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Who is the Trav Wiki Audience in 2017?

The Pakkrat said:
Should the traveller wiki implement a "Fanon" Tab, thus forcing almost 100% of my sector development in the Vargr Extents to this second-class existence, what will happen is an unbalanced state where the article tab will read the most basic, boring, minimal, official information on the article topic and displacing the creativity of the contributor to the Damnation Tab and branding their creativity as ignorable, unworthy, too lame to read, beneath your notice.
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I don't grok your complaint. Seriously. There is no second-class existence of information.

There is canon and non-canon.

I use both interchangeably without concern. But if it's going to be a wiki; shouldn't it be accurate? I love the work you did on the Extants but why is labeling it as non-canon delegitimizing it? It's already illegitimate (ie. fanon).

A non-canon tab would do wonders for expansion, creative input, and different interpretations of 3I and beyond.

A place to put multiple versions of a planet/system/polity etc. Right now, three contributors to a system (with vastly different interp/viewpoints) only muddle their vision because all of their information goes on the same page and is in-line with the other information. The first person to post non-canon info to a wiki should not control its content.

Claiming that it would water down contributions or be disrespectful to people who did cool things with setting material but, quite honestly, weren't asked to do so is pointless. Canon is Miller. Anything else should either be posted and labeled as such (fanon) or not published at all.

Since not publishing is the death of creativity, why would anyone care if their custom content is identified as such? That's what it is. Period. Anyone who thinks otherwise is feeling a sense of ownership based on "first-in" that is simply not accurate. Furthermore, how the heck can we give credit to people like you if we don't know it comes from personal interest and investment of personal time rather than actual books?

Again, COTI, I beg of you... be inclusive, not exclusive. It is the fundamental fail of these boards. A "fanon" tab would allow everyone/anyone to add ideas to the setting without upsetting anyone who insists on canon.
 
Canon - Non-Canon - Fanon

You know the way I feel about the Wiki; fantastic resource - regardless of the "authenticity" of the entry.

When you consider that the Wiki tries to cover all,or maybe most, of Charted Space with a time range of 300,000 possible years... that's a lot of data to try to sort through to establish what was "published" let alone what is Canon.

I have a simple and non-elegant solution. Declare it all non-canon right at the top; let the reader stumble through the reference material that is mostly listed at the end of each entry to determine is the entry in question is genuinely CANON.

Besides, every little event in the Traveller's Universe that gets touched by the players, ref's and NPCs changes the OTU in some manner. Every single game is in some ATU sooner or later....
 
aramis said:
Fannon most definitely carries a derogatory connotation for me.[
Most people I know consider it lesser, because if it were good enough, the author would have attempted to get it into a licensed product or even an official one - more so for games than other media, but...
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I don't think that way. Everything I have ever contributed to these boards is fanon unless I am citing a canonical item. House rules, settings etc all fanon. Some of it is useful some of it I now wish I had never written.

Good fanon is better than bad and contradictory canon (there is plenty of that).

Fanon is just a catch all for non-canonical fan contribution I have yet to meet or hear from or read anyone using it in a derogatory sense.
 
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I love the fanon on the wiki. The last time I wanted to romp through the VE, I used it. Having said that, I do like to see where the information I use came from. If something is from a canon source, I want to go and check out that source.

I am perfectly fine with canon and fanon being on the same page. In fact it would be easier to get to than having the fanon on a separate tab. (I also wouldn't complain too loudly if fanon were on a separate tab.) I would like to see in-line citations for all of it, though, so I know what is fanon, and what is from a source I can look up. Also citing which contributors produced which fanon would be helpful to me. That way, when there are conflicts in the fanon, I can mentally group together the parts written by the same author and know that they are probably intended to work together.

Cheers,

Baron Ovka
 
In addition, knowing the fanon source can introduce you to many more goodies. I followed a fanon blurb and discovered Stellar Reaches fanzine which is one of my all-time favorite fan-pubs. Likely would have not have dug into without catching wind of it on the wiki.
 
Successfully seeking publication as a standard is disingenuous. The whole of Mongoose's Trojan Reach development, the two Subsectors from Leviathan aside, is built on fan-written, self-published information that was decades old and somewhat obscure by the time Mongoose adopted it.

While I'm not a fan of how the division of sourcing was handled in the wiki previously, I support the idea of fan information being present and presented. The setting is absolutely vast, even within the confines of Charted Space. I'd rather have access to what other people have done with a region than wonder why no one ever puts stuff there.
BUT
I want to know it's fan material.
Sometimes that's *really* obvious, and sometimes it is not.
 
kilemall said:
Plus mythology and lies, inevitable in a topic so vast in time and space and differing realities experienced.
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Well, yes and no. There's a way to handle content that's outright lies (the "secret" tag/sub-page mechanism). There's less of a distinction IIRC betwhen official/licensed content and fanon of varying degrees of canonicity -- or, failing that, acceptance by parts of the fanbase.

And then there's data established by adventure scenarios that would vary depending on the outcome of the scenario...
 
The trick, as always, is to get contributors to admit to their work and classify it correctly. There is a footnote handy for specific paragraph callouts, for example.
There is a threshold within the style guide for legitimately adding yourself in Sources, but it has a less than perfect implementation to date.
 
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