Ultima Codex talk:Coverage

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Defining which games will be covered by this wiki[edit]

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.

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:

  • 1. 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.
  • 2. 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?
  • 3. 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?
  • 4. 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).
  • 5. 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)

  • 4. 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.
  • 3. 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)
I added the Lord of Ultima information because: 1) their wiki no longer existed, 2) there was not a large number of articles on that wiki in the first place, and 3) I believe all information about the Ultima series should be served here. Currently, I use this wiki mostly when looking for things to add to my fan project game. For example, if I want to add a special type of armor to the game made of a special metal. I should see that Ultima Online and Lord of Ultima currently use Verite and Valorite as special metal, UO also has Agapite, and Underworld 2 has Fraznium. (Note that currently, I don't find most of those, and if you remove the LoU topics I will only find Fraznium.) I feel you do a great disservice to the community by limiting what games you are willing to allow coverage of here, just because you feel that a game isn't worthy of the Ultima name. That specifically goes against the concept of a centralized fan database, which we purport to be. --Browncoat Jayson (talk) 09:10, 17 April 2013 (PDT)

Not directly related to the discussion, but I felt it best to ask here: Maybe we should shift Ultima Forever and Lord of Ultima into one Column with Ultima Online on the main page and rename the column into something like "Ultima Online and Non-Canon Games". It would certainly clean up the main page and get things more structured.--Tribun (talk) 11:09, 17 April 2013 (PDT)

As I said before, I am still a bit in dubio. Yes, we could only do the "core" games. However including the other ultimas, may be a good thing as well. That is because there is always the possibility that they go off-line and thus losing important information. We are an Ultima site after all. If you know what I mean.--Arthgon (talk) 12:22, 17 April 2013 (PDT)

I think it may be useful to go over the actual games, as there aren't that many, to decide which ones to add to the list of games we want to "cover in more detail if possible":
  • We are already covering in detail the numbered Ultimas, plus the Underworlds and Worlds of Ultimas. Maybe Akalabeth could use some more love, but there are not so many details in it anyway.
  • Escape from Mt Drash and Runes of Virtue, we don't have so many details. I don't think anyone will add too many details on Mt Drash, but adding more stuff about Runes of Virtue would be nice. There aren't going to be other wikis dedicated to these games. In any case, I think it is ok if someone wants to add more details about these games.
  • The canceled and fan games are a slightly different subject, so I am not going to go into detail here. Still, unlikely this will be inside another wiki.
  • Ultima Online. The main problem here is the huge amount of content in UOGuide, and the fact that the game is still evolving. Copying everything and synching forever doesnt really make sense.
  • Lords of Ultima. This is one of the reasons we are discussing this, as there was another, flimsy wiki, and the content was salvaged over here.
  • Ultima Forever and any new games. I read something about a potential wiki for this. I am not sure why this is really necessary; in my personal opinion, it would be much simpler to include Ultima Forever and future games in this wiki.
And that's it. So basically we have to define how we want to handle UO, LoU and UF and its potential sequels. A nice idea would be to have a sort of meta-wiki, which is able to search in several wikis and give results from all of them. But I have no idea how easy it is to do this. This would make sense to merge UOGuide to this wiki. Also, a lot of cross-wiki linking would be required, but this seems way less work than copying and synching forever. In theory, this could also be done with the LoU wiki at Wikia, even though we don't like Wikia (and cross-linking with Wikia may not work). And if the worst come to pass, things could be moved over here.
In any event, I see arguments on both sides: incorporating a looot of articles from detailed games that are kinda out of our expertise and already have significant wikis is troublesome. But leaving these pieces of Ultima content totally separate or with a little link here and there seems like a disservice to the community. --Sega381 (talk) 21:30, 19 April 2013 (PDT)
When I am done with fixing the portraits and Icons of Ultima VII (I will do the same with Ultima VII Part Two)I will finish the Rune of Virtue Walkthrough and fixing its icons and all. Perhaps I can post more screenshots of Akalabeth. --Arthgon (talk) 03:58, 20 April 2013 (PDT)
I don't think we need to merge UOGuide, but an option to search it (in addition to our search) would be nice. There is a lot of cross connections that just don't get made currently. The LoU "wiki" at Wikia is almost empty, with lots of broken links. It is not nearly as complete as the one I've put together, and since their community dosn't seem to be into improving it yet, I don't want to link to it. If you are sure you don't want to host LoU information here, I will move my articles over to their wiki and we can look at cross searching. Seems a waste tho. --Browncoat Jayson (talk) 06:05, 20 April 2013 (PDT)
So I guess we all agree that we don't want to merge UOGuide, but I agree that it would be nice to somehow integrate with it. Anybody has any ideas on how to technically integrate them further? Is there any way to do some sort of cross-searches? --Sega381 (talk) 18:38, 22 April 2013 (PDT)
I certainly don't want to rid ourselves of the Lord of Ultima content, either. A surprising number of our Google searches are directed towards the content Browncoat Jayson has recently added. What we need is some way of better separating the content from the rest of the wiki, just so the wiki is better organized. Is it possible to create something like a Lord of Ultima subdomain? Some way to cross-search wikis. It'd be nice to have the content here somehow. Dungy (talk) 05:37, 23 April 2013 (PDT)

Nobody has any ideas for creating a Lord of Ultima subdomain, and for cross-wiki searchs? No one?

I will try to write up something based on the semi-conclusions we arrived on this talk page, and put it in the coverage page. Still, it would be great to have answers to the two questions up there...--Sega381 (talk) 17:08, 29 April 2013 (PDT)

Other than Fenyx4, I'm not sure if anybody knows if such a thing is even possible. Will need to send him an email. Dungy (talk) 22:01, 29 April 2013 (PDT)
Thanks for the email. I'd noticed Sega's bump this morning bump hadn't actually had a chance to read it. Ummm... What exactly were you looking for in a "cross-search"? I see two ways;
  1. One search box (the one we currently have) that searches across all the wikis
  2. Multiple search boxes on our wiki. Each one searching a different wiki.
My problem with 1 is that I feel like it would clutter the search results... Oh and I have no idea how to do it. :) My problem with 2 is that... Well, you may as well go to the other sites and search there.
Lord of Ultima sub-domain. Sorry I need to ask what you mean again. Would the sub-domain be an entirely separate wiki (lou-wiki.ultimacodex.com for example)? Or you looking for a sub-wiki in this wiki? Closes sub-wiki I could do would making a different Namespace (like how we current have the "Forum:" namespace or how this page is in the "Ultima Codex talk:" namespace vs the "Ultima Codex:" namespace). That would work but I feel like it would still split the focus of this wiki while at the same time delegate LoU to a second class citizen. You'd have to go into the advanced options of search in order to search it for example. -- Fenyx4 14:48, 30 April 2013 (PDT)
I still don't see the need to move Lord of Ultima stuff at all. There is not a competitive wiki for this (the Wikia one is almost empty) and as noted, what we have is already getting search results.
For searching, I'd be fine with just having an *option* to search across both/multiple wikis. If we added a hyperlink to the Search box on the left to get to the Advanced Search window, and added an option on there to search UOGuide as well, I'd be set. --Browncoat Jayson (talk) 06:17, 1 May 2013 (PDT)
So... any possibility of implementing some of these ideas? --Sega381 (talk) 13:42, 15 May 2013 (UTC)
I guess we now have a clear answer about Ultima Forever, and most likely any games that will follow it, with the new wiki that was just revealed (good job by the way). Would anybody oppose the ide of adding a link to the UOGuide in the "community" section of the sidebar, in order to give it more prominence and put it at a similar level to the UF Wiki? I know it is external, but since there doesn't seem to be much progress in terms of unified search, simply putting a link there might help.--Sega381 (talk) 04:16, 23 May 2013 (UTC)
I'll add that link. Dungy (talk) 10:26, 23 May 2013 (UTC)
Great, thanks! --Sega381 (talk) 17:03, 23 May 2013 (UTC)
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