User talk:Gilgamesh de Uruk

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Again, welcome and have fun! — Oznogon (talk) 16:11, 17 March 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for the comics contributions! Rare and valuable work. -Oznogon (talk) 16:33, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

Characters template

Hi! I've had to roll back some edits that added {{Characters}} lists of creatures to AP pages as it was adding unwanted categories that the template was not designed to accommodate. We're also unsure of how to handle its use on iconics on AP issues as those characters are player standins or pregenerated characters for mechanical convenience, and as opposed to the audio drama or comics versions of those stories they have not been considered canon appearances in those AP issues.

{{Characters}} was created and is primarily used in fiction works like novels, novellas, audio dramas, and comics, in order to track which fiction works recurring protagonists and antagonists appeared in. It was not designed to track all appearances of all named characters. For adventures, {{Recurring}} and {{References}} were created to track recurring concepts beyond just characters, and are used primarily for Pathfinder Society scenarios, where such recurrences are more useful for GMs who want to play an arc of scenarios with recurring characters, locations, or themes.

We don't have an equivalent function designed for Adventure Paths. Major NPCs and bestiary entries are already (or should be) listed in the book's contents on their product pages. Lists of recurring characters appearing in a specific issue might also in some cases be plot spoilers.

There's a discussion occurring in the #pf-wiki-talk channel of the PathfinderWiki Discord server about how to handle this, and you're welcome to join. For the moment though, please refrain from adding new uses of the {{Characters}} template. -Oznogon (talk) 18:12, 19 May 2024 (UTC)

Sorry about the trouble. When coming to a new wiki, I try to copy the same coding and format I see being used on other articles which is why I copied the character list format from the comic articles and applied them to the Adventure Path articles. I've seen that you changed the format on the Creatures lists, but not on the PCs and NPCs lists. Would you like me to apply this format to the PCs and NPCs lists or leave them as they are?
Do I need to add a spoiler tag to articles where I've added character lists? I didn't think spoilers would be an issue for a 17 year old adventure.
I can't get on the discord server, it says "Unable to accept invite". Can I continue adding character and creature lists to more adventures now? I won't use the {{Characters}} template if it's causing problems. Gilgamesh de Uruk (talk) 02:25, 20 May 2024 (UTC)
Thanks for joining the discussion on the Discord. I appreciate your intent, and your efforts to communicate your goals and rationale for what you're doing, and it's unfortunate that I'm in a time zone and with obligations where I missed the discussion. This response is too long but the discussion touched on a lot of subjects and you communicated that you lacked context on several of them, so I genuinely hope this is worth it.
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I wanted to call out a few things up front that might make your specific mechanical efforts easier, and to also attempt to explain why we haven't already done these things.
Some time back Virenerus created a bot that parses the text of a PDF and generates lists of recurring terms, proper names, and concepts that significantly appear in the book, including but not limited to characters and creatures. It's not perfect and it struggles with ambiguity, but as a baseline it means the process of creating at least a first pass on these lists for Pathfinder Society scenarios was largely automated. (And in the process exposed issues with the existing templates we use to output those recurrences, but that's an easier problem to solve than compiling the data.)
The lists, which you unfortunately referred to as "a mess", often required little to no effort to compile. Their appearance is something we'd like to improve, but have prioritized other efforts to compile product data in a more structured manner, something that's recently extended to similar content like back-cover quotes and adventure level ranges. Also, those templates listing recurrences date back to a time when such recurrences were much less frequent; they need updating, and we know it. If we removed or hid the lists of recurrences from {{References}} and sectioned them by subject type, they'd be identical to yours in presentation.
But more importantly, {{References}} captures the connections as structured data the wiki's Semantic MediaWiki instance. For instance, each use of {{References}} for Aaqir al'Hakam enters it as structured data: has reference to:Aaqir al'Hakam.
As semantic data, this allows us to search by intersection, such as by scenarios that mention Aaqir and are categorized as being set in Absalom.
In parallel, other product data like authors, artists, suggested level ranges, publication dates, and locations have been structured. Once these references are integrated with that product data, we could build a way to search for all adventures that feature Aaqir written by a specific author between 2012 and 2014. Or have automatically updating lists of all adventures in which Aaqir is referenced, or a list of all characters in adventures that were set in Absalom, etc.
This work is all very much in progress. Adding lists that could work better as semantic data adds overhead for everyone else working on that project, while handing that project a golden use case for following through with the integration of references with the existing product data would be valuable.
Compiling this data as plain wikitext lists is useful toward that end only if done in a consistent format. As several folks in the Discord tried to note, if we do so for contextless comprehensiveness and without minimum standards for significance, we'll have a bunch of noisy lists of insignificant mentions that bury more valuable recurring subjects.
And as you mentioned, if you don't feel comfortable committing to doing lists for 300-odd non-PFS adventures, then we need to coordinate on what gets listed and its structure so that we can not only distribute the workload but also ensure that when we are ready to ingest those lists as structured data, we can then automate as much of that ingestion as possible.
Or we could also wait for and work on implementing that functionality, and then input those lists using the much better form-based tools, with autocompletion and validation, which the built-in Semantic MediaWiki tooling provides.
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So if we already have {{References}}, why don't APs already use them? Most, though clearly not all, APs are fully encapsulated plotlines and intentionally don't cross-reference each other, by design, so that GMs have the flexibility to play APs in different orders than their chronological publication. When they do cross over, APs also often allow for characters from other APs to be alive, dead, or otherwise unavailable based on past PC actions or GM preferences. Some APs reference NPCs only in the context of being backups who can fill a role if another NPC is dead or otherwise unavailable due to past events outside of, or even within, that AP. (The Return of the Runelords and Seven Dooms for Sandpoint APs particularly come to mind here.)
By comparison, Pathfinder Society (PFS) scenarios rely more on recurring elements than other published Pathfinder adventures. There are explicit metaplot arcs within seasons. but also frequently recurring characters across seasons, and even across editions. PFS scenarios can be run and played in any order, and PFS GMs sometimes like to run a story arc that features certain characters, organizations, locations, or items. PFS players who like a character or plotline from one scenario might also seek out other scenarios in which that character appears to follow their story.
Since there's more value in tracking those recurrences in PFS scenarios, and considerably more value in tracking locations, items, organizations, factions, or other concepts over creatures, and because there was precedent for manually documenting those recurrences (spearheaded by brandingopportunity, whose opinions I imagine are informed by that past work), and because PFS GMs have more access to PDFs of every PFS scenario than volunteers have access to every AP issue, that automation as I understood it was deployed first on PFS scenarios.
None of that means there's no value in tracking those appearances in APs, but they weren't the priority. The work on PFS is still incomplete.
That automation should still be available (Virenerus could confirm), in which case it would be possible to use those tools to generate such lists of significant appearances of subjects in APs, the standalone Pathfinder Modules/Adventures, and other similar lines such as Quests, One-Shots, Free RPG Day modules, etc., and then edit and supplement them manually.
To me, this means the manual work you've started of compiling those lists might be unnecessary, because we have tools to accomplish much of it with enough accuracy to reduce the work required to list significant mentions across all 201 and counting AP issues, 80+ standalone Modules/Adventures, and other adventures by a considerable amount, and also make it sustainable to generate and edit those for new AP issues and adventures as they're released going forward.
Those tools aren't perfect, and the results require editing. Proofing the output for PFS scenarios in particular has been a collective effort because not everyone who contributes to the wiki is active in PFS (I personally am not) or are PFS GMs who have access to every scenario. But the output for the most significant concepts is useful, and it didn't require the tedious effort of extracting each subject manually from each scenario. It provided some value that could be expanded by following up with an authored eye, and frees up focus from documenting every rat and human toward documenting major themes and connections.
If we can save you from that work while making it sustainable enough where you could walk away from it and the wiki could continue to incorporate it without you, that frees you up to create lists and connections in the wiki that would be harder to automate and ensures that massive project wouldn't stand incomplete.
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Unlike some of the other concerns voiced about whether the lists are necessary at all, I can see the value of having them, and have personally worked on adding and proofing {{References}} on PFS scenarios. Where I had stronger concerns were in the scope of what was (and wasn't) being compiled, and the tools you were using to compile the lists.
The creature lists containing every mention of every creature are, to me, at best not valuable to players or GMs, and at worst a vector for metagaming (of particular concern for PFS scenarios but also for APs and other product lines that have adventures sanctioned for PFS play). There are also spoiler concerns, which you dismissed as being meaningless on 17-year-old works but which we got very loud feedback on when we added product pages and canon articles related to the Season of Ghosts AP, where the mere mention of the existence of a location or person can spoil the entire campaign's primary conceit. The precedents we set on the 17-year-old AP don't have to be blindly minded, but I was so personally burned by what happened with Season of Ghosts that I'm always looking for opportunities where we can recognize that before we add content.
I can also see mentions about the presence or survival of characters in specific issues being a problem in APs with back-from-the-dead twists, of which there are several across both 1E and 2E. War for the Crown especially jumps out to me as an AP where that's an outsized concern.
This is in part why I suggested compiling these lists on the AP's overview pages as spanning the entire AP. Individual AP issues are rarely played separately from the campaign, so an AP-wide list would be more comprehensively useful for selecting an AP to play. They could be contained in something collapsible like the navbox forms for spoiler purposes, and their details wouldn't be specific to individual AP issues, passively mitigating some of the metagaming and spoiler concerns.
Speaking of which... by that point you'll have reinvented the fiction indices that Fleanetha and Brandingopportunity once worked on, such the navbox-styled indices like on Firesoul or the subpage list indices like Shadow of the Sands/Index, which were labor intensive and similarly difficult to contextualize in valuable ways (those also link to "Human" in such context-free ways that it's one of several points of noise that cloud the signal of more meaningful links).
But beyond all that, the scope of the project strongly includes helping players and especially GMs. IMO linking every insignificant mention of a creature equally to significant appearances in encounters, or their use in plotlines or player interactions, significantly reduces the value of all of the links in the list for either audience. Reading authored lists of significant appearances with context are, to me at least, much more valuable uses of my time than parsing what's important from a blindly comprehensive list that lacks context.
For instance, I called out "rat" because while there might be interesting adventures that use rats in a significant manner, such as in a significant encounter or as a plot device, they'd share a category with every adventure that simply mentions a rat in it or has a rat in an encounter, even when it isn't used significantly or doesn't feature in the plot. An adventure featuring Lao Shu Po is going to have a "rat" link just like Burnt Offerings with its rats-in-the-basement cliche, but those references would inherently have dramatically different meanings to their respective adventures, and plainly linked indices communicate this so poorly that they'd make every such list less valuable.
We also already have lists of creatures statted and featured in the bestiary entries of each AP issue or standalone Module/Adventures adventure, as well as major NPCs with article-length writeups. These are documented both on the product articles in the book contents (with page numbers) as well as on the Index of articles (1E) and Index of articles (2E) lists (which are sortable and searchable across all AP issues). I know this isn't what your lists do, or solve for why you created your lists, but they already answer where a creature or NPC is written up with full statblocks and backgrounds, which is more valuable than knowing where those are merely mentioned or are insignificantly used.
I'm also deep in the struggle of implementing the many, many still not fully known or understood retroactive changes of the Pathfinder Remaster going back to Mantle of Gold and Rage of Elements, and I'm not enthusiastic about doing that work again for a bunch of new lists from PF1 and especially D&D 3.5 adventures that will inevitably recreate removed links or references to creatures that have been renamed or were retroactively removed from canon. Listing and linking them will likely require special flagging to communicate that—all concerns that Forgotten Realms Wiki, by definition thanks to the Hasbro licensing conflicts that necessitated the Pathfinder Remaster, doesn't have to worry about even with the many retcons they've weathered.
Also, while I'm happy to be convinced otherwise about the value of listing significant creature appearances beyond what we've documented from listing AP bestiary contents, I will never be convinced that we need to track the significant appearances, much less mention-only references, of extremely common mundane creatures or broad mentions of common ancestries. ("Human" in particular drove me up the wall because every Pathfinder adventure—including the ones where all the pregen PCs are goblins, leshies, poppets, or otherwise not human—still has a human in it, so that list would simply contain every adventure. If there truly is an adventure without any humans in it, it'd be more notable to list that than the inverse. I'd personally extend that to all common ancestries, with exceptions only if a common ancestry is featured in particular depth, like in Sky King's Tomb.)
{{Characters}} is also simply not built for creature appearances, or generally for adventures. It generates character appearance categories for each entry, the lead-in text it outputs has "characters" in it and non-unique creatures aren't characters, so it shouldn't have been used. {{Recurring}} and {{References}}, as mentioned re: PFS scenarios, were built almost precisely for the purposes you're intending to use Characters for, and were also inspired by the usage and limitations of {{Characters}}. (Beyond that, {{References}} or a future replacement using the semantic data initiative for product data will probably replace {{Characters}} in all uses at some point — probably before any such lists across all APs and standalone adventures would be fully compiled.)
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There's another feature that makes me feel like manually compiling these lists generally isn't necessary in the Main namespace where product articles exist, for any subject, even without bot automation or semantic data: the backlinks from our citation templates.
Any significant mention of a subject in a source should be cited to that source; that isn't true, but that's a volunteer capacity problem, not an implementation problem. And especially for older works, characters and creatures—and many, many more concepts—are already linked to the source article by citation templates. Mediawiki already tracks every inclusion of each template, so if I want to see every PathfinderWiki article that cites Burnt Offerings, I can pull up {{Cite/Burnt Offerings}} and click "What Links Here".
Is that list as valuable? It's more comprehensive but lacks structure, and both lists lack context. Is that list easily discoverable? Nope; people have to not only know that the citation template exists, but also what "What Links Here" does.
But it does mean the value of manually compiling plain lists of mentions is considerably less, at least to me, than the value of documenting those references in articles, with citations, even if no new significant content is added to those articles. We can use backlinks in several ways to compile authored lists without manually researching them, and as a side effect we get references or even useful content added to canon content articles, which is the much more pertinent point of the project IMO than having lists of every reference and mention of every concept from every book.
What "What Links Here" won't ever capture are the things that aren't documented or cited on the wiki, or context when it's valuable, which is a very valid reason to compile authored lists (and why we've already done so in several articles). But as Yoda8myhead pointed out on Discord, we created the Meta namespace and inclusion initiative projects explicitly to compile lists of links to subjects from works that aren't on the wiki, so that we not only know to make those changes later but can also coordinate work so it isn't duplicated or done in conflict with other editors' work. We can point out missing content with page numbers and special context, like canon clarifications or cross-references, and in ways that aren't appropriate or useful for linked lists in Main namespace.
I think Yoda's recommendation of Meta as a home for these is the most immediate compromise. If you do want to keep making these lists right away, plain wiki lists in the Meta namespace pages for product articles, like Meta:Burnt Offerings, would be a better place for them than the Main namespace. Avoid using the {{Characters}} template for all of those lists; it's a thin wrapper for autocategorization around plain wikilink lists. We don't want or need the categories for these yet, so the template is unnecessary; if we change our minds, it's relatively easy to bot-convert a wikilink list to the template.
Also, if you want to keep drafting them for your own purposes without them being subject to any community feedback, your own User space would also be a better place for them. I've done this many times. -Oznogon (talk) 20:39, 20 May 2024 (UTC)
Thank you for the detailed explanation. I just want to make clear that I was listing characters and creatures that the PCs encounter in the adventures, not those that were merely mentioned. If I move the character lists to a Meta article, is it okay if I create a link titled "List of characters" in the main article to link to that Meta article? That would make it easier for a casual browser of the wiki who doesn't know what "Meta" means to find the list of characters. Gilgamesh de Uruk (talk) 02:49, 21 May 2024 (UTC)
Yes, I think that's appropriate. Thanks! -Oznogon (talk) 04:03, 21 May 2024 (UTC)

Tenor of discussion

I also want to call out a few statements from the Discord discussion.

I'm having a hard time understanding this discussion and what exactly people are objecting to here. If the problem is spoilers then we could add a spoiler tag to each article and/or move the character lists to the bottom of the article. I didn't think spoilers would be an issue for a 17 year old adventure. If the problem is that these characters or creatures are not significant, I would like to remind everyone that the Pathfinder wiki is not Wikipedia; other wikis devoted to a particular franchise aim to have complete character lists and species lists for each story. Why should this wiki be different?

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Like this: https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Silent_Tide_(scenario) ? Yeah, that's definitely a mess.

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Because this is the Pathfinder wiki. It's supposed to have information on every character who ever appeared in a Pathfinder story. If this being a "huge amount of work" is the problem, I'm happy to do the work. I like creating lists.

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If this doesn't work out for me I can try adding character lists to the Fandom Pathfinder wiki. I would rather not because that wiki doesn't show up in Google search results, which means most Pathfinder fans would never see it.

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Different editors are interested in different things. Banning character lists is not going to redirect those editors' efforts into doing something completely different on the wiki. People do what they enjoy.

I can definitely empathize with these statements because I've been passionate about making sure PFW includes certain things, and that it remains a useful community resource, for about 10 years now, and I'm still a junior admin compared to Yoda, Fleanetha, or Brandingopportunity.

But I've also been the person to say things to other editors in ways that are hard for them to view as collaborative. Your statements above from the Discord discussion are hard to parse otherwise; intentionally or not, they denigrate existing work, make assumptions about our community and the people in it, and also include suggestions that you'd consider leaving for another project rather than listen to feedback. Some of these statements are especially hard not to view as combative as they're in response to comments that didn't warrant suggestions that others were trying to ban your work, or dictating to the existing community what they should believe is the wiki's purpose.

I can be both optimistic enough to believe that wasn't your intent, and also jaded enough from past experiences to still fear that it might be. If I sound guarded, it's because I am.

Wikis are fundamentally collaborative projects, and each wiki's community is neither Wikipedia's nor any other wiki's. If you aren't interested in collaboration within this community, then perhaps you're right in suggesting that contributing to PFW might not be a good fit. We appreciate boldness, but when multiple people are asking to slow down and work toward a common, sustainable solution, it's harder to appreciate responses that suggest that your work is clearly superior to our mess, that our feedback isn't understandable, and that if we don't agree with your plans, you'd rather take your work elsewhere than attempt to understand others' opinions, learn from their experiences, or hear out alternatives.

The invitation to the Discord was to help find a way forward where you didn't have to do it alone (or for some of it, not have to do it all if you're willing to wait), and to encourage discussion before you spent time that could feel wasted if it were rolled back or edited to align to standards.

I don't want to see you waste work and burn out because it's not supported. I have, and it sucks. But I also don't want to encourage anti-collaborative disruption, because as an admin it means we're cleaning up the disruption instead of fostering sustainable contribution in more meaningful ways, much less editing the stuff I want to edit. People in collaborative projects like this sometimes do not do things that they enjoy, things that sometimes become necessary as a result of others doing only what they enjoy, and I feel it's important to understand and communicate that too. -Oznogon (talk) 20:39, 20 May 2024 (UTC)

I apologize if any of my statements came across as combative or anti-collaborative. That was definitely not my intention. I was just expressing my opinions and trying to argue my case. This wiki appears to have very different values than most other wikis I've seen, which was the reason for my confusion. Gilgamesh de Uruk (talk) 01:16, 21 May 2024 (UTC)
It does, and the confusion's understandable. Thanks for understanding. -Oznogon (talk) 04:03, 21 May 2024 (UTC)
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