Ultima Codex talk:Coverage

Defining which games will be covered by this wiki
There was a small discussion some days ago on the talk page for Lords of Ultima about what games should this wiki focus on. Some people indicated that they thought this wiki should focus only on single-player Ultima games from the main series, while others supported the idea of including details about every Ultima game, even if it is not part of the main single-player series. The fact is that this has not been defined before, and this wiki page is very vague right now in terms of what the wiki covers.

And btw, this discussion is not about what is canon and what is not canon, or how to present conflicting information from multiple games in an article. It is about which games should be have detailed articles here on the wiki. We can still have the concept of canon and source priorities; that should not be affected by the decision of which games to cover in detail.

So, I thought this would be a good moment to try to define this. Of course, this depends on people actually being interested in defining this, and on people participating in this discussion. I propose we vote on the issue, since this should be easy to do for anybody who wants to participate. If people want to add more arguments/comments to the discussion, they can do so below the voting section. Of course, the results of the voting are not binding, but they should help get an idea of what the community feels we should do.


 * Votes for focusing on only some games (i.e., the "core" single-player Ultima games)
 * The Ultra-Mind (talk) 10:06, 16 April 2013 (PDT)
 * -- Fenyx4 12:10, 16 April 2013 (PDT)
 * -- Tribun (talk) 13:44, 16 April 2013 (PDT)
 * -- Terilem (talk) 23:17, 16 April 2013 (PDT)
 * -- Warder Dragon (talk) 23:46, 16 April 2013 (PDT)
 * --Arthgon (talk) 01:32, 17 April 2013 (PDT)
 * -- Time Lord (talk)
 * Votes for including details on all Ultima games (including LoU, UO, UF, etc)
 * Sega381 (talk) 07:56, 16 April 2013 (PDT)

- Discussion:

I like the idea of having all Ultima information in one place. There may be some cases where we may want to avoid duplicate information, such as trying to integrate better with the UOGuide wiki, but in general, I think the wiki would be a better resource for people if it covers as many Ultima games as possible. Plus, it would also help the wiki gain a broader audience. I have the impression that we have focused mainly on the single-player games because those are the ones that most people here like the most. --Sega381 (talk) 07:56, 16 April 2013 (PDT)
 * I've cast my vote although, I'm not convinced that the definition of "core" is "single-player". And while I don't think that canon == core, I think they have a relationship. We may have to discuss this also. The Ultra-Mind (talk) 10:06, 16 April 2013 (PDT)
 * I'm at a crossroads where to vote. We're not UOGuide, and we shouldn't try to be UOGuide.  I don't think we should have detailed event information, or skill information, or bestiary information from Ultima Online.  UOGuide covers it better than we ever could hope to.  On the other hand, UO should be acknowledged, and interesting places and aspects from UO might have a place here.  My main worry is UO is constantly changing, and we'll become increasingly wrong and out of date without the appropriate editors. Dungy (talk) 10:42, 16 April 2013 (PDT)
 * Exactly: every Ultima should be acknowledged, if for no other reason, just to set folk straight on where its place is in the Ultima universe. (Maybe we should have an article for Ultima Thule.) But the day we go into every nook and cranny about Mt. Drash, is the day I go back to Wikia (j/k) The Ultra-Mind (talk) 11:11, 16 April 2013 (PDT)


 * Bear in mind that even though I was trying to oversimplify the issue with the categories above, the idea is NOT to choose exactly one thing or another. There is no black-or-white decision to be made. The categories up there are just a way of gauging which way we want to lean towards. Basically, do we want to focus on only some games with a deep level of detail (as we were doing so far), or on all of them? The actual decision can be a more complex combination of these choices. One option, for example, could be that we decide to include all Ultima games in as much detail as we can, but have a few exceptions such as UO, but not because of ideological reasons, but because of practical duplication reasons. I would suggest us to find a way to better integrate wiht UOGuide in that case, though, such as going only up to a certain level of detail, and then linking to UOGuide articles for things that go deeper and are more likely to change. We could also compile a list of the games we want to cover in detail, and only add games to that list if there is consensus for that.--Sega381 (talk) 11:30, 16 April 2013 (PDT)


 * (Edit conflict with Sega381) I seem to be on the same page as Dungy on this. UO should be acknowledged like it is on Ultima Online. Things from the "core" series that are important in UO can have their relevance mentioned like in Gem of Immortality if they have a lot of information in like, say, Dupre then it can mention it and say something along the lines of "For more information see Dupre". Something like Fishing which bears no relation to the "core" game is useless. UOGuide does it better. UOGuide can keep it current. And if we tried to get all of UO's info on here we'd be overwhelmed. UOGuide has over seven thousand articles compared to our four thousand and everytime I get an itch for UO and use UOGuide for a reference it always feels like they are missing huge swaths of information. Time spent working on UO would be better spent improving their wiki not duplicating information here.


 * I think the same would happen for any new game as well whether it is LoU, U4E or SotA. We'd either be a really bad wiki for them or we'd be overwhelmed with their content. So my vote is going into "focusing" but with the caveat that we don't scrub the site of every mention of the other games. We leave in what is relevant. -- Fenyx4 12:10, 16 April 2013 (PDT)


 * I don't really have anything different to add to the direction the discussion has taken so far. I agree that all games should be at least be given basic acknowledgement, but that detailed focus should only be afforded to the single player titles. The other spin-offs have really become their own beasts at this point, each with vastly different communities. Let's say a reader came here and typed "Moongate" into the search box; are they looking for information on moongates in Ultima, UO, Lord of Ultima, or Ultima Forever? I'd personally rather just keep it streamlined and stick to our strengths. --Terilem (talk) 23:17, 16 April 2013 (PDT)


 * I think Fenyx covered my opinion pretty well. We should, however, decide how fan projects fit into the wiki too while we're at it! --Warder Dragon (talk) 23:46, 16 April 2013 (PDT)
 * Sorry, that it took so long (vacation), but I would say that we should focus on the most important and relevant information and make a link to the sites who focuses and go even more deeper on the non-core ones. On the other side, I am not sure how long the fan games sites will stay online.  --Arthgon (talk) 01:32, 17 April 2013 (PDT)

Great! We seem to be reaching an overall consensus on the issue. I know that Browncoat Jayson was leaning towards having information about all games, but in any case the consensus seems to be to maintain our current unnoficial focus on some games. So a summary of what I am seeing so far:
 * We want to keep focus on only some games, in terms of how much level of detail we want to go into.
 * We will acknowledge and have articles about games that will not be our main focus, but only a couple for each game, enough to "set the record straight" and contain the basic information. If possible, we would suggest readers go to external resources for more detailed information about this games, such as UOGuide for Ultima Online. (Btw, Arthgon makes a good point.. what happens if this external resource dies? Not our problem?).

Some questions that we would have to answer:
 * Which games are the ones we are going to define as the ones we are going to cover in detail? Right now, we seem to be leaning towards the games listed under "Ultima canon" in Ultima Codex:Canon policy.
 * What are we going to do about the already existing detailed articles related to games we do not want to cover in detail, such as the UO and LoU detailed articles we have? Deleting them all? Most? Some?
 * What are we going to do about fangames? We do cover in detail a lot of things about remakes, such as Lazarus and U6Project. Will this be our official position for all fangames? Only for remakes? Only for some specific fangames we decide to cover in detail?
 * What about new official Ultima games, such as Ultima Forever? If we rule them out, does that mean that the wiki is going to be only about past games, an no new official Ultima games will be covered in detail here? Do we want to become something of a "Core Ultima Legacy" wiki only? (Of course, we would still have articles for these games, the issue here is only the level of detail).
 * If there are articles about topics that span our "core" games and non-core games, how are we going to treat the information about non-core games in those articles? Ignore it, mention it as trivia, have it in a small, clearly separate section for non-core games? For example, how/where would we mention moongates existing on Lord of Ultima on the Moongates article?

That is what I can think of as of now. Once we reach some agreement on these questions, we can start populating the Ultima Codex:Coverage article with the results. --Sega381 (talk) 06:33, 17 April 2013 (PDT)
 * New official Ultima games are going to need their own separate wiki. I believe there is some work being done to set up a separate Ultima Forever wiki with the Ultima Codex.  And which point we can link back and forth between articles for more information.


 * Fan Projects - I'm looking to keep them here. There really aren't many fan projects, the major ones are Lazarus and U6Project, and they didn't really cause many problems to the wiki by including them.  Dungy (talk) 07:50, 17 April 2013 (PDT)