Lit Wookieepedia, the Star Wars wiki

I don't know how this sort of thing works there, but as the winds of change sweep across Wookieepedia perhaps this is also the time for someone to finally introduce some sort of sane sourcing policy for canon articles. Eliminating the use of sketchy if not outright non-canon sources like FFG, Helmet Collection magazine, the old online Encyclopedia, author tweets, etc. would make the Wook immensely more accurate and useful for canon research. (FFG stuff needs to be documented somewhere, obviously, but not in canon articles.)

 

We have articles about lego characters. I am sure someone can do something similar.

 

The Star Wars apocrypha wiki that desperately needs to be made!

 

Stuff like FFG, Lego, Heart of the Jedi, and Supernatural Encounters all seem like they belong in their own separate categories to me (maybe the latter two could go together).

 

Maybe make a general non canon category?

 

Well, the most effective way to shift the culture is for new blood to come in and start editing. So I wouldn't wait to see the cultural shift if you want it to happen, because it needs you to make it happen.

That image was first placed there on November 26, 2010. Prior to that, the image was of Yarna d'al' Gargan. Prior to *that*, it was a clothed image of Aayla, possibly one from a comic where another character (a Gossam, I think) is staring quite conspicuously at her décolletage; whatever image was there has been deleted, so it's not easy to tell.

My advice for a would-be Wookieepedian getting started:
1. Start small. Make some small corrections to things like grammar or spelling, so you can get the hang of how editing a Wiki works.
2. Learn the code for sourcing. Wherever an article shows a superscript number in brackets, in the code for the article, it will show something like

Try practicing getting this format right in the site's sandbox, the Jundland Wastes (this is also a great place to try out other code). Unsourced contributions generally get reverted fairly quickly, so you want your contributions to be sourced, and you want that sourcing to be done right so other editors don't have to clean it up.
3. Listen to people on your talk page. While sometimes you'll get a weirdo or jerk with an axe to grind, usually it's editors earnestly trying to help you make better article edits.
4. Don't try to get involved in any site decision-making processes until you've made at least 50 good edits to the mainspace (i.e. the text of articles). Your votes will be reverted until you hit that threshold. Just keep on improving articles. While I think this 50-edit hurdle is part of what has ossified the Wook's culture (an outcome fully intended by certain individuals no longer with the site), making new users familiar with the basics of the editing and what Wookieepedia is like behind the scenes before they start stirring the pot is not without its advantages.

Unfortunately, there IS NO sane policy. Lucasfilm has intentionally been obfuscatory and contradictory regarding the nature of canon itself in post-Legends paradigm, meaning there isn't a cut-and-dried answer to these sticky problems. As it often does, Wookieepedia errs on the side of inclusion. Reader discretion is advised.

 

Still when you see Exar Kun being canon and only being like two sentences worth of info it makes yuh raise a eyebrow.

 

Yeah, the FFG stuff really needs a proper answer. Not like we'll get one from the Story Group since they are VERY quiet at the moment since the fallout from the end of the Sequels and the aftermath of Mandalorian Season Two. Not to mention this incident relating to the bootlegged Heart of the Jedi outselling High Republic novels.

So in reality, I think Wookieepedia needs to take matters into their own hands now about FFG. When it comes to the magazines, we know finally got a name for one or two minor characters who have never been named so it'd be good to keep them in.

 

I know if I were in charge I would have the rule of thumb of

Story Material > Non Story Material

So unless Exar Kun is mentioned in a offical novel, comic, game, film or tv series...he isn't canon.

Granted that might get tricky with Easy Eggs like one in a episode of TCW mentioning the "Brotherhood of Darkness" but I suppose i wouldn't count easter eggs either.

 

Going off that, Exar Kun would still be canon thanks to The Art of Solo: A Star Wars Story.

 

Pablo and Matt, even Leland, have been pretty active on Twitter recently.

But Wookieepedia making unilateral decisions about what is and isn't canon was the issue to begin with. "FFG is canon now!" the Wook exclaimed, when that isn't true. Wookieepedia shouldn't take matters into its own hands; it should reflect official material.

 

Yeah, Pablo in particular really shocked me, given all the kerfuffle recently. He explained the partial reason why here:

 

The policy was introduced due to the absence of any official direction from Lucasfilm, so as to organize those sources better. No one is saying they're "canon" now, we consider them "canon" for mechanical reasons. There may be the odd example here and there, but we don't live in a perfect world unfortunately, so we have to make do with what we have.

 

It would make more sense to treat none of it as canon, because none of it is.

 

"They're not canon but we consider them canon" is the issue.

 

It's definitely something that Wookieepedia admins need to discuss. There's a lot of things that they need to discuss.

FFG's status. Restoration of Participants list to battle pages to avoid turning the Commanders list into them. Last updates to ALL Legends pages since most are unfinished and it's been 7 years now since Legends ended for now. Why pages such as Leia, Andor, Bail, Krennic and several others go by their full names as opposed to simply first and last name or single "nicknames" like Pao or even "Joh Yowza". Are anatomy pages really necessary? And other items.

Wook Admins, if you're on the Forums, these are the things I'd love to discuss on Senate Hall, if I could have access to them again.

 

You are completely free to create a Senate Hall thread for any wiki matters.

 

Respectfully, I have to disagree with the idea that Lucasfilm has been "intentionally obfuscatory and contradictory" regarding canon. Can you expand on that point a bit? It seems to me that all things considered, the vast majority of the time it's pretty clear when something is or is not canon. Obviously the FACPOV books are ambiguous, and there are some odd corner cases like some of the mobile games that were floating around circa 2014-2015, but for the most part there is clarity.

Of the examples I provided above, FFG is definitively non-canon, the Encyclopedia is definitively Legends, and author tweets are "unvetted" material that might be worthwhile to include in a Behind the Scenes note, but not in the article proper. The Helmet Collection I'm not particularly familiar with, but from descriptions I've read it sounds like they're freely mixing canon and Legends material, and the Wook is simply treating it all as canon for whatever reason. Might be a corner case, I dunno, but definitely something editors might want to think twice about citing.

I actually find the use of the old starwars.com Encyclopedia as a canon source to be a bigger problem than the FFG stuff as it is unambiguously Legends material, and is used to source an awful lot of canon articles, including some important ones (for example, the Sith article uses the Encyclopedia to assert that the canon Sith Order was started by a single rogue Jedi, something which might have been true in Legends but is currently unsubstantiated by any actual canon material). Its claim to being a canon source rests solely on the fact that it lingered on starwars.com for a few months after the reboot announcement before it was decommissioned in favor of the current Databank.

 

The problem with someone like Exar Kun is people don't understand the distinction between a Sith named Exar Kun being canon and the entirety of EU Exar Kun being canon. It's perfectly fine that his canon page is only a couple sentences, because that's all we know about him. No declaration from LFL would do anything to change that, only future material.

 

I'm not jSarik, but there has been a lot more than just the FACPOV books that are ambiguous in their status as truthful.

• The Myths and Fables book along with its sequel Dark Legends and presumably the upcoming Life Day Treasury are all framed as stories that may or may not reflect actual occurrences.
• The Legends of Luke Skywalker is another book that frames its contents as being half-truths.
• Now that The Bad Batch has overwritten it, I believe the official line on the Kanan comic is that Kanan's memory is somewhat faulty due to the passage of time since the events depicted in flashback. Ergo, the story is framed as being told by an unreliable narrator.

I think it's worth noting that with the exception of the last example, all examples I've cited are not your standard prose adult novels published by Del Rey but rather they are middle-grade novels published by Disney-LucasFilm Press. They also have some of the most adventurous content in canon with stories ranging from Old Republic-era content to stories about Luke Skywalker following Return of the Jedi. I think this is probably intentional because while it provides some desired content for those periods when LFL is not necessarily ready to fully commit to them, it also prevents further canon from the big three arenas (Film+TV, Del Rey, Marvel) from being restricted by whatever stories are in these collections.

Instead of having a vertical tiered structure like the old canon, the new canon seems to have a spherical structure: you have the outer sphere including sourcebooks, magazines, guidebooks, and other stuff that only Wookieepedia appears to strongly consider (I could write a whole thread about this), then the middle sphere including anything considered narratively unreliable or otherwise liable to retcons, and then the more solid novels/comics/film+TV content which is intentionally designed to intersect barring occasional hiccups.

 

Can't. For some reason, I can't create a thread on the Senate Hall. I'm mostly trapped talking on Talk Pages about probable changes. Most likely cause I wasn't happy with how the Battle pages went in the past and I still couldn't believe EVERY squadron commander had to be on the list and why Motti is a commander at Yavin when he's just there doing nothing.

 

This is a reasonable way to look at it but I also don't think fans should feel like the Bad Batch version has to win out here. Would any future coverage of that moment prioritize it over the comic? Probably, but until and unless that actually happened I think people are free to treat the comic as the more accurate version and the show as fuzzy. The wook has "conflicting sources" tags for a reason and if they were to overtly incorporate an "unreliable narrator" explanation instead of just detailing both depictions as they are that would amount to fanon imo.

 

I've expressed my thoughts about the Bad Batch / Kanan stuff over in the Bad Batch thread and won't reprise it here, but in short it has a lot to do with how we as fans approach the material. Regarding the Myths and Fables, Dark Legends, Legends of Luke Skywalker types of stories, that doesn't concern me as much because that's explicitly presented up-front as ambiguous material, it's truthfulness is uncertain even in-universe, and it's easy to mark it as such within the articles themselves. That to me is a different sort of thing than having sources we know are not canonical, like FFG or the online Encyclopedia, used to source canon articles.

 

Can you elaborate on the issue you're facing?

 

When I am on Senate Hall, I try to click on Start New Thread but it doesn't work. Instead of being an active link, its a gray box. So I think I have been blocked by someone high up from making a Thread on Senate Hall for anything.