Lexicon talk:Main Page/Outbreak

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Outbreak

First Topic

Currently, I'm thinking that the best "first topic" that we should work on should probably be the most obvious one - Lexicon of The First Days of the Outbreak, shortened to the Outbreak Lexicon. This Lexicon would focus on the enigmatic first days of the Outbreak, and attempt to piece together exactly what happened with the quarantine and what may have caused it in the first place. Any other takers? -- Odd Starter talk • Mod • W! 08:41, 5 April 2006 (BST)

Groovy. --Zaruthustra-Mod 21:41, 5 April 2006 (BST)

A minor digression from the local Wiki noob

I like the topic idea, but I have a quick additional suggestion. Though the background story suggests a tone and flavor of the Lexicon, it would probably be a good idea to set down, in no uncertain terms, the prevailing tone to the coming pages, even varying from round to round, if that's what you're after. You'd want to give them guidelines loose enough to be creative but tight enough to keep the submissions from going all over the map (A few disparate examples: Confessional, Professional, Scientific, Reportorial, Historical, Humorous). I just get the feeling, unrestricted, the end result might have a feel of a Mad Lib(tm). Then again, this might be the place of a sure-handed moderator (or two). I have no previous experience in these things, so this is just a gut-feel sort of thing...--Xavier06 12:31, 5 April 2006 (BST)

I had thought the whole idea of a Royal commission would suggest the tone of entries quite nicely, though I s'pose that those outside of the Commonwealth might not have a good idea as to exactly what a royal commission is. Of the examples you gave, I'd probably not expect to see Humourous entries, nor would I expect to see much Historical, but just about everything else on the list would be pretty fair game. It's less the format and more the general mood that I was trying to isolate. This is a governmental enquiry - It should be relevent to the topic at hand, and mostly "factual" and serious in tone. -- Odd Starter talk • Mod • W! 13:54, 5 April 2006 (BST)
Fair enough. I had gleaned that was your slant from the proposal, but, like the old saying goes, no-one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the masses (or something to that effect). I imagine that, once everything starts, everything'll be clearer in the final edited page. Looking forward to it frankly...it would be nice to fill out the backstory to UD...

Your comment does lead me to a frivolous inquiry: I wonder what the nationality breakdown on UD players is?--Xavier06 17:46, 5 April 2006 (BST)

Migrated Conversation (from Category talk:Lexicon)

Oh, wow. I forgot all about this idea. Awesome job, Zar, you're great. Wonder how many people will help out...maybe I'll try to convince Kevan to make a news about it. Then again, that might get too many people.--'STER-Talk-Mod 00:43, 19 March 2006 (GMT)

Heh heh. If Kevan put up news to that, make sure we have time to appoint about 5 new mods >_<. I'll probly spend most of my modding time here anyhow. --Zaruthustra-Mod 00:59, 19 March 2006 (GMT)

Some Thoughts

I've been involved in Lexicons before, so I should probably bring some thoughts as to the format:

  1. The original format is one letter a round, but in my experience, this takes forever, and you tend to get a lot of dropouts, just because it'll take 2-3 months and people's lives will change during that time. I worked on a Lexicon that used phonepad grouping as it's round order (ie ABC, DEF, GHI, etc), so about nine rounds. This makes each Lexicon a lot shorter - It also gives interested parties less of a wait to naturally join festivities.
  2. I recommend a certain level of "focus" for each round. Instead of "What happened in Malton?", Instead focus on a small section of our setting, ie doing a lexicon about Necrotech, or the Military Activation, or the Last Stand of the Malton Police during the Early Outbreak. These allow a certain level of focus, while still allowing a mostly blank slate to play with.
  3. Instead of Investigative Reporters, instead make it some sort of government commission attempting to identify what exactly is happening in Malton. This improves the scope of the "characters" that can be played through the Lexicon.
  4. I'm not sure I like the idea of using sub-pages. Once the lexicon is complete, I think we should be able to integrate the new backstories into the wiki. Just keep a template and everything categorised, and we should be hunky-dory. There may be issues with page name collisions, but making the disambiguation convention something like Page Name (Lexicon) should be more than sufficient to block that (it'll also make links look a lot cleaner, since pipe linking can deal with parentheses, but not sub-pages). I also like the idea of inserting lexicon material into the actual wiki page after each game if it's referencing something that we already have a page on. Think of this as a collaborative attempt to make content for the wiki.

-- Odd Starter talk • Mod • W! 02:27, 20 March 2006 (GMT)

  1. 1 seems fine with me. The Lexicon that kevan.org linked to fell apart a couple months ago, it seems fromjsut that reason-a faster pace=happiness. #2 will certainly give the idea more life, anyway--we could do it more than once that way. #3 would indeed flesh "character creation" out more, though as I understood it that's not really what Lexicon is about. #4 seems a good idea, although I IRCed with Kevan about this and he seemed kind of worried about people taking lexicon pages as fact, even though I mentioned the template idea. Zar, what do you think?--'STER-Talk-Mod 20:18, 20 March 2006 (GMT)
  1. I made my version intentionally freeform because I was really worried about getting people to do it. I think it is a very distinct group of people that enjoys being given a letter or subject and then writing about it in their spare time. I mean, I do, but then I'm wierd. Add to this that we have people on different time zones, on their own schedules, dropping in and out constantly. It seems like it would be easier to coordinate an event with a cage full of howling monkeys. If you think the numbers can be brought to bear though, more power to you.
  2. Pretty much same fears. I don't want to stifle people. I'm sure theres a lot of people who have some great ideas about necrotech or something, but honestly don't care about the rest of the subjects. And they certainly don't want to wait 10 rounds or whatever to do it. Will people go for this?
  3. Yea, that sounds better.
  4. I fear this will create a massive mess. We'll have very commonly used topics sprawled all over, making it that much harder to find the info you want for everybody.--Zaruthustra-Mod 04:58, 22 March 2006 (GMT)
  1. I suspect you'll find that the kind of people who like to contribute creative material aren't quite as rare as you might think, especially on such a community as UD, where the actual world is not particularly well-defined, and in order to maintain a satisfying roleplay experience a certain level of creative "filling in" is necessary. The schedule thing isn't a problem - assume a twice-weekly deadline, set it to a GMT deadline, the problems will effectively vanish, and there's the issue that the deadline doesn't have to be perfect anyway, since it's not direly critical that people enter their entries in before the next set of entries can be written.
  2. The thing is, a blank page can scare people too. A truly blank world can make people feel lost, and without inspiration. If I ask you to "make up something", it paralyses. If I say "make up something with buck teeth, four legs and wearing a tutu", it suddenly becomes that much easier. I believe the same principle applies to Lexicons. As long as it's still a blank canvas, you can still get it pretty small. And I don't think the possible subjects I've thrown up are all that restricting anyway. The idea is to provide a subject matter which evokes a certain mood.
  4. Again, this is solvable, or possibly even solved. Categories will let us see everything in each given Lexicon, and frankly, subpaging doesn't solve the problem of lost pages anyway. As long as we're strict in categorising pages, we can name them whatever we want, and just keep a convention around for page collisions. And, you know, when we're done, we can take the info that Kevan likes, and incorporate it into the wiki proper, with no issues. -- Odd Starter talk • Mod • W! 10:35, 22 March 2006 (GMT)
Bang on. I'll be in and out for a while so if you guys want to work on it don't let me stop you. --Zaruthustra-Mod 08:48, 28 March 2006 (BST)

Template

For your inclusion pleasure, Template:Lexicon has been created for Lexicon users to include on pages or sections, as they wish. -- Odd Starter talk • Mod • W! 03:18, 20 March 2006 (GMT)

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