Talk:Main Page

As my knowledge of all things Tolkien is far inferior to that of some things Wiki, I want to suggest some things...

First of all: Page titles such as Barahir grandson of Faramir should be avoided as much as possible. Only when there are more than one Barahirs should this be used. If you have to do this, do it this way: Barahir (grandson of Faramir) so you don't forget whether or not you added that dratted comma...

Further it might be an idea to add a sort of "pub" for this kind of discussions. - Bokkie 18:04, 3 Sep 2005 (EDT)

Good Ideas

Great points. Barahir is one of those names that are used quite frequently, i.e. Barahir son of Bregor, Barahir son of Hador, Barahir grandson of Faramir, etc. In the beginning I was debating whether to do the parenthesis or not, but now that you bring it up, it is most likely something that we need to use.

A portal for discussion other than the main page is a good idea too, I'll try and think of a good name for something, although Portal might work, heh.

Thanks for your comments. --Hyarion 16:45, 5 Sep 2005 (EDT)

Feedback

Very intresting wiki site!... Thanx! --213.228.84.66 18:31, 15 October 2005 (EDT)

• Thanks for the compliment :) It's people like you who keep me motivated. --Hyarion 18:45, 15 October 2005 (EDT)

license?

Is the content here GFDL? Gimli 07:18, 6 March 2006 (EST)

What do you mean? --Earendilyon 07:36, 6 March 2006 (EST)

I mean is it available under the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Free_Documentation_License - can it be copied to other sites under the provisions of that licence? Also if content has been copied from wikipedia, shouldnt it be acknowledged? Gimli 08:30, 6 March 2006 (EST)

Hello Gimli, yes our content is under the same license, GNU FDL as Wikipedia. Any articles derived from Wikipedia will be rewritten so we have no plans to add an acknowledgement on the articles at this time. Wikicities is free to copy our content but it is disappointing to see so many wikis working against eachother. --Hyarion 10:26, 6 March 2006 (EST)

Hi Hyarion, I was doing alot of work on the lotr wiki without realising this site existed until a few days ago. now Im not sure what to do since the lotr wikicities community is going fairly well but has nowhere near as many articles as here. not sure if its worth trying to copy or what - perhaps there could be some way we could agree to format/arrange articles differently to justify having 2 tolkien wikis Gimli 19:47, 6 March 2006 (EST)

Ya I'm not really sure either. There's also The Tolkien Wiki and a couple other wikis out there too. I honestly can't think of any aspects the two wikis would differ on off the top of my head but let me know if you think of anything. I know Robin from the lotr wiki said he was going to concentrate on The Lord of the Rings and since we cover more than just that they didn't want to merge. Competition is always nice but I just don't like watching us waste our time doing the same things. Let me know what I can do. --Hyarion 20:39, 6 March 2006 (EST)

That sounds alright to me especially since I am not very familiar with Silmarillion related things - I guess just because of the wikis names wikicities could focus on LOTR and you on JRR Tolkien himself? Gimli 02:53, 9 March 2006 (EST)

Heh, unfortunately that would leave us with around 100 articles :p. Our goal since we started has been to focus on everything related to J.R.R. Tolkien, including his works, non-canon material, secondary material, collectibles, languages, films, the fans, etc. As we've devoted so much time to this already I think we will be continuing on this path, sorry. --Hyarion 11:36, 9 March 2006 (EST)

Main page redesign

I'm trying to redesign the main page a bit so as to not scare off any visitors. If you have any suggestions just let me know and I'll add them. The introduction text should probably be rewritten, possibly shorter. I also think instead of a featured image and a featured article we could showcase a featured article with an image from that article, and a bit more text directly from the article. --Hyarion 16:12, 23 April 2006 (EDT)

IMO, the link to Welcome in the opening sentence is unnecessary, as the welcome message is just below it. Coupling the featured picture to the featured article is a sound idea if you'd ask me; gives the page some more coherence *thumbs up*. --Earendilyon 17:04, 23 April 2006 (EDT)

Hm, good point I can take it off for now, eventually I'd like to remove the welcome statement from the main page and add it to the welcome page, and then also add a Tolkien Gateway page with information about the site if the welcome is not enough (and link to that as well). Then we can focus on news / featured articles / navigation links, hopefully it will be self-explanatory enough that people won't get confused, though I doubt many even read the paragraph. I'll try and get a Featured article page rotation going so people can submit possible featured articles, vote on them, and move them onto the main page a bit faster, as now it's just random. --Hyarion 17:10, 23 April 2006 (EDT)

Personnally, I've no problem with a randomly chosen featured article. Why complicate things with voting and stuff? It also will point people to lesser know articles. If it's really a daily new featured article, it will liven things up a bit. Why not make it an hourly featured article, will pace the rotations circle a bit up (by a factor of 24, to be precise)! --Earendilyon 17:16, 23 April 2006 (EDT)

Hehe, hm, definitely a thought. I'll see if I can rig something to do it automatically but we might have to change it manually. What we could do is have Featured article/April 23 2006 and the main page could have [[:Featured article/{{CURRENTDAY}}]]. I think one reason people do vote for Featured articles as it allows competition for users to rewrite and tidy up articles in hopes that their work would be featured on the main page. And if we did this we could also have an Improvement center where we post articles that need to be improved. But combining the two by doing random featured articles would work great too. --Hyarion 17:22, 23 April 2006 (EDT)

Purpose of site?

This is going to come across badly, I'm sure, so I apologize in advance for my skepticism. But, er, what exactly is the purpose of the Tolkien Gateway as opposed to the various other Tolkien wikis online (or, for that matter, Wikipedia itself)? In particular, it looks like a number of the articles here are at least currently based on the corresponding entries from Wikipedia. What was the argument for branching them off to form a separate site rather than simply improving them in place? (Not that I object to the impulse to create one's own site, mind you! But I feel some level of concern about fragmentation of effort.) Steuard --128.135.152.14 12:24, 31 May 2006 (EDT)