Lit Wookieepedia, the Star Wars wiki

Hahahaha, yeah, the whole reason I first got on there was because I was the one person in the world who cared about Force Commander.

 

Honestly, I feel like Wookieepedia's a more direct descendant of that sort of turn-of-the-millennium fan project then most wikis, and it's not to its benefit. I mean, we've rehashed to death how so many of its problems stem from that obsession with being an in-universe encyclopedia, and I think that traces rather precisely back to fan timelines and the like. (Which is not to criticize them as having those same problems, mind you).

 

Force Commander! There's some memories!

 

While I like it most of times, it is really irritating sometimes when you are trying to find out how/when different stories gave somebody different personalities/backgrounds or how the presentation of planets have changed under different authors

 

Thanks for all the likes! Brought back memories of when I was a bitter and jaded ex-Wookieepedian who loved to complain about it.

... Wait, nothing's changed on that front. Damn.

A lot of Wookieepedia's sourcing is unhelpfully vague, like when a minor factoid is sourced to a 400-page novel, or a 200-page sourcebook. I didn't join Team Page Number until way later than I should have, but it seems like a pretty basic idea to make sourcing as specific as possible. Chapters or page numbers instead of the entire book, specific levels instead of the entire video game, time stamp for youtube videos or podcast interviews, etc. How can someone fact-chect an entire novel?

 

Jeff, you know I respect you, but I think in this case, the criticism is a bit unfair, because when official products do give sources (which they've rarely done since Bill Slavicsek), they aren't any less vague. Also, I now rarely buy physical books. Most of my Star Wars novels are in ebook format, and obviously you can't get a page number. The problem is this: we either must ALWAYS provide a page number, or NEVER do it. Otherwise, it would be inconsistent. And I don't want to be stopped from writing and sourcing articles just because I don't have the physical book.

 

Why is this so important as to override the benefits?

(Also, many e-books do have page numbers, but that may be a tangent)

 

Chapters, rather than page numbers, are the way to go for novels. I think SavageBob was the originator of chapter-sourcing, which is easier for various reasons --- ebooks, as you say, and it also makes describing things like action scenes and space battles easier without putting in a new reference every couple sentences, as the action generally flows across a number of pages at a time. I always went with chapter-sourcing for novels, and that made it easier to achieve consistency, too. After I started sourcing page numbers & chapters rather than entire novels and sourcebooks, I didn't have any trouble with consistently making an article's sources as specific as possible.

I would source comic issues without doing page numbers, though, since twenty-two comic pages isn't all that much to look through if something needs to be verified, and as the issues don't generally provide page numbers it would feel misleading and confusing to make them up when full-page advertisements are sprinkled throughout, which would muddle things up. SavageBob would cite the page number of the Dark Horse omnibus if he could, though, which was a clever workaround.

Take an article like Nei Rin --- when I was writing it, I found relevant information all throughout the Legacy Era Campaign Guide, over nine different pages ranging from page. 6 all the way to p. 214. Putting it all under one source would have helped nobody --- it would have made it harder to fact-check during the peer review process when it was becoming a Featured Article, and it would have given any readers of the site (authors looking for info or even just regular bums like me) over 200 pages to hunt through if they wanted to double-check anything. She's also mentioned on just one page of The Essential Guide to Warfare, and sourcing the entire book instead of that one single page would be just cruel.

Since there's no official policy on it, I would always just try to be as specific as possible. Page numbers for sourcebooks, chapters for novels & radio dramas, timestamps for podcasts for Behind-the-scenes info. For an obscure character like Judder Page's father, it would be easy to make something up and claim that it was somewhere in the Heir to the Empire sourcebook, but the way that the article is sourced provides accountability.

 

You know, this is actually an interesting point I hadn't thought of. Maybe because a lot of the sort of fan timeline stuff I followed in the 90s internet era was for Asimov and Heinlein timelines, and since there were a number of inconsistencies with those, those timelines always had some editorializing interspersed.

But if you look up some of the real early official Star Wars sourcebooks that predate that sort of internet culture emerging, like the Guide to the Star Wars Universe, they definitely do not have those kinds of pretense to being entire in-universe and will make the occasional real-world editorial comment that can seem kind of jarring from today's perspective.

 

Apparently Wikia will be straight-up changing its name to Fandom.com in a few weeks. Some Wikis like Yu-Gi-Oh and RuneScape have already flown the coop in anticipation of this. Will be interesting to see what Work does.

 

I think part of the problem with sourcing is the articles on reference books are just a collection of hyperlinks to the articles on the individual topic, which removes a lot of context. The best example I have being the previously mentioned TERC, where there is almost no context on the content of the work, especially the George Lucas said explanation for TCW and no Sith/dark sider mandate for TNJO from the era introductions.

 

One of the things I've really missed on the Wook in comparison to other fan wikis (mainly tfwiki) is a "Notes" section on pages about works. One of the joys of getting into Transformers comics recently is going to the page of each issue and reading the super in-depth cataloging of continuity references and running gags and such. And despite there being a fair amount of that in Star Wars, there's really nowhere people collect it.

 

The page number of an ebook changes depending on the font size. You make the font smaller, there’s less pages. It’s probably different based on which program or app you use, too.


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The Transformers wiki also has the superior image captions.

 

Honestly the Transformers wiki is just the gold standard of wikis.

 

Wookieepedia could DEFINITELY stand to take itself less seriously.

 

Most SW books I've read on the kindle give the physical page number if you tap the bottom of the screen. ... Or maybe it was just the Legends ones? Can't remember. But anyway you would tap the bottom of the screen and it would say "Page 231 of 397" or something. But, still, source chapters for novels.

 

How to access them will depend on your reader/app, but ebooks do come with the original print page numbers embedded in the file. In iBooks, you can get them to display by switching to scrolling mode, regardless of your font size.

 

Gizmodo compiled a list of what they consider the "100 Websites That Shaped the Internet as We Know It". Look what the fairly bafflinf choice for #69 was.

 

Nice.

I was recently thinking about how influential Wookieepedia is now—not in terms of the internet, exactly, but we've got the Lucasfilm creatives actually using it as research when making new stories. Which kinda means it's shaping new and future content, as are any mistakes and inconsistencies it carries.

I was thinking of it because someone brought up the formation of the Republic (or the reformation of the Old Republic into the Galactic Republic, rather); Wookieepedia has the date as 1032 BBY, citing Pablo's Propaganda, but looking through the book itself I can't see any reference to that date. All it says is plans for the Republic's millennium celebrations began under Valorum's reign, but the milestone was never actually reached before the Republic was dissolved. Doesn't that suggest the Republic isn't a thousand years old as of 32 BBY (and wouldn't be a thousand until sometime after ROTS's 19 BBY) so the 1032 BBY date on Wookieepedia is incorrect? Anyone?

 

yeah,the wiki for cancer (if there is one)will now be Cancer fandom.com

 

This is kind of wierd. On two unrelated FANDOM wikis I got redirected to those "you won $1000" scam sites. In one day, also. I never see those scams. Is this common on Wikia wikis or Wookieepedia itself?

 

Yeah it happens to me all the time. Usually their are “viruses” or “ads” attached to New pages. Idk why.