Wiki Wishlist

[Rhovanion Selidor]

As some of you may have noticed, our Wiki has been growing slowly but steadily! Summer has been doing the bulk of the work thus far, for which we should all be very very grateful, but the time has come for everyone to chime in on where we go from here. What kind of things would you like to see added to the Wiki? Have you seen something cool on other wikis that might be a good addition to ours? How do you feel about the current setup and layout of pages?

Recently we've been able to add two templates: the family tree and the character infobox. Examples of these templates in action can be found here, here and here. Currently these templates are only being used on a handful of pages. Do we want to see these things on more pages or would some changes be in order?

So please, give us your feedback! There's no point in doing all this coding work if people think the Wiki would be better off going a different direction. A personal Wiki Wishlist would be awesome to help me figure out what kind of edits to prioritize.

The things I'd like to see are the following:

• Citations! I'm still working on figuring out how to do this, but hopefully it should be ready soon. Using citations (the little footnote things on most Wikipedia pages) we can cite specific threads on the forum when we mention important events in the timelines of characters and houses. This will be reaaaaaally helpful to new players, and even just to old player who need a quick reminder of a character's history.

• If we end up going with the Character Infobox setup, I'd really love to have the heads of Houses decide on a set color scheme to use for their members. There are three fields that can be customized (the title background, title text and subheading background) so there should be enough variation that we can easily identify affiliations by color scheme. I'm working on getting smaller banner icons to display next to the House name as well, so that will be another way to customize them.

• On the subject of the Character Infobox, I'd love any suggestions for things to add to the current list of info headings (name, husband, eye color, etc.) The code is really easy to work with, so adding/rearranging things is no problem.

• If we like we can color the boxes of the Family Trees, but I'd like some standardization for what the colors mean (head of house, heir, married into the family, deceased, etc.) before I open that can of worms.

• Navboxes at the bottom of certain pages to group things according to province? Like this example, but perhaps with the cities listed as well? If there is interest, this is something I'll try to work on later.

So now it's your turn! Tell me what you want to see!

[Serenna Ashpool]

I totally stole Rhovanion's green for Serenna. I vote THAT for House Ashpool.

[Victor Castell]

I'm working on Victor to get up the colors for Castell, but one thing I've noticed that we need to decide on is the women's wiki page name. IE: "Celeste Sterlyn" or "Celeste Castell" ? Like your page is Serenna Ashpool, but when you wed will it still be there?


I personally think it's easier to try to keep everyone to their birth names? Or always refer to women by all three? IDK. Ideas or thoughts? Or is there the thing where Celeste Castell and Celeste Sterlyn can go to the same page?

[Skye Drake Harrowmont]

All you have to do is go:

#REDIRECT [[Full Page Name]]

on whichever page you want to redirect to!

So, for instance, on Serenna Sanseverino, I redirected to Serenna Ashpool.

[Victor Castell]

Double Post for the win.


1. I like the idea of coloring the family tree charts to make it easy to see who is born/wed/etc right away

Possible Color Ideas (just the look.. I suck at picking colors, so I would prefer someone with more talent to actually DO that)



Born into House Female: #F85496
Born into House Male: #544CEC
Wed into House Female: #F496BC
Wed into House Male: #4B94ED
Lord of the House: #0FCF2F
Lady of the House: #F488E9
Heir of the House: #FDFF5B

Can we do strike outs in the tree for deceased?

2. I like the little category boxes idea.

I'm sure I'll have more as I play

3. Ok, with Shae's kickass thing, I like the idea of making the pages for the females their birth name and redirecting there with their married names. Sound good?

[Allegrezza Sterlyn]

I would rather not do color codes on the family trees. If we do just color code the current lord of the house. It's one of those things that sounds like it would work but when you open up a page and a rainbow is staring at you it rapidly stops being readable or clear and starts looking like someone let a tween loose with a highlighter set. Yes to striking out dead people. But it's pretty clear already by the lines who was just wedded in and who was born in. ((Sorry, Summer's web design classes left her with allergies to overuse of color codes. Likewise if anyone uses more than two types of font on one page I WILL have to smack them, and if anyone suggests a flash intro to anything ever they'll be hanged.))

Colored backgrounds behind text decrease readability for lots of people is the real issue. It's fine for little bits like the headings on the info boxes but when you pick those colors out, please do so carefully and check to see that the text is still very clearly legible. But for the trees, where there would be six colors in a giant poofy rainbow... it's too much. Too too much.

If you really want a color bg on your family tree, pick one color for everyone, then a second color for the lords of the house. No more than 2-3 colors on one tree, and again you need to be careful to ensure they show up readable on others' monitors and put a guide in at the bottom.

All you have to do when you make the tree is XA=Xavier and it'll strike through. Likewise you can bold the head of the house.

[Rhovanion Selidor]

Wow, thanks for all of the feedback everyone! Please keep it coming as more ideas/suggestions come to you. I think Summer and I will have to work out a Manual of Style soon so it will be easier to keep things consistent. What do you think?

Also, there is a much easier way to link back to pages using different names. Rather than redirects (which might get cumbersome) when you put a link to a name you have the option of including separate fields for display text and link text.

For example: [[Celeste Sterlyn|Celeste CASTELL]]

The page being linked is [[Celeste Sterlyn]] but the name being displayed on the page is Celeste CASTELL. I think it's a bit easier than remembering to make a redirect for every single married character. As long as you get into the habit of doing it, it's a lot easier to deal with. Plus it works well to link to things that are abbreviated or in plural form (ex. [[House Lorterra|Lorterra]] or [[Horses|horse]]) and parts within a bigger articles (ex. [[LinkedArticle#LinkedSection|DisplayText]]. Easy peasy!

[Victor Castell]

If we do colors, I would like to standardize. I do tend to like some color. One option to keep it reduced is to go with what I had for lords/ladies (basically, I wanted a bolder color for born and a lighter color for wed in) for all characters and then just bold the text for the Lord/Lady/Heir of the house. That would basically be just two colors, with two shades for each, so not so rainbow, but still something visual.

[Beatrice Sanseverino]

Might I suggest a category for the players? What about one for characters of certain houses?

[Rhovanion Selidor]

Originally Posted by Beatrice Sanseverino

Might I suggest a category for the players? What about one for characters of certain houses?

Already have a player category [[Category:Players]] but to ensure you are sorted under the right name please use the {{DEFAULTSORT:Username}} tag right before your category list to ensure that you're placed under the right letter.

ALSO, there is a new field in the character infobox for betrothed characters. Add "| betrothed_to=" (sans quotes) anywhere in your code if you want to use this option. I put it right after the spouse options, but the infobox code works so that it is displayed in the same place regardless of where the field is placed in your actual coding, so I guess it doesn't really matter.

EDIT: Added a religion field as well. Just add "| religion=" as per the above instructions, preferably right before affiliation. All of these additions are present on the current template page as well.

[Rhovanion Selidor]

Wiki Update (05/05)

We now have province-sorted house navboxes, a fancy navbar at the bottom of all province pages, character categorization by house is now available with [[Category:House INSERTNAME]], and my favorite development of all.....

Drum roll, please....

House icons for the character infoboxes!!!

Simply fill in the " | house= " field with the image filename as well as the link to the house page. The code for the example pages is here:

| house=[[File:Selidor.png|40px|link=Selidor]]  [[House Selidor]] - [[House Ashpool]]  [[File:Ashpool.png|40px|link=Ashpool]]

The pixel size makes sure the banners are not humongous, while the link will take anyone who clicks the image directly to the house description page. Handy!

I've gone through and done almost all of the character pages with infoboxes up, and I've changed the house display order for married characters to match what the forum accounts look like (married house first, birth house second). If I forgot to add the icon to your character page or messed up the order somehow, it would be great if you could fix it.

Thank you!

This has been your friendly neighborhood Wiki update.

[Aurelia Whitstone]

I'd like to request an info box for the gods/goddess where I can put an image and then information like, god of what, patrons, province of origin, main temple, etc. <3