Organizing Trek Stories and Content

[Dayton Ward]

MB is a nice goto source when I'm beginning research on something. I get the desire of wanting to try and make everything fit, but I've never thought it practical in this context. The whole "chronological history" approach to a character, ship, etc. works fine for Memory Alpha when all you're worried about is screen "canon," but trying to meld various disparate continuities across novels, comics, games, and so on hurts Beta's usefulness as a straightforward, unbiased reference source, IMHO.

Someone (JD?) suggested a template for articles going forward which would allow info from different/possibly contradictory sources to be presented within a single article, without assigning weight or preference to novels over comics, etc. I like that idea a lot. Whether that could be retrofitted over time to existing articles is another kettle of fish, and I respect that it'd be a tremendous undertaking.

 

[Christopher]

MB is a nice goto source when I'm beginning research on something. I get the desire of wanting to try and make everything fit, but I've never thought it practical in this context. The whole "chronological history" approach to a character, ship, etc. works fine for Memory Alpha when all you're worried about is screen "canon," but trying to meld various disparate continuities across novels, comics, games, and so on hurts Beta's usefulness as a straightforward, unbiased reference source, IMHO.

I agree. Whenever I use Beta to research something for a book or story I'm writing, I always have to take every assertion with a grain of salt, to try to determine which original sources are being cited for a given claim and to double-check and verify things to see what came from where, since the text of the articles is often quite misleading. Luckily I have the research skills I learned as a history major to help me read MB defensively and sift through the clutter, but it still sucks that it's such an unreliable reference source.

 

[JD]

MB is a nice goto source when I'm beginning research on something. I get the desire of wanting to try and make everything fit, but I've never thought it practical in this context. The whole "chronological history" approach to a character, ship, etc. works fine for Memory Alpha when all you're worried about is screen "canon," but trying to meld various disparate continuities across novels, comics, games, and so on hurts Beta's usefulness as a straightforward, unbiased reference source, IMHO.

Someone (JD?) suggested a template for articles going forward which would allow info from different/possibly contradictory sources to be presented within a single article, without assigning weight or preference to novels over comics, etc. I like that idea a lot. Whether that could be retrofitted over time to existing articles is another kettle of fish, and I respect that it'd be a tremendous undertaking.

Exactly. All of the stuff deserves to be treated equally, I just think it should don't think it should all be mashed together.

 

[Dayton Ward]

Luckily I have the research skills I learned as a history major to help me read MB defensively and sift through the clutter, but it still sucks that it's such an unreliable reference source.

Yes, it's a great way to jump-start research on a given topic, but we're definitely in "Trust, but verify" territory.

 

[Stevil2001]

I hate all the ST Online stuff on MB. And people have started using "Destiny timeline" when Destiny was only really a miniseries.

Probably more people have played Star Trek Online than will ever read Avatar, Book One, though.

That's why I like Novelverse, it doesn't favor one person or series over any of the others.

"Novelverse" implies all novels share a continuity though. Each term has benefits and drawbacks I'm sure; Destiny timeline communicates that it's all the stories that feed in and out of Destiny.

@ATimson used to call it something like the "Markradiverse" (for Marco Palmieri and KRAD).

 

[Jinn]

Probably more people have played Star Trek Online than will ever read Avatar, Book One, though.

Yeah, but the STO Wiki is a much better resource for STO than MB is for anything...

"Novelverse" implies all novels share a continuity though. Each term has benefits and drawbacks I'm sure; Destiny timeline communicates that it's all the stories that feed in and out of Destiny.

I presume the term is used because for a lot of people the Borg's end was the major difference between the current novel continuity and STO.

 

[Christopher]

"Novelverse" implies all novels share a continuity though.

I guess that's why I often refer to "the main novel continuity."

 

[DimesDan]

Yes, it's a great way to jump-start research on a given topic, but we're definitely in "Trust, but verify" territory.

I admit, when writing some assignments on topics I wasn't too sure on (which was a lot of them to be honest) I would take a look at Wikipedia to get a general gist of things and then dive into the links cited.

 

[Jinn]

Now that we've mentioned STO, here is how the Tzenkethi look in STO. Yeah, it's all one continuity.

 

[Christopher]

Now that we've mentioned STO, here is how the Tzenkethi look in STO. Yeah, it's all one continuity.

Different continuity to be sure, but that's an interesting design. It looks like they were trying for something broadly similar to how Robert Hewitt Wolfe imagined the Tzenkethi, as something like a small T. rex.

 

[ryan123450]

Probably more people have played Star Trek Online than will ever read Avatar, Book One, though.

I never thought of that before, and you're probably right, but that is really sad.

 

[Extrocomp]

Star Trek Online will be shut down when it stops being profitable but the novels will last forever.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Considering the size and scope, perhaps creating a Star Trek Novelverse wiki would be the way to go. The current Novelverse would be top tier, the 80's Novelverse B-tier and everything else C. Most of the key interconnections and contradictions have already been documented in the Charting the Novelverse thread.

 

[ryan123450]

Deciding what's in the 'Novelverse' category and what's in the 'everything else' would be a daunting task. And the connections listed in the Charting the Novelverse thread are way out of date and incomplete at this point. I have far more connections listed on the Litverse Reading Guide.

 

[Christopher]

Deciding what's in the 'Novelverse' category and what's in the 'everything else' would be a daunting task.

Right. Even the novelists don't agree on what older works (or recent TOS novels, or comics, or whatever) are included in the "Novelverse." Pocket continuity has always been handled loosely, and even now it isn't ironclad. The approach of Trek tie-ins has usually been to give fans wiggle room to apply their own judgment and imagination and define the Trek "reality" in the way that works best for them, rather than imposing a single authoritarian dogma that everyone is required to abide by.

So there shouldn't be any "top tier," any more than there should be an enforced blending of everything. Those are both trying to impose a single point of view on everyone else. A reference source should be objective. It should merely categorize and report accurately without judging. This idea came from this source, that idea came from that source. Just report, don't editorialize. Let the readers decide how they want to fit it together, what they want to count and what they want to exclude, what they want to consider "top tier" in their own experience of Star Trek.

After all, the Novelverse isn't necessarily the end-all and be-all of Trek Lit. There may come a time when new canon fundamentally contradicts it and the books have to start over with a different continuity, like what happened when the '80s novel continuity was overwritten by TNG. You never can say what the state of the tie-ins will be in 10 or 20 years. A reference source isn't for yourself, it's for the people who come after you.

 

[ian128K]

Different continuity to be sure, but that's an interesting design. It looks like they were trying for something broadly similar to how Robert Hewitt Wolfe imagined the Tzenkethi, as something like a small T. rex.

Not exactly. He tweeted this yesterday:

 

[Christopher]

Not exactly. He tweeted this yesterday:

That's not what he told me on the ExIsle BBS when I asked him about it a decade ago:

http://www.exisle.net/mb/index.php?showtopic=42306&st=0&#

If I had to guess, I suspect I did my usual and combined a couple things. Probably Kzinti and Tsankth.

But when I picture them in my head, they weren't big cat people. I thought of them as more like the Hakazit... Heavily armored lizard things...

Hakazit were aliens from Jack Chalker's Well World series, described as 3-meter tyrannosaurs with powerful arms.

Of course, even then, he was unsure of his recollection a decade after the fact -- and it's now two decades after the fact.

 

[ian128K]

Interesting! Yeah, sounds like it may be an unsure-memory thing.

 

[JD]

Trying to do a new Wiki just for the "Novelverse" or whatever else you want to call it would be way to complicated and open to a ton of debate. What makes it especially hard would be when you the Novelverse books referencing stuff that doesn't entirely fit, like the Rihannsu books or The Final Reflection. How much of the books do you include in the wiki and how much do you leave out?
And I don't know if I like the idea of the novelverse stuff being singled out like that, I really think if even if you're just doing a wiki, you should stuff try to treat everything equally. Even though I love the novelverse, I'm also a big fan of the comics and a lot of the older stand alone novels, and I don't want to leave them out, or make their fans feel like they're being slighted.
I think the big thing with my organization system is to try to keep things objective. If it happened in a comic it goes in the comics section, if it happens in a novelverse book or is referenced it one then either that book or at least that bit of information goes there, ect. The information should also be presented exactly as appears in the book, not attempts to tweak it to make fit with something else.

 

[Jarvisimo]

Is it possible to add filters to Memory Beta? Like in The Tower of the Hand?