Tor's "Mapping Cosmere"

[Argent he/him]

Just now, TheLordRuler said:

I thought this confirms that Ati was the original Vessel. Hoid speaks with familiarity about Ati, which suggests he knew him beforehand. I can't see how else Hoid would have known him so well. Also, he bunched him with Rayse, which probably means the recipient (Frost I believe) knew them both as well. Unless there is some information I am missing?

No, it seems like you have all the pieces to the puzzle. The thing is, none of this knowledge confirms that Ati was Ruin's original Vessel (in fact, we have a RAFO on the topic) - though it does suggest it strongly.

Regardless, what I was trying to do is illustrate a point - that we don't know enough about the events surrounding the Shattering to make any definitive conclusions about what transpired there, and where the (original) Vessels went - and when.

[Oversleep]

38 minutes ago, CaptainRyan said:

I just read the original article (nice job @ButChrisNo) and I think our collective Shardic outrage might be a tad over-the-top.

I think you're confusing constructive critism with outrage.

22 minutes ago, Argent said:

Yeeeaaah, but it's so much easier to bash people than to compliment them...

I may have trouble with giving due praise...

... and my OP has none of it. While I haven't been bashing, I also did not praise when I should have.

@ButChrisNo, you're awesome for the work you put in creating that article and for your effort to spread the Cosmere knowlegde. I didn't mean in any way to lessen what you have done and if I came off like that, I'm sorry.

[CaptainRyan he/him]

20 minutes ago, Oversleep said:

I think you're confusing constructive critism with outrage.

That is a fair point. "Outrage" was probably a poor choice of words. 

I think there is nothing wrong with wanting to help someone correct mistakes - in fact, it can be quite noble to offer to help others! On the other hand, if all we ever offer is criticism than I think we will quickly be ignored haha. A little praise sure goes a long way, eh? 

[ButChrisNo]

No worries about the criticism, folks! There's a lot to fix (deleting a whole planet!), so the outrage is perfectly understandable, and your criticism was honest and didn't veer into personal attacks, which I VERY much appreciate.  Finding out that I didn't do the job right the first time is dispiriting for sure, but we're all working towards the same goal: To enjoy and theorize about these epics.

I'm just about done updating the charts based on your feedback. I'll have to step away for the evening but I'm hoping to have the article updated by tomorrow morning!

[Aeonax]

I really appreciate the graphics and write up, can't wait to take another look tomorrow.

[WhiteLeeopard she/her]

14 hours ago, ButChrisNo said:

No worries about the criticism, folks! There's a lot to fix (deleting a whole planet!), so the outrage is perfectly understandable, and your criticism was honest and didn't veer into personal attacks, which I VERY much appreciate.  Finding out that I didn't do the job right the first time is dispiriting for sure, but we're all working towards the same goal: To enjoy and theorize about these epics.

You shouldn't feel bad about having some mistakes on the first try! The sheer number of WoBs, pictures from signed books and pieces of puzzles that have been put together on this forum is mindboggling. If I remember correctly on last count there were thousands of WoB floating around, and those are the ones to often contain many of the sneaky pieces. I don't post too often, but have been around for a while, and still find something new every week. The chart is really neat. Awesome job on it.

 

Edited June 7, 2017 by WhiteLeeopard

[+Extesian he/him]

Great job @ButChrisNo! Sure there are 'errors' to people who spend their nights reading obscure answers Brandon has given but I thought it was nicely put together. If it had been a theory on here I would've congratulated you, given an upvote and then told you where it was wrong. Coz that's what we do

But yes we're all here to understand and enjoy these books better and for all our academic analysis on here, you're the one who actually gets the chance to draw casual readers further into the Cosmere, through Tor.

And even with the odd problem, I love the charts. It's a good idea for giving scope to the Cosmere.

[Oversleep]

8 minutes ago, Extesian said:

people who spend their nights reading obscure answers Brandon has given

Another one for the 17thShard slogan?

[Chaos he/him]

Hey @ButChrisNo Eric here. I just wanted to let you know that I love the charts in the article, and it's actually amazing how much you want to make things accurate. The cosmere is difficult because there are so many Words of Brandon (WoBs) to keep track of. I really appreciate you coming here. As you can see, Sharders are extremely passionate. A lot of the people who posted in here spend hours transcribing audio from Brandon's signings. They are really dedicated.
 
As far as content goes, Pagerunner hit all the points I noticed and beat me to it. @Pagerunner, you rock.
 

My main sources for the piece were Coppermind (which I'm now gathering is out of date?),

 
Let's talk about the Coppermind. I have my fingers in many pies and one of them is that I'm a Coppermind admin. You might not realize, but actually, over half of all edits on the wiki are made by four people--Coppermind staff. (Those people, by the way, are Joe, David aka Windrunner, Ian aka WeiryWriter, and I.) Most of the stuff that are the big articles, like Cosmere, Shard, and Hoid, are written from this group. Thankfully other editors refine the articles, but at some point there's so much new knowledge on the subject that the article just needs to be totally rewritten, and that means a very small and busy group has to do this.
 
The Coppermind is a wonderful thing, but it's also terrifying. When people cite it, I'm overjoyed it's useful, yet I also think, "oh no those articles need so much work!" It's a never ending of pile of work to do, to say nothing of many other time commitments we have. My rewrite of the Cosmere article last year was an exhausting, draining experience that took a month of research to do, at least a while to write, and even more time to cite. I didn't work on it constantly but it took about three months. (And I need to do some more major revisions to it.) 
 
I'm not trying to make excuses; I'm more trying to apologize. It's never perfect. The Shard article (another piece I wrote, but in 2012) needs a total rewrite. None of the individual Shard articles are up to par, especially Odium. We should probably use our "This article needs updating" template more.
 
This is on top of the 900 or so articles that need to be reviewed to see if they get the "completion" mark. Heck, even today I noticed several cities on the new Elantris map that didn't have articles! A travesty. 
 
In any case, I hope this is illuminating on the process of the Coppermind. I can at least say that when the articles are written, they certainly are complete and well-cited! (I would say our ludicrously extensive citations are one of the best things about the Coppermind.
 
It's a perpetual issue to educate people on all of this knowledge that comes from outside the text. To this end we have our Cosmere Q&A board, and we also have our 17th Shard Discord server. You can always ask cosmere questions in the #cosmere channel. In Discord, you can also write @Worldhoppers to ping a group of people who identify that they have knowledge on the cosmere. So feel free to ping a question there 
 
If you want to keep things more secret before something is published, you can hit me up at [email protected] and I will take a look. I know the group of people to ask if I don't know the answer.  Also amusingly, David, Ian, and I write most of the 17th Shard news articles. 
 
Thanks again for coming here. Maybe you'll stick around a bit, or come to the Discord upon occasion Keep up the good work.
 
Oh, PS when writing out the in-universe group, can we write it as "Seventeenth Shard"? That's not super important, but as that's how it is written in our one reference to it in-universe, it's a good way to distinguish the in-universe people from the 17th Sharders, the members of this site. (This is probably a thing I think about more than others, as you can see other people in this thread denote them as 17th Sharders.) 

[ButChrisNo]

Hey all, the article and charts are updated! (http://www.tor.com/2017/06/06/brandon-sanderson-worldhoppers/) Feel free to let me know here if there are accuracy tweaks to be made in the text. (The paragraph on the Cognitive Realm may be a little squirrelly since I'm mixing stuff from SA and AU. There's a lot there that I'm leaving for a curious reader to investigate on their own.)

Ya'll were super right about Sel being less of a focal point. Silverlight and Odium's chase makes it all fairly moot.

Thank you for all the help and clarification, everyone! Hopefully after this I can make some time to jump into theorizing in the threads here.

@Chaos, managing a Sanderson wiki sounds...intense. I really appreciate the work you and the other admins have put into it. I tend to use it a lot when reading or rereading a Sanderson work, so I can remind myself what is known and not known about the various aspects of the Cosmere.

[Calderis he/him]

@ButChrisNo, I've got to commend you. 

First,  for wading in to the sea of Rabid Fandom after writing your article. 

Second, for graciously accepting the criticism of said work. 

Finally, for turning the original article around, and incorporating all of those criticisms and extra info in a single day. 

You're pretty awesome. Thanks for taking the time to interact with us. 

[champion kaz]

In the first Mistborn Trilogy the Kandra reveal that Preservation created man's conscious state by giving them a part of it. It is why it was necessary to hide Ruin's body from him in the form of atium. Doesn't that show that not all humans come from Yolen?

[WhiteLeeopard she/her]

2 hours ago, champion kaz said:

In the first Mistborn Trilogy the Kandra reveal that Preservation created man's conscious state by giving them a part of it. It is why it was necessary to hide Ruin's body from him in the form of atium. Doesn't that show that not all humans come from Yolen?

All humans are believed to be patterned after the original ones in Yolen. But yes, not all are from Yolen. In Scadrial they were created by Ruin and Preservation. And in Roshar some were there from before the breaking of Adonalasium. 

[Calderis he/him]

1 minute ago, WhiteLeeopard said:

All humans are believed to be patterned after the original ones in Yolen. But yes, not all are from Yolen. In Scadrial they were created by Ruin and Preservation. And in Roshar some were there from before the breaking of Adonalasium. 

Brandon uses people to refer to sapient species as a whole. 

By that wording, I imagine that The Listeners are native and predated the Shards. I doubt there were Humans there prior to the Shattering though. 

[WhiteLeeopard she/her]

Yes, I was referring to the Parshendi  

 

Edited June 7, 2017 by WhiteLeeopard