Project Redcap:Administration
This page is for administrative discussions among the site contributors.
Project Status & Plans
Updated 2010-03-25
We are preparing for a permanent merger with the | Project: Redcap site. The new site will be called Project: Redcap, but it will have all the contents of this site (HermesWeb).
Pitt is planning to implement and test a software upgrade before we merge the sites. Andrew Gronosky will be shifting his efforts from content creation toward organization.
Andrew is also working on getting the writers guidelines page and other project-related pages into more useful shape.
Getting Involved
In order to get a site added here, you don't have to edit the pages yourself. You can contact Andrew, and ask him to post material for you.
If you do have an interest in editing pages yourself, you are welcome to do so. You might want to experiment in the sandbox to get a feel for how editing works.
Contributing does not require you to open an account or join the mailing list. We have a guest accounts that occasional contributors can use. If you want to contribute regularly, using your own account just makes your contributions more visible.
E-Mail List
We have an e-mail list that is actively used by team members to plan and discuss the development of this site. To join, send e-mail to %%mlm at lists dot ekkaia dot org%% with the words __subscribe hermesweb__ in the subject line.
Design Questions
There are a number of design questions, articulated by Pitt on the mailing list, that we ought to keep in mind. It will take time and consensus-building to fully settle all of these. For now, the discussion is taking place on the Wiki.
Scope
Basically, what is the site about? What kinds of content do we want to include or exclude?
I think we all have ideas of what the scope should be -- it's just that, at present, we all probably have different ideas. ;-) My own opinion is that the scope should encompass two things:
- Providing findable links to as much Ars Magica material as possible. That is the original mission of Project: Redcap and the community needs a site that does that job.
- Being an encyclopedia of the canon, current and old. This is the dictionary idea Pitt discussed above.
Fan-created content is welcome, but it is not our primary mission to host it. For my part I am more interested in linking to fan content than in hosting it. That said, if someone wants to put fan content here in order to make it easier to find (and to give it a wider audience), I see no reason to discourage him/her.
Threshold/Transition (between Scope and Namespace & Nomenclature)
Agreed, this is the way most of our pages ought to be designed. The Writers Guidelines page (or something like it) should be updated to express this idea.
There will be a few exceptions, for lengthy articles or pages where it makes sense to collect together a large amount of information. For example, most of our topic pages such as Welcome to Ars Magica and Order of Hermes will be big. But, 90% of our articles should be short -- a few paragraphs with some links and references.
Namespace & Nomenclature
-* dilemma, where * is one of the twelve Hermetic houses, and eventually created a reasonable bijective mapping of all information involved, yielding 3 times 12 distinctive pages.
What I'm trying to say is that, under the premise of a wiki, it is imperative to have a clearly structured nomenclature, one that more or less stands for itself, and one that can be used to comfortably retrieve the information contained in it. A wiki is not only about "use it, share it, contribute" - we could have that with a forum as well. It is also about structure.}}
I think the page categories help to make the information discoverable. Nomenclature in general is something that we should address on the "How to Use this Site" page, which doesn't yet exist.
In addition to the \{founder,house,member\}-* dilemma, I think nomenclature issues occur in the titles of Ars Magica supplements: for instance, there are two supplements titled Covenants (one for 5th Edition and one for 2nd). We should straighten it out with a consistent solution. Pitt, I think you have more experience with this than I do. Can you make any specific suggestions?
The two-action limit makes sense and is consistent with what theory I've read about usability. This is why it is better in some cases to have big, complicated pages with many related things in one place. (The table of contents feature is important in that case).
It seems to me that we have two sorts of categories: categories that apply to things within the game world (such as Domus Magnae, the Hermetic Houses, etc.) and categories that matter to gamers (published books, authors, editions, "fluff" vs. "crunch").
So I'd welcome a bit more thought and discussion about categories and nomenclature, and it would be good to capture that discussion on a page somewhere.
Legacy Page
The history of this page before August 6, 2010 is archived at Legacy:administration