Forum:The Codex of Ultima Wisdom and Freeshards

As per a discussion I had with Withstand the Fury (WtF), our kind and loving host here at the Codex of Ultima Wisdom.

Basically, The Ultima Codex, which we are a part of, has become an official Ultima fansite. Go to UO Herald, and see the big pretty link in the top right corner. This is quite the honor actually, and will be a good way of driving people to our site to educate them about the Ultima series. I also have reason to suspect in the near future there will be a large increase in people accessing information about the old Ultima games, and that the good people of Mythic will be using our site.

The Problem:
As WtF has rightly pointed out, as an official fan source we are being placed in a slightly more precarious position than we were previously. We have maybe 20 - 30 pages on the wiki devoted to UO freeshards and UO utilities, some of which operate against the UO Terms of Service. WtF is rightly worried that some people whom are displeased that the Ultima Codex has received official fan status while their site has not might use this as a rallying cry to have our official status revoked

Even though I dislike the idea of removing these pages, I think it might be prudent that we remove the individual UO freeshard and UO utilities pages from our wiki. These pages tend to be poorly maintained, out of date, and I think very few of our core editors have knowledge of these free shards. Discuss. Dungy 15:51, 18 May 2012 (PDT)

Well, I'm okay with removing the utilities and Freeshards (or grouping them together with a big disclaimer). Not so much because they violate the ToS but because I don't feel like UO is really this wiki's purview. UO Guide does a good job of covering UO and I like focusing on the single player.

My concern is where do we draw the line? I don't want to turn around and have to remove xu4 and Exult next. Seems unlikely they will come under fire due to them being from older non-active games but I thought it an important point to bring up. -- Fenyx4 20:59, 18 May 2012 (PDT)

As a once-and-potentially-future admin of a freeshard, I am not at all thrilled with the prospect of censorship, which is further compounded by my already low opinion of EA. I don't think our mentioning of freeshards should be a concern, and I am very wary what the next step is - removing anything negative about EA?

That having been said, I've never been of the opinion that Ultima Online should be a major part of this wiki. I do think Freeshards in general deserve a mention, but it need not be in the form of individual pages for each shard. I'm not remotely happy about the prospect of censorship, however. --Warder Dragon 04:56, 19 May 2012 (PDT)

Gotta agree with Fenyx4 and Warder here: where do we draw the line? Sure UO Freeshards are technically against the UO ToS... But likewise fan projects are technically illegals and a violation of EA's Intellectual Properties. If we begin to remove mentions of UO Freeshardes and tools on these grounds, what will be the next step: removing mentions of Exult and Lazarus ?

Now to be fair I don't really feel FreeShards necesarilly deserves big individual pages because let's face it : we're more focused on the single player games, and the way these things are handled they're hard to keep these up to date - but preemtively removing theses seems silly, especially if the fear is from some external outcry rather than some issue with EA. --Sergorn Dragon

I'll probably just sound like a parrot here, but I agree with what's been said above too. I'd be worried that if we start censoring ourselves it would turn into a slippery slope indeed, and that doesn't particularly seem in line with the wiki spirit. I do also agree, though, that our main coverage should really be on the single player Ultimas anyway; after all, I thought the UO Guide was supposed to be the Ultima Online wiki, not us. I've always felt there was a lot of crossing-of-paths there that just creates unnecessary competition. --Terilem 10:13, 19 May 2012 (PDT)

I agree with the majority here. We all seem to feel that some of the UO content on here has overlap with UOGuide, and in general doesn't really gel with the wiki. We also all agree that censoring information about other fan projects like Exult, Lazarus, or Nuvie is unacceptable. Can I offer a compromise? We'll clean up some of the UO information here because it's out of date, wrong, or just plain doesn't fit with the overall theme of the wiki. We should also clean up pages that are done much better by UOGuide. That will allow us to better focus on what I think this wiki really is, a single-player Ultima wiki. I propose starting by removing Ultima Online Utilities and Freeshards. The information in these 2 categories is years out of date anyway and probably does more harm than good. Is that OK? Dungy 10:46, 19 May 2012 (PDT)

I'm not entirely sure. There's information that's out of date, definitely, but the tools listed in UO Utilities are still the preferred ones to use to day. I say before we start figuring out what pages to prune (and I do agree some pruning is in order) we should decide our policy for these things. I think this goes beyond merely the topic of freeshards, this decision can have a major impact on the direction of the wiki. For example, were I to recreate Ultima Legacy, could I not make an article about it? Do freeshards made in the spirit of Ultima have a lesser status than other fan projects? If we do decide to change our policy on these matters, I want it to be because we decide it is necessary. --Warder Dragon 11:56, 19 May 2012 (PDT)

One argument about keeping mentions of tools and Freeshards though : is that UO Guide makes no mention of those for obvious reasons and I feel they do deserve some place on a wiki. Just not necesarilly a big one. Also I feel personally that Ultima Online and its content has a very obvious place on this wiki as well. This is the "Ultima WIki" as a whole and as such there is room for Ultima Online because it is a part of Ultima, though of course we don't want (or need) to be as complete as UO Guide is (I know nobody mentionned anything about removing all UO content but well, just in case). That's not mentionning cancelled games of course which also have a place here IMO --Sergorn 07:25, 20 May 2012 (PDT)

Right, I'm not suggesting the removal of all UO content, I just don't feel it needs to be as detailed as what we've been doing - individual pages for every skill and spell and such, I always thought that's more UO Guide territory. I do think that Freeshards deserve mention, and my personal opinion is that a better solution/compromise would be to prune the pages that are out of date, then rewrite and expand the Freeshards article so it's more detailed and up to date, but also note that the usage of Freeshards is not something EA approves of. I think that's a reasonable compromise - to present all points of view. --Warder Dragon 09:33, 21 May 2012 (PDT)

Regarding the freeshards stuff, I can't really comment; however, I think the UO fan community should comment on the UO guide/UO wiki pages issue. IMO, the creation of those pages is really outside the area of knowledge for most of us; so members of the UO community would need to take charge of adding UO content if they wish to add it here. - Iceblade 4 June 2012