Star Systems

[Jofwu he/him]

I realized we've got a link to a nonexistent Taldain System page. The beautiful star charts were posted on Brandon's website today, so I figured it might be cool to write about it and get an article in there.

Is there any plan to get Infoboxes for star systems? Or is there some other preferable way to put that image in the article? (I assume it would be okay to use the artwork posted on the website?)

And as an aside, I would argue that we should probably work on a consistent naming scheme for star system pages. I think they ought to use Khriss's names (i.e. Rosharan System, Drominad System, etc.) since that's apparently the in-universe terminology.

[Joe ST he/him]

please upload the files from Brandon's site if you have need of them, it's considered fair use and it's good to have them for pages. the only thing iirc there's wob for Greater Roshar being that system's name? unless that's WoB that's been subsumed by published stories. otherwise I'm fine with using Khriss's names for pages, 

[Jofwu he/him]

Okay, I'll do that.

I figured it would be best to put them in the top right corner, but as there is not really a fitting infobox template to do that with. Geography is the closest one, and that feels wrong. Any guidance on that?

My argument about naming Roshar is that it appears in AU as "Rosharan System". I know Brandon has referred to it as Greater Roshar in the past, but I'm assuming in-universe usage supersedes Brandon's terminology in the past.

[Zmann966 he/him]

2 minutes ago, jofwu said:

Okay, I'll do that.

I figured it would be best to put them in the top right corner, but as there is not really a fitting infobox template to do that with. Geography is the closest one, and that feels wrong. Any guidance on that?

My argument about naming Roshar is that it appears in AU as "Rosharan System". I know Brandon has referred to it as Greater Roshar in the past, but I'm assuming in-universe usage supersedes Brandon's terminology in the past.

It's probably more of a clarity thing on Brandon's part when he's speaking to his fans. If he says "Hoid has great interest in Roshar" it means something very different than if he said "Hoid has great interest in the Greater Roshar system." Even if in-book only uses "Rosharan System."

Might have to keep a close eye on hsi individual word usage either way though, haha

[Jofwu he/him]

Eh, I get that. Yes, he has used Greater Roshar [System] in the past to refer to the entire star system rather than just the planet. What I'm saying is that AU establishes "Rosharan System" as the official term for the star system. In the future, Brandon would say "Hoid is interested in Roshar" versus "Hoid is interested in the Rosharan System". And even if Brandon does continue to use Greater Roshar, I still think it's less official unless the term appears in an actual book.

Just my opinion.

In any case, I think the "Drominad" article should be renamed "Drominad System". And when we give the others a page it should be "Selish System", "Threnodite System", etc. (as shown in the star charts).

[Tsidqiyah he/him]

I always thought that Greater Rosharian system was just the internal three plants. Hoid likely has no interest in the planets outside of the habitable zone. SO he is only interested in the "Greater" part of the system

As for how three planets is greater then ten realize that in the cognitive realm the three with life will have much more presence then the others that have minimal cognitive activity.

[skaa he/him]

I'd like to use this opportunity to inform my fellow Coppermind contributors that the correct term for a system of planets orbiting a star is planetary system. A star system is a system of stars orbiting each other (so, the Taldain system is both a star system and a planetary system). Also, I've seen Coppermind contributors (and even Brandon himself) use "solar system" to refer to planetary systems, but technically the solar system is the planetary system of the star Sol, which is what we Earthlings call our star in Latin.

Also, in the future when Brandon reveals more names of stars I think it would be better to use the star's name for the article on its planetary system, like what I did for Mashe.

Edited December 2, 2016 by Ookla the Insipid

[Jofwu he/him]

Ah, thanks for the catch on terminology!

I disagree on article/system names though. First because we don't have names for many stars (and may never have all of them). Second because that's not how Khriss does it (or Brandon for that matter). Third because it's less intuitive to all but the most hardcore fans, who are primarily going to be using world names for reference.

Curious to hear what others think though.

[Windrunner he/him]

I'm of the opinion that we default the system name to the names as given in Arcanum Unbounded. Until we hear further, I'm going to consider Greater Roshar as a dead term and default to the Rosharan system for the name until we hear different. Printed canon takes precedence over interview questions unless Brandon is clarifying a mistake in the books. I don't want to name the systems after the stars, especially considering we don't have names for any of the stars aside from Mashe. I agree that we should have a system infobox, I can throw one together pretty quickly by stealing from Joe's wikicode. xD

[skaa he/him]

1 hour ago, jofwu said:

Ah, thanks for the catch on terminology!

I disagree on article/system names though. First because we don't have names for many stars (and may never have all of them). Second because that's not how Khriss does it (or Brandon for that matter). Third because it's less intuitive to all but the most hardcore fans, who are primarily going to be using world names for reference.

Curious to hear what others think though.

I doubt anyone other than the most hardcore fans (or minor fans who are huge astronomy nerds) actually care about the planets outside the main ones where the stories take place. Still, you are correct that Khriss doesn't use the star name for the planetary systems (except maybe the Drominad system; we still need to ask Brandon whether "Drominad" refers to the system's star). This is perhaps because cosmere scholars are understandably more interested in Shardworlds and planets with perpendicularities than any other celestial object. They are philosophically geocentric in that way.

Nonetheless, we write wiki articles for every cosmere thing on which we have a significant amount of info, and we do know several things about the star Mashe, so I wrote a Mashe article. It just so happened that the information we have about Mashe is all about the stuff orbiting it. Even in Wikipedia, articles of stars with planetary systems include details of the planetary systems. The only Wikipedia article about a star whose planetary system has a separate article is Earth's sun, and I suspect it's mostly because we know a ton of things about our own sun other than what's orbiting it.

Anyway, since we don't have other star names I can't really complain if someone makes articles for the Scadrian, Taldain, and Threnodite systems (as Khriss calls them), as we don't really have any choice.

 

Edit: @Windrunner, I have renamed the Planetary System of Mashe to The Selish System. "Selish System" already redirects there. I hope that will suffice.

Edited December 2, 2016 by Ookla the Insipid

[Joe ST he/him]

I personally would prefer the pictures to 'fill the page' rather than being a thing you have to click thru (twice) to look at in detail.

[Jofwu he/him]

@Joe ST, can you clarify? The giant image as you have it on the Mashe page feels really awkward to me. I scaled up the image on the Taldain System page just a bit and added a line to link it directly to the full size, so that it's only one click away. How do you feel about that approach?

Just need to add a "link=" to the image code. The little button in the bottom right corner gets you to the file page.

[Joe ST he/him]

I'd still rather have the picture front and center, and yeah the 1024px is just chosen because of my screen, I wanted 100% but it didn't accept that. 

[Windrunner he/him]

So, I've made the infobox and gotten it approved by the wiki team. I'm in the process of adding it to the system pages now. Skaa, I also spoke to the others on the wiki staff, and we've decided we're going with consistency and naming all the systems by the same convention. Mashe now is a redirect to Selish System.

[skaa he/him]

3 hours ago, Windrunner said:

Skaa, I also spoke to the others on the wiki staff, and we've decided we're going with consistency and naming all the systems by the same convention. Mashe now is a redirect to Selish System.

Ah, well. Can't be helped, I guess. Thanks for the infobox, @Windrunner.

Edited December 3, 2016 by skaa