Staff:Discussion

From Gineipaedia, the Legend of Galactic Heroes wiki

Revision as of 12:37, 16 May 2011

This page is meant for staff discussion of various issues related to either the Legend of Galactic Heroes franchise or Gineipaedia itself that do not involve specific articles or policies.

For archived discussions, see Staff:Discussion/archive (does not exist yet)

Galactic Geography

We need to figure things out. (And make a Galaxy page). We know that the Empire is located predominanty in the Orion Arm. The FPA is located primarily in the Sagitarius Arm. There are a number of conflicting maps of FPA/Imperial territory (most agreeing that the combined territories occupy about half of the Milky Way). Are there any detailed, primarly-level maps out there (from either the OVAs or Novels) we could use to try and determine what, exactly, the shape of things is?

Some interesting stuff... I'm still trying to build a "picture" of the LoGH universe, and I've just realized something that indicates that virtually ALL of the fan-created maps (or even licensed maps) are grossly incorrect. In Spiral Labyrinth, Yang travels from Heinessen to the distant frontier of the FPA (covering what appears to be about 2/3s to 3/4s the width of the whole FPA. The distance between the two locations is 480 light years.

Because the FPA and Empire are both depicted as being similar in size, we can estimate that both territoris encompass a 2D circular territory about 500 or 600 LY in diameter, making the whole of colonized worlds only about 1000LY or so in diamter, spread across 2 arms of the Milky Way Galaxy. (Again, 2D estimates in line with the Galactic plane). Notice how none of the "official" maps in the OVAs show the galaxy as a whole? That's because the galaxy is too big. Current estimates place the Milky Way galaxy with a diameter of 100,000LY to 200,000LY (and some research indicates it may be even BIGGER). This means that, at best, in by 800 UC (2 NIC / 491 IC / 3600 CE) humanity has only explored/settled about 1% of the galaxy.

Personally... I find this awesome. I love it when a science fiction writer has a sense of scale. It always bothered me how most scifi leaps from "solar system" to "whole galaxy." Will probably try to compile all of this (along with visual screenshots of various maps from the OVAs, encyclopedias, and perhaps fan sources) later this week. Canary 01:07, 10 May 2011 (UTC)

Featured Article Selection

Wouldn't it be cool if each time the front page loaded, the "Featured Article" list was different? Let's make a list of articles we want to be included as "featured." In terms of general criteria, let's say that they most contain more than 1 section and be mostly complete. Once we have 25 or so total, we can set it up. Sound good?

I would suggest the folowing articles: Inferior Genes Exclusion Act; Legnica; Tanaka Yoshiki; Annerose von Grünewald; and Bloody Night Canary 22:59, 30 April 2011 (UTC)

Well, once we get enough good content we would ideally want to start doing a Wikipedia-style single 'featured article' with an excerpt and all of that, so i'm not sure how much energy we want to expend on this (temporary) list in the interim.

As a general rule, though, i think the following things should be true about a featured article: (1) All statements are sourced [disqualifies most of those]; (2) all content is original [disqualifies Tanaka Yoshiki, since it's copied straight from WP — we really need to fix that when we get a chance]; (3) does not contain parts that require clean-up/citation; and (4) is at least nearly complete. That's why i chose the ones we've got up there now — not because i'm particularly proud of them or think they're interesting topics, i just thought they fit the general idea of what a 'good' article ought to be.  ♥ kine @ 12:16, 8 May 2011 (UTC)

Only one article at a time? Well, I suppose that works, but that's mostly a formatting concern. My point about determining a list of suitable topics still stands. As for the pages I pointed out above, I've gone through and cleaned them up. All are at a "quality" level, by my estimation, at present. With one exception--Annerose's page. I think the Bio is nearly complete (could stand to be better written) unless we want to add in all of the events/conversations where she was present, but not really involved (the Duel). The main issue is citation, as 1) I'm not sure on the {{}} format for anything other than the main OVA series, and 2) not all of the Gaiden episodes have pages yet. so....

I'll also add Galactic Empire to the list, now that I've finished that page. Eventually we'll want Yang and Reinhard and FPA and NGE up there, too, but I say keep the rest of the cycling articles more esoteric. Personally, I find the pre-Imperial background history to be pretty interesting, so I think that's a good place to draw from, as are any articles that heavily source non-animated material. Canary 02:06, 9 May 2011 (UTC)

New Galactic Empire v. Old Galactic Empire

Lohengramm's Neue Reich presents us with an interesting problem: because Reinhard became emperor through technically legal methods (the forced abdication of the last Goldenbaum ruler) the 'Neue Reich" is, basically, the same entity as der Alten Reich. Two dynasties, one empire. But due to the numerous social and political reforms he initiated and Hildegarde von Mariendorf continued, as well has the annexation of the Free Planets Alliance, the social, political, territorial and even economic characteristics of Reinhard's empire are radically different than those of the Empire under the Goldenbaum Dynasty.

So do we view the Neue Reich as a separate political entity with as separate article (the New Galactic Empire) or do we consolidate everything on the Galactic Empire page? For a historical analog to consider, the transitions from Han to T'sao Wei to Jin dynasties in China were all legal (and also forced abdications) transitions, so the Chinese nation was basically the "same" from dynasty to dynasty, despite, you know, vast social, political, territorial and economic differences. Most, if not all academic sources, however, tend to divide Chinese history between dynasties as though each were a separate state. Wikipedia does this as well. Canary 20:01, 30 April 2011 (UTC)

I'm not convinced they should be separate entities with separate pages and separate categories and all that jazz. Both the official subtitles and the Japanese fan sources continue to refer to it using the same words and characters as for the Goldenbaum Empire, except in a few very specific cases. (For example, in that passage about Hilde i quoted you from the LOGH Encyclopaedia, it says that she became regent of 銀河帝国 the Galactic Empire.) It's also sort of cumbersome to use in a sentence  ♥ kine @ 04:59, 10 May 2011 (UTC)

I agree it can be cumbersome, but I think I've managed to make it more practical by combining certain things. Basically, even though the terminology and basic social/political structure of the New Empire was an extension of the old, I feel it's necessary to differentiate the two because of the introduction of the new calendar, in addition to the points I mentioned earlier. Socially, politically and geographically we're looking at two very different entities.

How I've chosen to integrate this "dual" page is fairly simple, I think. Basically, it just means adding "New Galactic Empire" tags to anything that also has a "Galactic Empire" tag, and simply changing the "Galactic Empire" tag to "New Galactic Empire" for anything that only involves the new empire--like the New Imperial Capital. The Imperial Warships and Imperial Citizen category pages have also been edited to that, in their description, it is clear they include pages from BOTH. In the end, all it amounts to is adding "New" and a space to the text, and that's not really cumbersome at all. And it can always be "hidden" in the link. Canary 16:53, 10 May 2011 (UTC)

Fair enough  ♥ kine @ 02:07, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

Detail of Production Staff articles?

I'm curious about how much depth we want to include in the production staff pages, and how much interest we think the community will have in these pages. Other than basic work histories (filmographies, etc.) should we try to include basic biographical information? Canary 20:01, 30 April 2011 (UTC)

I don't think it should be a priority, no. In terms of both reader and contributor interest i suspect that far more focus will be placed on in-universe topics, so i don't think we should waste time/effort on this now. But obv it is not something we should disallow or anything; it will just come later  ♥ kine @ 12:16, 8 May 2011 (UTC)

Gineipaedia Icon

What do you guys thing, should the Brunhild in the icon be slightly larger? I feel like the ship's length is too well matched with the Goldenbaum seal, and I'd like to see a bit more obvious of an overlap. Maybe not. (This is basically just a sample discussion topic). Canary 20:01, 30 April 2011 (UTC)

Personally I'd prefer the Goldenlohen crest. :) Vympel 07:40, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

I would, as well. Unfortunately it's too impractical--the Goldenlowe crest has too many details that just don't work in silhouette, and the only decent images we have of it are very fan-arty. Canary 17:45, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

I don't think there's a problem with the sizing. (As far as the content itself, it's not ideal, but i think it's sufficient for our current purposes)  ♥ kine @ 12:16, 8 May 2011 (UTC)

Rank template — and ranks question

FYI, i've created a {{rank}} template for linking to FPA/Imperial military ranks. I found writing out the whole link to be quite tedious, so hopefully this is easier. There's documentation on its page, but basically this is how it's used:

{{rank|fpa|fleet admiral}} [[Yang Wen-li]] -> Fleet Admiral Yang Wen-li

This is not intended to be used every single time we give someone's rank, mind you. Just the first time usually. After that you can just write out 'Fleet Admiral', so it doesn't need a template.

On a related note — how do we feel about the rank distinctions that some translators (like CA) make between navy and other branches? For example, Schönkopf is referred to as a 'general' (an army rank). No distinction is made between any of these in Japanese (it's the same word no matter what the branch), and even the rank insignia in the show is identical for all of them... but it does make sense to translate them that way, intuitively.

And if we do do it that way, i wonder how we will make the distinction in the template....  ♥ kine @ 17:04, 8 May 2011 (UTC)

Novel names

I am not sure what titles we should give to the novels. Technically, they have names — Dawn, Ambition, &c. But they're not necessarily analogous to episodes, so i'm not sure if we should call them 'Dawn' and 'Ambition'. What do you reckon? Just keep using the full names?

PS: The manga volumes do not have names, as far as i can tell. They are just called 'Legend of Galactic Heroes 1', 'Legend of Galactic Heroes 2', and so on

PPS: I am working on making all of the covers look nice (as well as they can anyway, considering the scans are god-awful quality) and then uploading them; i'll try to do it in batches of three. edit: Novel covers are done.  ♥ kine @ 11:26, 14 May 2011 (UTC)

Important question re the position of Iserlohn!

This has been bothering me for a while, but it didn't occur to me how much of our content it could affect until just now: So far on our wiki, we have been operating under the assumption that Iserlohn Fortress is located within the Tiamat Starzone. However, i don't think this is true, for three reasons:

1. In the first or second episode of the OVA (i forget which), when the narrator is talking, it shows a diagram of Iserlohn's orbit. The point in the centre of that orbit is labelled Altena.

2. The Japanese Wikipedia's section on Iserlohn also says that it revolves around Altena.

3. This map, which i think is from the manga, explicitly states that it's in the Altena system.

The one thing (well, three things) i can find that contradicts this are the video games — they all show Altena as being somewhat distant from Iserlohn. But they're video games. :/  ♥ kine @ 17:01, 15 May 2011 (UTC)

Iserlohn would quite clearly appear to be in the Altena starzone. Which, I guess, should be re-named Artena? And then there's this "Revolve Truck" thing....

So it looks like we're going to have some trouble re-organizing the various Battle of Tiamat pages. From looking at the Third Battle of Tiamat OVA, it would indicate that prior to the 3rd Battle, there had already been 6 attacks on Iserlohn, one of which was nearly successful.

I think I'm going to make the creation of an accurate map based off OVA information my top priority now. Something like that would have helped us catch this Tiamat thing a lot sooner. Canary 12:37, 16 May 2011 (UTC)

Opinions: dimming bracketed phrases

Hey there, want an opinion on something. As part of the italic-title template i've created, i added a feature that would automatically dim bracketed phrases at the end of the title. You can see this on the following pages:

• Legend of Galactic Heroes (OVA)
• Legend of Galactic Heroes (BOTHTEC game)
• Legend of Galactic Heroes (Saturn game)
• Legend of Galactic Heroes (Super Famicom game)

Do you guys like this? I think it might help to reduce the visual focus on disambiguation terms, making the actual title stand out... but i'm not sure. This is something that no other wiki does, so i don't have a precedent. (If you guys did like it, i would create a template to dim bracketed phrases in non-italicised titles as well.)  ♥ kine @ 00:31, 16 May 2011 (UTC)

Looks fine to me.Vympel 00:35, 16 May 2011 (UTC)