Wiki Beta, or how I learned to stop worrying and love the community

[Emperor]

.. wait. It's all well and good adding these guys to categories, but we should probably simplify/automate and organise.. whatever it is we're trying to do here.

The Stories have a field for Character which is expandable, the idea being that you can list each character which has appeared in that story.

The Characters have a field to represent what series the character belongs to, not what they've featured in.

Surely the stories field is the one you want to fill out in this instance? I'm not sure we can successfully tie the Character noted in the Story to a Series, though.

Otherwise you'll have to add each series reference to the character template for each little appearance they make, and you'll have no record of WHERE they made the appearance. If we went that route then we should probably introduce a new field, like "appeared in", where you can list series.

Ah ha, and this is where you come down to how you define something like "belong" is going to be a tricky beast - Judge Anderson belongs in both the Dredd and her own series I'd have thought (ditto Hammerstein and Ro-Busters/ABC Warriors). Thinking it through there aren't that many characters who have crossed over (and often it'll largely be Dredd characters who had their own spin-off series) and usually only into one story, so it is probably not going to be that confusing (or require an extra field, unless you want one to differentiate between characters who belong to more than one series and those who have only appeared in a series).

[Batman's Superior Cousin]

Will be starting some articles dedicated to Savage, Rogue Trooper, Shakara, Nemesis, Nikolai dante and Defoe in the next few weeks

[Emperor]

I was wondering if be a way to import collection information? It'd obviously be handy to have something like the Extreme Editions listed but very useful for things like the Case Files where you'd want an overview page and one for each Case File - all you'd need there is the ability to list the stories and include links to reviews and the like.

[Emperor]

Oh and would the wiki be the right place for something like this?:

http://www.2000adonline.com/forum/index.php/topic,27561.0.html

It'd be handy as we could link to the various characters/series (and trade collections if the previous idea works out*).

*I have a list of trade reviews saved off if you want me to drop them in here so they can be incorporated as you go along, I'd also include such recommendation as this (as bring such things together so someone can look through them at their leisure could help swing potential buyers):

http://forbiddenplanet.co.uk/blog/2010/judge-dredd-america/

[Mike Gloady]

What an amazing idea.  And it's going so well, too.  When I have time I'll be sure to join the fun.

[Grant Goggans]

If I could make a suggestion... is there really a need for separate pages for (character) and (series) at all?  Why not just have one page, and leave room for a "fictional character biography" - as Wikipedia terms it - there for us to fill out?

[VinceBot]

Some series aren't characters, and some characters aren't series. This is a descendant from the Vault (front page) setup, where it doesn't make sense database-wise to mix the two into one entity.

Really though, the wiki is free for you guys to figure out. Can you make a separate topic about it?

[Emperor]

Just one thing that could lead to confusion, if you go to a creators page and click on edit in one of the sections you don't do to a box where you can edit the section, you go to the template and edit that bit of the template (which then inserts that text in every page using the template). To add content to a page you need to edit the whole page.

Is there any way to kill the section [edit] links in the mainspace to avoid this problem? If anyone wanted to change the template they can still go to that specific page.

[VinceBot]

You'd need to edit in the magic word "__NOEDITSECTION__", which hides edit section links, into each of the templates.

I might do this myself if I get some spare time.

[Emperor]

OK cool. I've added that to Character, Creator, Megazine, Prog, Series and Story.