Er. Ah. I wrote that page. Do NOT take it seriously. At all. Sorry for messing with the pages and all, but that one specifically is completely chock full of sarcasm. You'd need to sit on it to close it, were it a briefcase, because of how full it is.

If you need to tell me that it is sarcastic and not to take it seriously...

Tone is easily lost in translation; text doesn't offer you a way to roll your eyes or wink slyly at the reader. Some people are better at writing sarcasm than others! When you're addressing a mixed audience, it's better to reserve sarcastic comments for yourself than to aim them at your audience; it's a lot easier to say "just kidding!" when you're poking fun at yourself than when you're poking fun at something personal to everyone in your audience.

(More clearly, maybe: your comedic intent was not clear. Learn from the feedback you receive about it, or expect to continue receiving ire.)

Not a fan of Flight of the Conchords, I take it?


1) I'm speaking "er than a doornail" levels of dead. As in "deleted". That removes all ambiguity.
2) It adds the information of whether or not the contestant is still on the island, which I find at least mildly important. But, mostly, I think the dead should be shoveled into a new category because of this:

You're not a "CURRENT PLAYER CHARACTER" if you're dead, but I still think you should be listed somewhere.


Of course, the flaw in this plan is that, since I've used the emoticons I might use to show facetiousness, I can't very well use them again to show that I'm speaking facetiously.

FML, then let's delete the "CURRENT" part. I don't like listing people who are gone or deleted somewhere else. There's a lot of sentiment, there's a lot of coming and going, and to come back and see DED in big red letters rubber stamped across my face? Or the face of a player's character that I enjoyed? No, thank you. I don't like that.

So how's about we just have... an index.

With such mild and bland categories as Character Biographies, Clan Descriptions, Gameplay and Statistics (Useful), Game Ecology (questionable), and other such things? definitely create a place where all the useful, statistical, guide-things can be put for rookies or the curious, and another for all those lie-filled pages of glorious confusion and chaos.

The trick is to make large categories, and not specific ones. Specifics are where people get argumentative.

Yes, I hang around libraries a lot. What's it to you.

yes this


I don't think the intent of the Dramatis Personae is for new players to know who's on the Island? The most effective way of learning who's who is to actually talk to people. Do new players go and read the whole list to figure out who is who? No, they have a chat with people in NewHome at first and get to wandering around the Island. I wouldn't categorize the Dramatis Personae as a resource for new roleplayers.

Dramatis Personae is the cast of characters: everyone who has had a role in a play, everyone who appears on stage. Just because your character has died, or you've had to leave the Island for whatever reason, doesn't mean that your words or your appearance never happened. They become history--Act I of an ongoing work.

So that's why I don't think the Dramatis Personae, or really any of the Wiki's fiction content, ought to be changed. If you want a new page for Current Player Characters, as part of the New Player Resource Section, where everyone who feels like it can add their own entry, then go ahead. But in a library, there is a difference between a dictionary and a history of a city. There are reference materials and there are stories; each have their place, and each has to be managed differently. Which is why I repeat my earlier suggestion: a new, cleanly organized section for New Player Resources, and possibly another for Frequently Used Player Resources. And as for the character biographies, the roleplay archives, the clan pages--the history--we can alphabetize them, group them under a broad heading (Marly's "Clan Pages", "Character Biographies", not "Inactive Characters" etc.), link them more neatly, but let's try and leave them alone as much as possible.

It started, back in at the beginning of season one, as an index, cheatsheet, and a quick look for new rookies about what sort of characters were on the island. The Island was a LOT SMALLER then. We need an index that works, and people need to add their new pages to it, and that's not 100% fool proof, so someone needs to, ideally, check the Recently Updated against the index to make sure it's there.

Also, cart and horse order territory, but in this index? some people have done HUGE stories on multiple pages, with a table of contents page with all the links. that should be on the index, not the individual chapters

Iriana, I did use the list to find out who people were when I started, actually! And I found it quite handy. That is how, initially, I found DICE. It could do with more people adding their characters to it, but I don't like the idea of removing anyone from it, nor do I like the suggested idea of a master list of characters with active/inactive/alt/npc - what's wrong with the DP as it stands for that?

Marly: wow, I had no idea that had ever happened, thanks for cleaning it up. O_o

Oh. Well! Then I apologize for making assumptions. Okay, so it could be a new player resource. But there are so many characters now that it does feel a little unwieldy to me, no matter who it's organized. Was the list significantly shorter when you first started, or has it only expanded a little?

Actually, like what Marly said, I could see it being something for new players to look and see "okay, these are the sort of characters that are running around, how do I fit in to this world/be unique from these existing characters/etc. etc." Right, that makes sense, and I didn't see it earlier.

But yeah, I--don't want the list edited or split up into active/not active or to otherwise lose any of the old stories and old characters. I wasn't around when a lot of that was written, but I love reading it. Sorry, I might be beating a dead horse here; I think we've more or less agreed that deleting things/"reducing paperwork" is a bad idea.

Okay, so. I've tweaked the wording of the intro to the Dramatis Personae list to reflect a little better what it actually is, and added a Wiki-appropriate* garnish of footnotes.

I hope the change makes it easier to work with. If not, well, it's a wiki....
--
* That is: too many. Wiki entries are always better with too many footnotes.

Iriana: It was significantly shorter, but I'd still read it at this length, I imagine. Just probably not all in one go, like I did before.

I don't want to lose any old stories or characters either. Hmm... let me describe better what I want, using the power of Fake Tables of Contents:

Why do I want this? Well, it more fits my interpretation of the term "Dramatis Personae". But more importantly, I'd like to know who on the list is still on the Island without searching for them.

No one would ever update that, even if people did like the idea (and several in this thread have said they do not). Look at the "list of people to ask for help" (or whatever it is called) on the roleplaying guide. A good chunk of those people have been gone for ages and ages. Look at all the old articles from S1 that we leave in there.
You'd just end up having to do searches anyway.

That's not something that can be done in the wiki--like Ada said, it'd be impossible to maintain. Most people don't seem to approve of having someone moderate that sort of list by arbitrarily deciding who counts as a "former" contestant. If anything, it'd need to be an extension of the Contestants List that exists in the game (which could do with a bit of rejiggering too). So a game-end thing, not a player-updated-wiki thing.

We don't always know who is a "former contestant" and who's someone who just has to go away for a while while they're in hospital or trying to get a new job and a new house all the way across the country or trying to climb out of a pit full of slobbering licky-monsters. Or going through a really focused, intense school year. Former is something very permanent. If I were in hospital, I'd really hate coming back and seeing my name on the inactive list.

Some people don't show up on the list after a bit because of the auto-delete, but others have the hyper ring. The ones who get deleted sometimes create the same character and come back. In short AAUGH WE DUNNO.

I can see instances where looking up people can be tedious, but... ehn. A lot of things are. It's at least got a search function on the contestant list so you don't have to sing the alphabet song while you're looking for them. For the odd person, okay. Are you trying to look up large numbers of people? Perhaps it might be time to look at tweaking the Contestant List to have a feature for listing people who haven't been online in X days/months such as a Last On sort feature.

Well yes...but all you have to do is move your name back on to the active contestant list again. If you've been otherwise engaged, then you are effectively inactive aren't you? The big problem would be keeping it up to date.

Ideally, people who cared enough to put their character on the list would also care enough to move their character around on the list. If not, then it would come down to either Wiki Magic(tm) or the League of Laughably Wiki-Inclined People that Collin was discussing.

This is still with the assumption that is at all necessary. And that we know why you want this list.

Why the heck do you want it?

---

"Ain't nothin' left to do but smile, smile, smile." -The Grateful Dead

Really, Collin just had it as one of the things he'd organize by, and, while I disliked the other ones, (the Alt category seemed like none of your business and the NPC category seemed misfit to Dramatis Personae) knowing which characters are still on the Island seems mildly nifty. It doesn't seems like that big of a thing to me, really, just knowing which information is still relevant. It was also on the page in LARGE UPPERCASE LETTERS that only current characters should be on the list, but I suppose we can forget that now.

Ahhh. Gotcha! I still disagree with the idea that the Bios of folk who have left are irrelevant, but really, `ithat`i's irrelevant anyway.

See, I think the problem that Collin (and anyone else who wanted to attempt the WHOLE DAMN THING) had in organizing the wiki wasn't that we need one thing over the other- it was trying to tackle the, well, whole thing. Taking things piece by piece seems wiser. Journey of a thousand miles and all that.

Y'know what? I'm gonna go alphabetize the Scene Index!

---

"Ain't nothin' left to do but smile, smile, smile." -The Grateful Dead