Usuaria discusión:LadyLameness

re Ahu being Jezrien: Well what is the source for this? shouldn't such a claim have a citation? or if not, then just remove it entirely. (King of Herdaz)

Sorry!

I will inform the staff next time! Every wiki has a welcome template and a deletion template. And correction: it wasn't vandalism, it was just a mistake. --Auri (Express yourself, be heard!) 08:47, 21 February 2020 (UTC)

Hi Auri, I'm not quite sure what you mean about every wiki having welcome and deletion templates. We already have a 'to be deleted' template and have not needed a welcome template on the Coppermind up until now and without reasoning it does not seem clear as to what purpose they serve. LadyLameness (talk) 08:54, 21 February 2020 (UTC)

February 2020

Please can you not revert my edits. It is my talk page. You wouldn't like it if I reverted your edits on your talk page, so please, in the future, do not do it to mine. By the way, I was updating my new signature. Can you tell me that it is purple? By the way, do you like my quote? Remember: Express yourself, be heard! --Auri (Express yourself, be heard!) 08:54, 21 February 2020 (UTC)

I've been involved in this too, so I'll chime in. We have no objections if you want to organize your talk page by adding section headers and the like, but you should not be changing the comments that other people have left and we will restore them if that happens.
--Stargazer (talk) 08:59, 21 February 2020 (UTC)

Vessels

LadyLameness why lock the Cosmere navbox? There are so many permissions locked down on this wiki, that it's hard for others to actually make it better and more usable. The Cosmere navbox could be so much more useful - and the Vessels are definitely something that belong there (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Navigation_template#Properties). If you're reading about one Vessel, of course you're going to want to navigate to the others and the current setup is not at all conducive to that.

Hey! While we do try and limit locking pages, there are certain ones that get locked either because they have been repeatedly vandalised in the past or, in the case of the Cosmere navbox or other core wiki functions, templates, or special pages, because they need discussion before they are changed. We didn't actually realise this one wasn't currently locked, and the permissions that have been added are to promote active communication and aren't meant to imply that the page can't be updated. There is definitely an argument for adding the Vessels to the navbox, it just needs to be discussed and agreed upon first - if you wanted to come and drop your suggestion into our Discord then we can get that discussion rolling. :D

I do just want to note, that even if the permissions weren't currently set to 'staff only' on the Cosmere navbox page, they would still be restricted to logged in accounts that have been been given the editor permission - this is to stop spam and vandalism that will reflect on a large number of pages.

Are there other functions you've been having trouble with? It may be related to you not being logged in, but for spam prevention brand new accounts will have some additional restrictions that we can remove for you. Please let us know about of any other usability concerns you have - we are always looking at ways to improve user experience! LadyLameness (talk) 03:12, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

LadyLameness - that you're forcing me to create an email account to create a discord account in order to log in to discord and post a message to petition you to make an obviously helpful and needed change is just indicative of why this wiki isn't as high-quality as it should be at this point. Obligating new users to go through all this rigmarole is effectively negating all of the positive benefits of crowd-sourcing in the first place. I shouldn't be the one who has to justify a helpful change - the onus is on you or Stargazer to say why the change isn't helpful when it's clearly neither spam nor vandalism. And you'll notice that no comment was made by you or Stargazer why the change should be reverted - neither in the wiki nor the Discord.

As for the idea that navboxes need discussion before they are changed - I think you're going overboard here. It's not like the Cosmere navbox is some shining paragon as is. Vax is included as a planet purely on speculation, but Aslydin isn't included as a Worldhopper, Denth and Shashara aren't included, and neither are the members of the Ire, in particular, Riino. Including 'Survival Shard' under Shards is somewhat dubious, and Harmony wasn't even included until I added it. I'm glad you have re-added it following the reversion, but you broke the convention of alphabetical order.

Behavior like reverting non-spam/vandalism changes without explanation and excessive permissions are things that discourage people from participating in a community. For all you know, cliquey things like this have driven off newcomers that otherwise would've been willing to volunteer thousands of hours to better this wiki.

Hey, LadyLameness and Stargazer here! If you would prefer not to join the Discord then that's definitely fine - we can continue to use talk pages to discuss changes, most people have just found that tedious in the past and prefer the quicker responses that an active chat room allows. But it definitely isn't the only way to communicate, here is just fine as well and we can relay your suggestions back to the other editors!

Regarding the particular edit of yours that was changed, unfortunately, the rollback feature doesn't allow users to leave a comment when using it, otherwise Stargazer would have left some sort of note. We can definitely see how that would be very frustrating for you and are sorry that we weren't able to leave some sort of message to explain our reasoning. As mentioned above, we're not opposed to changing the navbars, it just needs discussion beforehand and for a consensuses to be reached.

Navbar's in particular can garner a lot of debate about what should be included and what needs to be excluded, based on spoilers, current size, and projected size of the navbox. Not everything can be included and some things that might be useful aren't always enough to warrant being added. If you have any arguments you want voiced then we're happy to pass them on to make sure they're considered.

You raise some good points about the status of the cosmere navbar, but there are also arguments for not including the Vessels at this point, and we'd want to have a fuller discussion on that before proceeding. The changes you've suggested have been raised and are being discussed. Some editors have suggested changing up the worldhoppers section as well now that you've brought attention to it - there are definitely some changes that could happen there and questions about who should really be included. Do you think there are other sections that could be improved as well? The big question that's coming up is around spoilers - for example with adding Vessels, there's worries about including Sazed and Dalinar as those are immediate spoilers that jump out on pages people might not be expect them to be on. Do you have any thoughts? The current suggestion is to maybe limit Vessels to the original sixteen. Also apologies for not putting Harmony in the right place - Ladylameness didn't realise you had put him somewhere specific for a reason, we'll make sure that's fixed.

As for your note about excessive permissions, it would help if you could clarify which other permissions are causing issues. Most pages should be open to anyone to edit; there are some functions that are restricted to the 'editor' category, such as making new pages, to prevent spam from automated bots, but we can easily move you into that category if you have an account. However, the most restrictions will apply to edits made without an account - this is for accountability purposes and to prevent spam or vandalism , which are issues we have had to deal with in the past. We can definitely get you into a permissions group that has less restrictions, however, you will need a Coppermind account for that to happen.

While we do want to make the Coppermind as user friendly as we can, we do have to balance this with issues we've previously come up against. Sometimes there are measures we've put in place that should be rethought and it's always useful when these are brought up by other editors as it might not jump out to us why they're problematic. Something may have worked well in the past, but is no longer relevant or is now actively making things unnecessarily hard. It's really helpful that you've pointed some of this out and we would appreciate any more feedback you're able to give. However, as mentioned, there is a balance we need to find, so some permissions do need to be set in place so that the editing experience is pleasant for both current volunteers and new editors. LadyLamenessStargazer 08:02, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

What level of evidence is necessary for 'speculation' to become 'theory'?

As far as I can tell, the "Unknown Shards" section is a collection of best-available-evidence. As much of this wiki relies on Word of Brandon rather than published book material, it seems somewhat unfair to ban metatextual speculation simply for lack of references. -- HoratioVonBecker

While we do allow some speculation on pages, we do have a high bar of what is required for it. Things that Brandon has spoken about outside of the books to a degree where we can be reasonably certain or that have been made clear from the direction taken in the books, for example. But, referencing is a very big key to speculations sections and a good rule of thumb to use is if there is not something that can be easily referenced then there is not enough evidence to be added to the wiki. This isn't the only rule of thumb, but is definitely at least the first question that needs to be asked. I would recommend taking a look at our help page for Speculation - it has a lot of useful guidance but I think the one to point out here is speculation is included when the article at hand would be critically incomplete without the speculation. This doesn't necessarily mean that information is missing but more that we can't explain something else without touching on what hasn't been confirmed (eg. Trell and the potential they are Autonomy).

In terms of the Shard page - as Windrunner explained in 2016 there is no evidence that there is a Shard called Justice - this is still the case now. There is also no evidence that Kelsier is a Shard; Brandon has followed up that Kelsier does not have actual avatars and this is just what he tells his minions. Regardless, parallels are not evidence nor are they citable or integral to this article. Core Cosmere articles also get held to a much higher standard because we get a lot of people trying to add baseless speculation and theories.

We have been working on a clean up project of our pages with speculation as quite a few had baseless theories that aren't suitable for the Coppermind. There are still some out there that you might come across but they are not good examples of what speculation on the Coppermind should be like. For pages with good speculation sections to references I would recommend Miles Dagouter and Pact of the Seven Peaks. I hope that helps clear up the confusion. LadyLameness (talk) 00:08, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

It does help, but it kicks the question back a step. Why isn't there a dedicated speculation section, if many people want to speculate there? Even if you determine that a main resource article is not the place to collect tenuous threads, it seems there should at least be a direct link to that place. -- HoratioVonBecker

Theorising and speculation are lots of fun but that is not the purpose of this wiki - that sort of collation is better done on the 17thShard forums. The wiki is meant to be a thesaurus of facts and confirmed information that people can use to learn about canonical information. Theories, as fun as it is to talk about them, do not fall under this category, and most end up being debunked either via wob or new book releases which would create quite a mess on the Coppermind over time if they were all being included. I would encourage you make a forum post if you would like to collect these theories - it also allows others to collaborate and engage with them which isn't possible on a wiki. LadyLameness (talk) 03:52, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

It seems like the purpose of easy collation and trimming could be better served with an 'established theories' section, though? Forcing people to only post the hard evidence, without the theories they build toward, leads to a lot of text being obsoleted when we, say, get hard confirmation that Trell is the Vessel of Autonomy. (EDIT: I also had Thaidakar as Vessel of Prudence, then I realized said Vessel was female. This is why a proper collation section would be useful.)

There's certainly a useful purpose for 'this is all the hard evidence we have, everything else is *speculation*' - it's just, that's a tool for keeping theories on point. It's literally only useful, at that level of detail, to facilitate speculation. So why not actually facilitate it?

Sure, The Coppermind is not a place for acrimonious discourse, and moderating nerdfights is obviously a headache. But it's also literally the most obvious place to collect theories. Is telling people off for attempting that obvious step actually less headache than making them do it right? If so, do you want even want to make avoiding headaches your priority? -- HoratioVonBecker

Like I said before, the Coppermind is not the place for what you are describing. The 17thShard Forum and Discord exist for this purpose and are tailor made to keep track of theories and discussion, which seems to be what you are after. I would again recommend creating an account on the forums (if you haven't already done so) if you wish to keep track what you have outlined as it is not suitable for the Coppermind. LadyLameness (talk) 00:17, 25 June 2021 (UTC)

Hi again. I know that the forums and the Discord exist, but they aren't as public or as well-organized as the wiki. I'm not trying to say the wiki should be the place to host several-thousand-word theorycrafting threads - that would hinder its' organization, and therefore its' accessibility. But in its' role as the most accessible resource, it seems like it would be the best place to index those theories. Brief summaries, with links to the appropriate speculation threads. Does that make sense? -- HoratioVonBecker

Hello, what you're suggesting makes sense, however as I've been attempting to explain that is not what the Coppermind has been setup for nor what it should be used for. I think we might be going in a circle at this point and I'm not sure if it's useful or productive for us to continue. The wiki isn't for compiling speculation, I'm sorry, this will have to be done elsewhere. Cheers LadyLameness (talk) 04:08, 4 July 2021 (UTC)