Status of the Encyclopedia Project

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Mithreas
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Status of the Encyclopedia Project

Post by Mithreas » Sun Jun 18, 2017 6:05 am

This forum has information from a couple of different iterations of the encyclopedia. This post is intended to explain how the current EA works.

The EA is currently homed here. You use your forum user account to log in, no separate credentials required.

We've set the EA up so that all contributions are In Character. There's a good reason for this - namely that we want to be able to pull articles into the server when people are browsing bookshelves or researching a particular subject. As of the time of writing that's not yet implemented, but it's the goal we're working towards.

Adding to the Encyclopedia

We're populating the EA with
- in-game books written by characters throughout Arelith's history
- selected content culled from message boards and notebooks, going back at least 100 years of Arelith time (10 years RL)
- new content written by anyone who submits it.

You're all welcome to contribute! In particular, if you have something you want to submit as a book for the palette, please put the text on the EA. Don't worry if you can't figure out how to tag/categorise it, or if your spelling isn't very good - all additions get reviewed by our EA volunteers.

To add an article, simply search for the article you want to create. Assuming nobody else has used that name already, you'll get the option to create your new article.

Reading the Encyclopedia

Very deliberately, there's no one stop shop to start reading "the story of Arelith". Arelith's history is emergent, from the actions of all of you as players, and the approach we've taken to documenting it is the same. The top page gives you some category structures you can browse (e.g. you can look at stuff relating to Bendir, if that's what you're interested in), or you can go to the master timeline which groups content by the decade(s) in which it is relevant. Some decades are much better populated than others right now, we're working on the rest :)

Browse it for inspiration, or look up content around areas that interest you... and hopefully you'll find there's always more out there. We're at about 400 articles right now, and expect to hit around 900 by the time we've finished importing everything we have. Hopefully, of course, people will keep contributing current writings, ensuring that the record remains up to date... though of course, more secret things may not be published until decades after they were relevant.

Discord
We have an Encyclopedia Arelithica Discord channel that's open to anyone who wants to discuss the project or ask questions - we'll keep an eye on this forum too. You should be able to join the channel via this link, though given my poor level of Discord fluency, you may need to ask someone on the EA team. There's a forum user group called Encyclopedists for people who have volunteered to help out with moderation and curation.
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