Talk:Artemesia Family/Garret/Treatise Letters

Why Some Pages Referenced Are No Longer Part of the Wiki

The pages having to do with the Scarlet Trinity and Excellence and such have all been removed by my request. Why? Well, first of all, the pages were meant to give interested players the content of an RP device placed in-game. Sure, I gave in-character links to it. That gives other characters and players information only about the content, and tells nothing about the background story at all.

Think about it, hypothetically, if you find my tax forms on some website, do you know whether it was I who voluntarily placed it there, or whether some hacker stole it and posted it? You don't, unless you are either me or the hacker. And yes, you can find empirical evidence to prove one over the other, but would you know whether I wanted the documents posted online, or whether I had any knowledge of it? No, unless you are me, you do not know what I am thinking.

So when I originally wrote the wiki pages, I did so with the intention of letting players who wanted to immerse themselves have a little fun. Did I plan having this current situation happening in-game? Yes, and no. I knew there would be conflict over it, but I had specifically done so with the plan to work an in-game roleplaying story fashioned after Rashomon. Unfortunately, too many people place automatic weight on wiki edits. So what if a previous edit looks different? I said in the game, through my character that one was false, one was real. Are you the author? Would you know which one is real? Both in-game and out-of-game, are you the one writing the pages I chose to share with you? If not, who are you to say whether the first link I gave you in the wiki was true as opposed to the second page or third page?

As for why I gave it through one character, and never roleplayed something like, "It was stolen!", well first off, there is something called "mystery". How enjoyable would it be had I used a message that read, essentially, "John Doe stole a book called 'The Scarlet Trinity of Excellence' and passed it along. In a few months someone will call it heretical, etc."? Mind you, that means I would not even give you a wiki link in the first place either. Then what, you wouldn't even know the contents except what I choose to tell you. Besides, there could have been players either not part of SA or even part of Dwilight, who might have saw the pages I wrote, and maybe decided to hop into Dwilight just to create some in-game drama. Doubtful, but certainly not having anything and leaving me to tell you all what is written exactly is quite boring and doesn't let more people participate.

Obviously even in-game I fully expect characters to believe what they believe. However, there should not be a strict adherence to wiki pages as absolute truth, and you do not know anyway which edit is true. So pointing out inconsistencies in in-game messages is fine, and encouraged. Trying to point to the wiki as forensic evidence is not the point of this game. Remember, we're not playing Wikimaster. You can't just off-handedly point to the wiki and say, "You changed the contents of the page because I compared the current version with the previous version, therefore you are lying now." There are in-game roleplays I'm giving to people giving them the background to the content, and if you don't want to read those and want only to point at the wiki, then you all don't get a wiki page anymore. It's meant to be a atmosphere enhancer, not a distraction.

So some of you might say that it was rather immature of me to just delete the wiki pages over this. I will just say that I chose to share my works with you. I never had to, and I never said you had to read it. We're supposed to play this game, within the actual game. The wiki is a useful tool to help us record things that would have otherwise been lost in-game, or to provide help for a larger audience. It is not meant to be some forensic evidence for wiki detectives to use as IC arguments to shoot down attempts at making a story that explains things in-game. --Qmasterflex86 15:01, 29 August 2009 (UTC)

Just a couple comments.

• First, the basic rule of RP in BattleMaster is this: If someone gets a message IC, then they know, IC, everything that happened in that message. This is the only possible way the game can work, as there is no form of RP police or gamemasters that can patrol that kind of thing. So if you post a message about a secret meeting between, for example, Garret and Sejeida in the dead of night, in the middle of a farmer's vacant field in the outback of Turbul, to the entire SA channel, then everyone in SA can use that information. They should try and come up with some reasonable story as to why they know it, but they do know it. If you don't want them to know it IC, then the answer is simple: Don't tell them. Does this mean that some people won't be able to read your RPs? Yes, it does. But the only other choice you have is to accept the fact that some people may not be able to adequately handle the access to the information you gave them. So, your choice. (Also, if you post something on the wiki without an appropriate note about how it should be considered OOC knowledge except in some certain circumstance, then don't be surprised when people take it IG.)
• Second, if you RP about a book and give people a link to where they can read it, then it can be assumed that they must have copies of that book. The Scarlet Trinity, for example, was talked about in SA channels four months ago. It was linked from the Sanguine Times issue 2. It is linked from the Aquilegia main page, described as a primer for the following of SA in Aquilegia. How can you possibly post it there, described that way, and then say that only two people in the entire world ever had access to the book? And once it's posted that way, then you have to assume that if people have read it, that there are logically copies of it in circulation, and with the full knowledge of the authors. After all, it's a primer for following SA in Aquilegia. So of course people can refer back to the old versions of it. After all, they have a copy in their hands. If you want to have different copies in circulation, post a separate copy with some description of how it was found in a different location. Then let the players decide for themselves which one is the "real" copy. But don't remove the old one.
• Third, players tend to get very angry when you try to manipulate them in what appears to be OOC ways. Things happened in-game a certain way, and that's that. If you post a three chapter book on the wiki and link it in-game, then come back several months later and change that wiki page to make it a four chapter book, while claiming all the time that it's the same book, people will get angry. After all, you're engaging in retroactive continuity. And people don't like that. It is also the same OOC manipulation that you are claiming that other people are doing by supposedly checking wiki histories. You are using the ability of the wiki to present different text in the exact sample place in a way that cannot work IC. The contents of a book on a shelf in a library don't change.
• IMO, you need to step back a little from trying to do all this OOC manipulation using the wiki. (Because that's really what it is that you're doing when you change the content of a page, and claim IG that it's not any different, and you don't know how it happened, and that someone else must be disseminating fake material.) Once you post something on the wiki and announce it IG, then leave it alone. (Except for obvious expansion, corrections, etc.) Cut out the OOC tricks to deceive people.

--Indirik (talk), Editor (talk) 19:34, 29 August 2009 (UTC)

So in the end it's just a trade-off between wanting to share something that might be potentially interesting or keeping RP security. As for your last comment, no content of any page was changed. I changed the in-character links to direct to another page, that also existed before, that no one was ever given an IC link to. There is a big difference there, as this isn't something like, "Oh hey, I'm changing my page", but "You were looking at the wrong area". Anyway, this will cease to be a problem in the future. Because, you know what? Forget all this, it's not worth it. There's better stuff to do than making wiki pages to add to the story of some game. --Qmasterflex86 19:44, 29 August 2009 (UTC)

If you're not changing pages, then why are you worried about people playing "wiki sleuth" and comparing page versions? I'm really not understanding your point here. You seem to be saying two different things: 1) People are using information on the differences between various versions of a single page to get IC ammo for an attack, and 2) that you're not changing pages, just linking people to different pages. So if you're not changing pages, what kind of metadata are they getting from page revisions? --Indirik (talk), Editor (talk) 17:32, 30 August 2009 (UTC)

Ever consider that there was more than one page? From the beginning I planned the wiki creation such that I could put forth a story about how one copy was the secret private version and how the other was the public version, and how the two got switched. To those ends, I created two pages that were distinctly labeled as such in the wiki URL: One was named "Excellence_Treatise" and the other was named "Excellence_Treatise_Lite". "Excellence_Treatise_Lite" was not given ICly, and was never even mentioned. On the wiki pages, it was rather difficult to find it as well. In-game, my character claimed that "Excellence_Treatise_Lite" was the treatise that was supposed to be public, and that "Excellence_Treatise" was supposed to be private. "Excellence_Treatise" was unedited, except for the foreword added that everyone knew about anyway. "Excellence_Treatise_Lite" was edited, but no one is supposed to know the difference, because in-game, quite literally no one but Garret knew about it, before revealing it. However, the wiki page was edited before the in-game reveal, so I don't see why or how anyone's character would know the difference. --Qmasterflex86 11:16, 2 September 2009 (UTC)