Chaos

I knew that. I totally knew that.

Courtesy of our master codemonkey ryan, look at sweet new 17thshard.com main page! It's--gasp--dynamic! It's madness. It's not even Sparta; it's 17th Shard! Woo! Bad joke? Okay. I'll just copy this from the blog and let you hear what Ryan said:

Okay. I changed it, and it should work now. Theoretically. Let me know!

I'm honestly not sure. You could upload them to various image hosting sites (imageshack or photobucket) and link them that way.

Go for it.

You made infoboxes. I think I may love you. They are great. Good job!

Hey you! Good to have you here. I'm certainly glad someone is here with, you know, wiki experience. We very much appreciate the help!

Let's change it to Stormlight Archive.

If there's a way to do it, I'm not familiar with it. (Though that's not surprising, due to my general unfamiliarity with wikis )

I have a big monitor, too, but if I move to my laptop, I don't. See, it's a fixed width site (I think when forums are expanded to such ridiculous widths, they look, well, ridiculous) so it would narrow it down.

My opinion on a sidebar is negative, at least, on a forum. It's better to have more real estate in the width. For example, in topics, I'm ostensibly scrolling through 10 or 15 posts. A sidebar is far shorter, so I'm effectively wasting space. The main page will have a Twitter feed which is both our tweets and Brandon's.

Hi Mi'ch's sister!

I can test a smaller(ish) version of the banner later tonight. It is, of course, entirely Will's discretion if he likes it. I'm not sure what you're saying here. Could you clarify? As to the link tree, it should only take up one line once I do Yelenia's suggestion.

((Since Reports are more newsy than book discussiony, yeah, I'm moving the reports here)) Yes, Kelsier was on the list of those. Also, Great Houses, off the top of my head: Venture, Elariel, Tekiel, Hasting, Lekal, Erikell, Erikeller, Urbain, Buvidas, Haught. You don't believe me, but it's true, I did it without looking

Peter's response: So, we're good to go. Thank you so much, Beligaronia, for asking such a great question

Organization for the sake of organization is not a good idea, I should think. Like, I'm just whipping out Memory Alpha as an example, looking at the article on Bajorans. It's only the member of two categories: Bajor, and Species. I wouldn't want to, say, start listing "Species of the Alpha Quadrant", because such divisions are not inherently useful. So I'd think a minimalist school of thought will get us a lot more mileage.

Sounds good to me. Kerry's in class right now, but I think once she gets back, she'll make a decision. Let's leave the organizing to the OCD people Haha.

It's true. Some authors have a problem with fan fiction for copyright reasons, but Brandon doesn't have problems with us doing things like that. This seems similar.

Or Kerry just needs to read Way of Kings. Slacker. Meh. Categories are easy enough to change. Let's put it in Races and Creatures (or whatever we're going to call it) until evidence (ie: later Stormlight Archive) books contradict it.

I've tweeted Peter about it. We'll see what he says.

I'll wait for Kerry to make a decision about the category to use. However (remaining spoiler free), I would say that there's more evidence to suggest they aren't human. Well, no, we need something that applies to a set of humans. Sentient lifeforms would have the same problem, I think.

I'm not qualified to enable #if statements. If Ryan, our codemonkey, doesn't respond in this topic, go shoot him a PM (his username is Ryan). You do bring up a good point. My layman's response (for am I certainly not a copyright lawyer) would be that if we were copying whole pages of the book or chapters, that would absolutely be copyright infringement. But the epigraphs are much smaller chunks. Plus, it's really useful to have the full text of them in some place. If not the wiki, someone would already have posted them on a forum somewhere (and I'm sure they have). Of course, "because everyone else is doing it" is a really bad legal defense. That'd be my stance on it, but I'd love to hear someone with more experience on the matter to have some input. EDIT: I think I'll ask Peter (Brandon's assistant) about it.

Well, since we're not anthropologists and far more aligned to Fantasy, I think putting non-humans in "Races and Cultures" would solve that issue, and putting some kind of qualifier on "human cultures" or ethnicities for humans would work. I get what you're saying. Something like "types of humans" would be good. "Human cultures or ethnicities", maybe. I just don't want something so broad that it applies to individuals. In mathematics terms, there are numbers and there are sets. We want a category that has non-human races (a set), and human cultures (another set). "Humans" is ill-defined, because Vin is a human. It applies to not only a set, but a member of that set. So, I agree. Let's get a term for "set of humans". I merely oppose using "Humans" because it can have too many interpretations. [Note, I am simplifying set theory a little, since members of sets don't explicitly have to have numbers. There are sets that have other sets as members. But still, the distinction of set and non-set is important.]

Sure, but "humans" is so vastly broad that it really has no meaning. When I can lump in essentially everything in Mistborn into one category--like Vin, Kelsier, nobility, Terris, and ostensibly kandra--it effectively tells me nothing. "Humans" should not be a category. We could use Ethnicity separate from Culture, if it makes you feel better But humans? I do not think this is a useful distinction.

I think "Cultures" would be more specific. Also, come on. In the classical fantasy sense, races are other species, like elves, dwarves, etc. So much so that there was a Writing Excuses episode called "Non-Human Races". I don't think I'm off base in that regard. It's common terminology.