Trakata is now canon, believe it

Can soeone please tell me what in the world is Trakata. I mean like describe it for me. Thanks.

 

What he asked, plus who, if anyone, used it?

 

Imperator-class appears in DL, which came out before the RotS: ICS, no?

 

According to Wookieepedia, DL:TRoDV came out on November 22, 2005; RotS:ICS appeared on April 2, 2005...?

So... no?

Wookieepedia could be wrong, though. Anyone?

In general, I'm not sure how I feel about this sort of thing.

I think fanon nods can be absolutely fine at times (Stacey in Allegiance, for instance, or Trakata here), provided that they're well-handled and they don't conflict with canon...

But what is Trakata? I googled it, and it seems to involve leaving the lightsaber off until you actually attack...

- The Imperial Ewok

 

So
luke used Trakata when he was sparring with Ben

 

I got the impression that Trakata was strategically switching the lightsaber on and off during a battle.

Say you're fighting a Not Nice Bad Guy in a lightsaber duel. He lunges at you and you turn your 'saber off at the exact right moment so that he overextends himself and falls right into your lightsaber hilt... which you then turn back on. Or you just walk into battle and turn your saber on... when the hilt is pointing at his chin. That sort of thing.

It does sound cool, but the fanon aspect tarnishes it a bit. This is why most authors try not to read fanfic.

 

So...it's not a saber form so much as a technique?

That's not so bad, I guess.

 

I bet that big, bad Saxton's getting published has reeeeaaaallly got you peeved, huh?

 

I have no problem with Dr. Saxton becoming a canon author. Good on him!

I'll point out, analytically, where he misidentified fanon as official material, and where he made speculative statements based on fan-theories that were untenable in the light of canon - both in ICS and in his official work.

I'll argue, rationally and calmly, that from the POV of Star Wars continuity, some of these were mistakes that shouldn't have been made.

But I assume he made these mistakes honestly, and laying any "blame" on anyone would be a very complicated matter.

So, do I grudge him his success? Why should I?

- The Imperial Ewok

 

It's right in this case. Which makes sense if you think about it--that the book about the movie would come out at the same time as the movie, and that the sequel would come out later?

 

So you guys aren't upset about the subject matter, but the precedent it might set. Fans making their own canon doesn't sound good.

 

Oh, that's what it is? Why did it need a name? Lightsaber "forms" are the lamest idea ever.

 

Not exactly. Fans have always, and will always make "fanon", and some of it can be entertaining, thoughtful, well-written, etc. etc. Sometimes ideas are picked up by authors who like them, or sometimes fans themselves become official writers and end up creating canon.

That's not the issue. The issue is that a small group of people believe their interpretation of Star Wars is the "correct" one and struggle to get the official canon stamp, so that future authors will know how to "correctly" do Star Wars. The objection to this is that others (see sig) are more of the inclusive type, whereas these fans would rather dump and bury certain portions current canonicity, whether it be a certain media type (i.e. RPGs), or a particular hated author (i.e... well, you can probably guess this). For a while they've tried to rules-lawyer LFL representatives into accepting various "truths", but have been thwarted by the existence of the Holocron, an official database used by SW authors and unavailable to the public, making it impossible to do a quick "Ministry of Truth" sweep through it to purge it of disrecognized canon.
The alternate has, unfortunately been Wookiepedia - a fine idea to create a Star Wars database, marred by its usage as a propaganda tool by certain members (one, in fact, blatantly states so in his bio page there).
Ultimately, though, there's little to worry about overall (as I see it) - there's plenty of people in the RPG or book biz to look and say "no, the statement that X is a Y is an interpretation by someone who wrote the Wookie article, not a canonical fact". The surer path would be to directly interact with authors here, but the track record of the, shall we say, more fanatical fans to sway them has not been encouraging.
The only real dissapointment out of all of this is that they will concentrate even more on turning Wookiepedia into a propaganda mill in a futile bid at some sort of "canon supremacy". Which is a real shame, as it really could shine as a true online encyclopedia for Star Wars information...

 

I was wondering the same thing

 

Yeah, one of the last pages of the ROTJ novelization when in which we get Anakins perspective of the conversation between him and luke on the ramp of the Lambda shuttle just before he dies.

 

Who, and why am I not aware of this? If someone pushes fanon, POV and original research into Wookieepedia, they should be punished.

Also, please provide some actual, concrete examples of Wookieepedia articles that you see as propaganda and fanon-pushing.

 

Bad example, because its already been flagged, but there's a good sized article on Chad Vader in Wookie

 

^ But that's just an article on a fan film. It says it's a fan film, not canon, in the article, and the only reason it had an article is because it's a popular internet fad.

 

I'm sure you're aware of some of the people - from what I've read, you just slapped down one for foul language a few months ago, but at least he changed his "I hate [this particular Wookie editor] with all my soul" bio.
The particular fellow I refer to in the previous post has a bio that reads like a religious testament, promising to promulgate the true nature of Star Wars along with the almost-cliche-now dislike of sources like X (i.e. WEG) and like Y (i.e. that "certain author" as some like to say not-so-coyly here).

Give them some credit. They aren't noobs trying to slip in entire articles about their fan fiction heroes or home-made images of starships. See below.

Also, please provide some actual, concrete examples of Wookieepedia articles that you see as propaganda and fanon-pushing.[/quote]

Let's pull out a fan-favorite and take a look at the article for "Super Star Destroyer":
Now let's assume that I've only watched the movies and I'm looking for more information about these ships. What interesting facts are in the article?

The Executor was the first ship called a Super Star Destroyer. The first one is a little nitpicky, but the "Rebel slang" included a whole range of types that existed before the Executor. Probably chalk this one up to confusion - a better photo caption would be 'the most well-known Super Star Destroyer" or something similar.
Imperial-class vessels are downscaled battleships that only lead in relatively "calm" sectors but are literal "destroyers" when involved in major campaigns where larger vessels dominate. Gosh, what possible agenda could this serve? Never mind that this has little to do with "Super Star Destroyers"...
Death Stars were conjecturally regional command centers, while the SSDs were sector-level command bases. Nice re-wording of an old source, a WEG one to boot. The implication is that the Death Stars - of which only two were built, we all know - was supposed to be regional command centers. Whereas the sector-level command bases were, in fact, all SSDs meaning at least 1000 of them floating about.
Star Cruisers were built by the hundreds or thousands. A bizarre statement. Where is the source? Is this just a useless guess? Why not say "anywhere between 10 and a million were built"?
The Executor-class is a true battleship of the SW universe.Take that, minimalists!
Battlegroups based around SSDs were not uncommon during the Empire's height.*Sigh*. "When you assume..."
The reason Executor Sedriss used an ISD as his flagship at Balmorra instead of the tons of SSDs in the Empire at the time was because Palpatine was paranoid and didn't want to spare any of them.
The Allegiance in Dark Empire is a Gauntlet Star Cruiser, a known type of SSD. A long-standing pet-peeve of mine. Almost-kudos for labelling the name as pure speculation on its own page, but you wouldn't know that from reading the SSD page, would you? (And from reading the "Gauntlet[sic] Star Cruiser" page, you'd think that only the name was speculative...)

People have an expectation when they read an encyclopedia, that what appears is factual unless labelled otherwise. Speculation is being presented as factual. Interpretations are done and not presented as such. Discussions in the talkbacks end up with the refusal to even discuss the matter further, with an air of outright hostility that certainly reduced my interest in contributing anything to nil. We've seen mention before that they want SW authors to use Wookie as a resource in place of other ones (that they can't edit or even check to verify it's "truthiness" to their satisfaction) - now with this whole "trakata" thing, they're probably going to go into shock. "Just think - we can get WOTC to put Gauntlet Star Cruiser in print and

 

myron -- I want to have your babies. Seriously. In a hetero-lifemate sort of way, of course.

 

99.9% of our articles are completely non-controversial; POV is not an issue on those articles, because there's no agenda anybody wants to push. Even for the SSD article, the statements you pulled out are just a small part of a long article. Also, the article has extensive internal citations. If you don't like a statement, feel free check the source yourself.

 

Apart from ControWiki (The Wiki For Controversial Subjects), I think any Wiki would be 99.9% non-controversial. I'm glad that the article on Beverages in the SW Universe is safe, but the 0.1% tends to be the high-traffic, high-interest articles (which, incidentally, is where I'm most interested - namely starships and cartography). Besides, why should this sort of behavior be tolerated on any part of Wookiepedia?

Bury suppositions in a pile of actual, factual statements and it's hard to tell the difference.

As I've stated before, that's exactly what I do. I've used Wookie multiple times to get directions to what source refers to information I'm interested in. But I'll take any information contained in an article with a grain of salt unless it shows exactly where it originated.

 

blackmyron: agreed. But then, I would say that, wouldn't I...

Hmm. Anyone got any suggestions for an approach to improve the situation? I do like blackmyron's POV here, because it seems to be more about parsing the info back to neutrality than any opinion, including my own!

- The Imperial Ewok

 

Maybe.

In the first edition of A Guide to the Star Wars Universe, Raymond Velasco referenced sources "[SW, E, SME, RJ, WSW]" in the entry for "Imperial Stormtrooper.

WSW's entry in the Guide's "Codes Following Dictionary Entries" is-

WSW-"Soldiers of the Empire," Anthony Fredrickson, The World of Star Wars: A Compendium of Fact and Fantasy from Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, Paradise Press, Inc., 1981

As far as I can see, Velasco only drew upon "Soldiers for the Empire" for information pertaining to their armor:

Their uniform is a white-and-black armor spacesuit that can be used in almost any environment, and provides limited protection from blaster fire. The armor consists of two parts: the outer shell (eighteen pieces) and a black, two-piece "body temperature control glove."

It appears that nothing else from "Soldiers for the Empire" was used.

"Soldiers for the Empire" was removed from the entry codes section in the second edition of A Guide to the Star Wars Universe by Bill Slavicsek. It was placed into a section called "Additional Bibliography", however.

The information on stormtrooper armor that was contained in the first edition is still largely intact in the second and oddly, is inside the "movie canon" section of the entry on stormtroopers. I don't know what to make of that.

 

^ It came out before the EU, and was thus probably considered something akin to movie promotional material.