing list archives) into the Wiki when one can easily link to the external locations. If there are entries in the mailing list archives that for instance discuss the identity of Dorcas, then one could link to these entries in the article on Dorcas.

- Beyond this there are an endless amount of subjects that could be included in a wiki. One could have articles on different themes in Wolfe's work (for instance Memory, Religion or Mythology), articles on authors that have influenced him and in what way, articles on writers that have been influenced by him, or anything else that might seem relevant. - 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 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.

// Jesper

Jesper wrote: - Theories and facts should be clearly separated. If there are theories about a subject, there should be a "Theories" section in the article with short descriptions of the theories and links to the separate articles.

- 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've been thinking about this for a while, and I think any wiki we start on Wolfe's work should be categorized tripartitely: One section should be for Urth ML emails. This would make it much easier to reference assertions and theories, especially since it seems that a number of messages are primary sources, not merely secondary sources. And of course, if they are hosted on the wiki itself, one could run a bot or some sort of bot to auto-link phrases to their pages. (Now that I think of it, one could compile a list of words, phrases, and subjects from the mass of texts). I'm not too sure about the copyright status, however: I'm pretty sure the list owner can allow them to be posted on a wiki (since he already has the right to so post them in a publicly accessible archive), but I don't know how that factors into reditributions and licensing. So having a separate section would allow us to segregate non-Free content from the Free content. The second section would be articles. Straightforward factual articles on Wolfe, relevant authors, his books and short stories, etc. Think like what Wikipedia currently has. I guess we could import Wikipedia policies wholesale for this section: verifiable, NPOV, no personal attacks, etc. This section we could grab straight from Wikipedia. About all we'd have to do is add a GFDL notice (assuming we decide to go with a non-GFDL license, or cross-license) and perhaps swap out internal Wikipedia links for interwiki links. Of course, these articles would link (perhaps in the relevant sections) to the third section... which is the section of interest to us all: The third section would be distilled discussions and theories. The idea is to condense all the verbiage and back and forth into a single page of pros and cons (ie. the evidence that, say, Thecla is the hermaphrodite lover of the Autarch would be presented on its own page, perhaps titled "Theclas as hermaphrodite"; the evidence for it would be presented, linking to the relevant emails, with textual citations and such, and then the opposed side. Talk pages can be used to hammer out the list, or it can be done on-list.) Categories could be very useful for sections two and three. An off-the-cuff example: A top-level category could be Authors, with Gene Wolfe in it, and then Books and Short Stories in the Wolfe cat, books being divided into Short Sun, New Sun, Peace, Soldier etc. categories. Then one has the articles on the individual novels. If a character appears in all the books, and so doesn't fit into a single book's category, they would go in the New Sun category, but minor characters could go into only one book's category (ie. Triskele would go into the New Sun cat, but the serving boy at the restaurant in SotT would be in the Shadow of the Torturer cat (if that's the right book)). Now, no doubt someone will suggest that the wiki host the various Wolfe interviews and miscellany available online. I won't address these: technically those are copyright violations (at least, I haven't seen any under any sort of Free license), and so it would be unconscionable for me to advise Ranjit to set up a wiki and work to populate it with stuff that exposes him, the hoster, to legal retribution. Now, perhaps he doesn't mind the risk, or perhaps Wolfe has made known an intention not to prosecute any fans, but it's up to Ranjit, not me, or us, for that matter. We also need a name. Lupinepedia, Wolfepedia, the Wolfe Wiki, the urth Wiki, just plain Urth.net... are all possible names. Now, the perfect name would be short, clever, clear, and be easily compressed (ie names based on Urth or Wolfe are good, as they make it easy to refer to, and they also make interwiki links from, say, Wikipedia, easy to do, so they look like [[w:c:Wolfe:Article|Article]] or [[Urth:Article|Article]] instead of something much longer). Just some thoughts. We also need to decide on licensing. Using the GFDL is a possibility but there are severe drawbacks that may more than counterwiegh the ease of using Wikipedia articles as a base: it's long, complex, cumbersome, unclear, and there are some bad features. I'll provide some links for further reading, if you want to know more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Free_Documentation_License#Criticisms_of_the_GFDL http://wikitravel.org/en/Wikitravel:Why_Wikitravel_isn%27t_GFDL http://home.twcny.rr.com/nerode/neroden/fdl.html http://people.debian.org/~srivasta/Position_Statement.xhtml There are quite a few possibilities w/r/t Free license. We could use a modified BSD license (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_license), a Creative Commons license (I like the Attribution-SA myself: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/1.0/), or a public domain license (no rights reserved, essentially). My personal preference would be to go with PD; it's simple, it's definitely Free, and it's not like we really need the protections of copyleft- who'll steal our content? And of course, if we decide to merge with Wikipedia some day, PD interoperates well with GFDL. Ok. So those are my thoughts on the subject. Look forward to hearing your comments and criticism. ~maru "A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct." _______________________________________________

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.

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.

- 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.

- 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?

Jesper wrote:

- 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.

At the very least. I've seen some theories on this List better aired in an outhouse. I've made posts I wish I could take back -- but I can't. It's one thing to think out loud in public in a relatively small forum such as this, but it's a very different thing to have such thoughts presented with a presumption of authority or even credibility to a larger audience. I don't know that much about Wikipedia, but if Whomever's opinions are presented there as facts, then it is useless as an authority, and I could never in good conscience cite it as such. Democracy is a wonderful ideal, but not all opinions are equal.

On Wednesday 10 May 2006 05:31, Jesper Svedberg wrote: Roy C. Lackey skrev:

Jesper wrote:

- 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.

At the very least. I've seen some theories on this List better aired in an outhouse. I've made posts I wish I could take back -- but I can't. It's one thing to think out loud in public in a relatively small forum such as this, but it's a very different thing to have such thoughts presented with a presumption of authority or even credibility to a larger audience. I don't know that much about Wikipedia, but if Whomever's opinions are presented there as facts, then it is useless as an authority, and I could never in good conscience cite it as such. Democracy is a wonderful ideal, but not all opinions are equal.

This is what I'm talking about when I want to separate theory from fact. You are right that in some (perhaps many) cases, it isn't clear where the line goes between speculation and what can be agreed upon as being a fact, but considering how wild some of the theories here are it's at least worth trying to keep these two things apart. Maybe it isn't interesting who created a theory, but it's at least interesting to make clear that this is one person's idea of how to interpret the text.

On 5/12/06, Matthew King <automatthew at gmail.com> wrote: On May 9, 2006, at 12:38 PM, maru dubshinki wrote:

We also need a name. Lupinepedia, Wolfepedia, the Wolfe Wiki, the urth Wiki, just plain Urth.net... are all possible names.

A punny name based on a two-bit word Wolfe uses in Shadow of the Torturer: Urticate Sometimes, after reading a contentious thread in this list, I feel like I've been urticated. _______________________________________________

On May 9, 2006, at 12:38 PM, maru dubshinki wrote: We also need a name. Lupinepedia, Wolfepedia, the Wolfe Wiki, the urth Wiki, just plain Urth.net... are all possible names.

On May 12, 2006, at 4:42 PM, Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote: On 5/12/06, Matthew King <automatthew at gmail.com> wrote:

On May 9, 2006, at 12:38 PM, maru dubshinki wrote:

We also need a name. Lupinepedia, Wolfepedia, the Wolfe Wiki, the urth Wiki, just plain Urth.net... are all possible names.

A punny name based on a two-bit word Wolfe uses in Shadow of the Torturer: Urticate Sometimes, after reading a contentious thread in this list, I feel like I've been urticated.

Onomastipedia?

On 5/12/06, Matthew King <automatthew at gmail.com> wrote: On May 12, 2006, at 4:42 PM, Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:

On 5/12/06, Matthew King <automatthew at gmail.com> wrote:

On May 9, 2006, at 12:38 PM, maru dubshinki wrote:

We also need a name. Lupinepedia, Wolfepedia, the Wolfe Wiki, the urth Wiki, just plain Urth.net... are all possible names.

A punny name based on a two-bit word Wolfe uses in Shadow of the Torturer: Urticate Sometimes, after reading a contentious thread in this list, I feel like I've been urticated.

Onomastipedia?

I retract my suggestion in favor of Dan'l's _______________________________________________

maru dubshinki wrote: I've been thinking about this for a while, and I think any wiki we start on Wolfe's work should be categorized tripartitely: One section should be for Urth ML emails. This would make it much easier to reference assertions and theories, especially since it seems that a number of messages are primary sources, not merely secondary sources. And of course, if they are hosted on the wiki itself, one could run a bot or some sort of bot to auto-link phrases to their pages. (Now that I think of it, one could compile a list of words, phrases, and subjects from the mass of texts). I'm not too sure about the copyright status, however: I'm pretty sure the list owner can allow them to be posted on a wiki (since he already has the right to so post them in a publicly accessible archive), but I don't know how that factors into reditributions and licensing. So having a separate section would allow us to segregate non-Free content from the Free content. The second section would be articles. Straightforward factual articles on Wolfe, relevant authors, his books and short stories, etc. Think like what Wikipedia currently has. I guess we could import Wikipedia policies wholesale for this section: verifiable, NPOV, no personal attacks, etc. This section we could grab straight from Wikipedia. About all we'd have to do is add a GFDL notice (assuming we decide to go with a non-GFDL license, or cross-license) and perhaps swap out internal Wikipedia links for interwiki links. Of course, these articles would link (perhaps in the relevant sections) to the third section... which is the section of interest to us all: The third section would be distilled discussions and theories. The idea is to condense all the verbiage and back and forth into a single page of pros and cons (ie. the evidence that, say, Thecla is the hermaphrodite lover of the Autarch would be presented on its own page, perhaps titled "Theclas as hermaphrodite"; the evidence for it would be presented, linking to the relevant emails, with textual citations and such, and then the opposed side. Talk pages can be used to hammer out the list, or it can be done on-list.) Categories could be very useful for sections two and three. An off-the-cuff example: A top-level category could be Authors, with Gene Wolfe in it, and then Books and Short Stories in the Wolfe cat, books being divided into Short Sun, New Sun, Peace, Soldier etc. categories. Then one has the articles on the individual novels. If a character appears in all the books, and so doesn't fit into a single book's category, they would go in the New Sun category, but minor characters could go into only one book's category (ie. Triskele would go into the New Sun cat, but the serving boy at the restaurant in SotT would be in the Shadow of the Torturer cat (if that's the right book)). Now, no doubt someone will suggest that the wiki host the various Wolfe interviews and miscellany available online. I won't address these: technically those are copyright violations (at least, I haven't seen any under any sort of Free license), and so it would be unconscionable for me to advise Ranjit to set up a wiki and work to populate it with stuff that exposes him, the hoster, to legal retribution. Now, perhaps he doesn't mind the risk, or perhaps Wolfe has made known an intention not to prosecute any fans, but it's up to Ranjit, not me, or us, for that matter. We also need a name. Lupinepedia, Wolfepedia, the Wolfe Wiki, the urth Wiki, just plain Urth.net... are all possible names. Now, the perfect name would be short, clever, clear, and be easily compressed (ie names based on Urth or Wolfe are good, as they make it easy to refer to, and they also make interwiki links from, say, Wikipedia, easy to do, so they look like [[w:c:Wolfe:Article|Article]] or [[Urth:Article|Article]] instead of something much longer). Just some thoughts. We also need to decide on licensing. Using the GFDL is a possibility but there are severe drawbacks that may more than counterwiegh the ease of using Wikipedia articles as a base: it's long, complex, cumbersome, unclear, and there are some bad features. I'll provide some links for further reading, if you want to know more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Free_Documentation_License#Criticisms_of_the_GFDL http://wikitravel.org/en/Wikitravel:Why_Wikitravel_isn%27t_GFDL http://home.twcny.rr.com/nerode/neroden/fdl.html http://people.debian.org/~srivasta/Position_Statement.xhtml There are quite a few possibilities w/r/t Free license. We could use a modified BSD license (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_license), a Creative Commons license (I like the Attribution-SA myself: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/1.0/), or a public domain license (no rights reserved, essentially). My personal preference would be to go with PD; it's simple, it's definitely Free, and it's not like we really need the protections of copyleft- who'll steal our content? And of course, if we decide to merge with Wikipedia some day, PD interoperates well with GFDL. Ok. So those are my thoughts on the subject. Look forward to hearing your comments and criticism. ~maru "A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct." _______________________________________________

Matthew King wrote: On May 9, 2006, at 12:38 PM, maru dubshinki wrote:

We also need a name. Lupinepedia, Wolfepedia, the Wolfe Wiki, the urth Wiki, just plain Urth.net... are all possible names.

A punny name based on a two-bit word Wolfe uses in Shadow of the Torturer: Urticate Sometimes, after reading a contentious thread in this list, I feel like I've been urticated. _______________________________________________

On May 9, 2006, at 12:38 PM, maru dubshinki wrote:

We also need a name. Lupinepedia, Wolfepedia, the Wolfe Wiki, the urth Wiki, just plain Urth.net... are all possible names.

On 5/14/06, Joe Smulkstis <jismulkstis at nyc.rr.com> wrote: "And who else would get it?" Possibly the BTK killer and others like him. I suggest avoiding obscurity and going for "WolfeWiki" or "GeneWolfeWiki". It might be more easily located by people interested in Gene Wolfe, and that would be a good thing. _______________________________________________

On 5/14/06, Anjruu at aol.com <Anjruu at aol.com> wrote: Hi. I was wondering if it might be possible to compile a dictionary-esque of all the esoteric words used by Wolfe in his various books on the wiki. Actually, a compilation of interesting and esoteric words would be fun, regardless of their connection to Wolfe's works. I am not sure if this would be feasible, even desirable, because dictionary.com would have many of them, but I think even just putting together the choices would be an adventure. People could submit in proposals via the mailing list. -Anjruu

\On 5/10/06, Roy C. Lackey <rclackey at stic.net> wrote: Jesper wrote:

- Theories and facts should be clearly separated. If there are theories about a subject, there should be a "Theories" section in the article with short descriptions of the theories and links to the separate articles.

What is fictive fact and what is theory -- and who decides? Is it a fact that Weer is dead, or that Dorcas is Severian's grandmother? These two cases are not that controversial; consensus is that they are facts, but that is only a consensus. Did Weer really have constructed such an edifice as his Memory House, or did it exist only in his head? It's been argued both ways. Fact or theory?

- 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.

At the very least. I've seen some theories on this List better aired in an outhouse. I've made posts I wish I could take back -- but I can't. It's one thing to think out loud in public in a relatively small forum such as this, but it's a very different thing to have such thoughts presented with a presumption of authority or even credibility to a larger audience. I don't know that much about Wikipedia, but if Whomever's opinions are presented there as facts, then it is useless as an authority, and I could never in good conscience cite it as such. Democracy is a wonderful ideal, but not all opinions are equal.

On 5/10/06, Jesper Svedberg <jsvedberg at gmail.com> wrote: Hm, you seem to have recieved my original mail, but I didn't get a copy. Strange. Anyway, I apologize for the double posting.

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.

On 5/12/06, Matthew King <automatthew at gmail.com> wrote: On May 9, 2006, at 12:38 PM, maru dubshinki wrote:

We also need a name. Lupinepedia, Wolfepedia, the Wolfe Wiki, the urth Wiki, just plain Urth.net... are all possible names.

A punny name based on a two-bit word Wolfe uses in Shadow of the Torturer: Urticate Sometimes, after reading a contentious thread in this list, I feel like I've been urticated.

On 5/14/06, JWillard <aldenweer at charter.net> wrote:

How about theoubliette-wiki? (OED says: "A secret dungeon, access to which was gained only through a trapdoor above...") It seems we've all fallen into this particular oubliette. And Wolfe mentions its etymological significance as "a place of forgetting" - which seems appropriately ironic for a venture trying to do the opposite. And who else would get it?

public domain is all right (I agree, I don't think lots of people will be interested in what we're doing) then, fine. It sounds like Wikia wants a large audience to establish a wiki, and I don't know that we can provide that.

instead of Ancient Greece Portal, we could have an Urth Portal, Whorl Portal, Latro Portal, etc. It seems to me that, optimally, any one of these areas is begging for a tremendous amount of information, because I think, ultimately, we're talking about having a page for every Wolfe character, every Wolfe creature, flower, building, etc., every key concept (White Fountain, fuligin, etc.), and every theory (Severian's lineage; Thecla as Secret Protagonist; Severian Clones, etc.) - and that's just Urth. I'm sure people will want the same for The Wizard Knight, Peace, Fifth Head of Cerberus, etc. (I do.) If I'm just reiterating something you've already proposed, I apologize. But it seems to me we're talking about a potentially massive amount of stuff and will need to be laid out to accomodate that. It seems to me the main page of the entire wiki should focus on Wolfe: links to categories like biography, influences (I'd like to see more on connections between his work and Nabokov's, for example), bibliography, etc. and to the portals for the different books/series? I don't know: I'm tired and I'm probably just babbling a bunch of obvious things. Jason

maru wrote: Well, why would we bother summarizing such posts into a wiki article if they were so truly excreable?<<

n 5/15/06, Roy C. Lackey <rclackey at stic.net> wrote: maru wrote:

Well, why would we bother summarizing such posts into a wiki article if they were so truly excreable?<<

Different people have differing thresholds of credulity. <g>

Is that how it's going to be done -- summarizing posts? Let me spell out my concerns, which are primarily related to this list's archives.

Most posts have a narrow focus. Some people try harder than others; some people have done their homework and some have not. The wheel is constantly being reinvented. The sheer volume of the list archives is daunting to consume, and few of us have eidetic memories. I read the archives before I ever posted, but they were much smaller seven years ago. Trying to separate the wheat from the chaff is very difficult, and it's not all the fault of the search engine; it's the nature of the posts. Even trying to follow the thread of a single subject line is often fruitless, because what started off as topic A often devolves to topics D and E, which have little or nothing to do with A.

There have been many thousands of posts made which contain a lot of redundant verbiage. I don't see any practical way to sift out what may be worth repeating (in regards to the Urth List) in another forum, but if it isn't filtered some way then all you have is what already exists -- the chaos that is the archives.

Who's going to do the summarizing? It seems to me that it would require a hell of a lot of time and work. Are summarized theories harvested from the archives going to do justice to the originals, and will the respective authors be consulted beforehand?

-Roy