For a long time I have been misremembering the Manual of Style rule regarding the perspective of articles. I have been writing under the impression that I shouldn't point out that something is fictional when in fact it should have been in the first sentence. That being said I personally prefer to read a page that carries the In Mythos banner instead and only uses a real world perspective under the Behind the mythos section. Ironically the best example of this is the Cthulhu page which, despite being the example used by the manual of style, is largely written from an in mythos perspective. It manages to maintain the air of mystery and solidity it deserves without losing that literary stance. I'm not suggesting some sort of massive overhaul (I know I say that every time) but I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.

You might have noticed that I’ve been on-and-off working through the list of redlinks, trying to remove a lot of the unnecessary ones which have accumulated. Over my time doing this, I’ve found that a large percentage of them are a result of articles which have been directly copypasted from Wikipedia.

So now I come to my point: I think that something has to be done about those articles, but I’m not really sure what. I’d offer to fix them, but I really don’t have enough knowledge of Lovecraft's activities outside of his stories (friendships, publishers, etc), and so I’m not overly keen on having to do all of the research that this would involve.

I see a few solutions to this:

1) We delete these pages entirely. I am not an advocate of this option.

2) We leave the pages as they stand (although many of them contain a lot of information which is irrelevant to our topic, and look kind of messy). I’m not an advocate of this either.

3) We implement a template to distinguish these pages from our own articles, explaining that they are taken from Wikipedia. Not ideal, but an interim option.

4) We strip those pages down to a bare minimum, and wait for someone else to join the wiki who is willing to fill them out. Again, I t’s not ideal, but it would make them more accessible to newcomers to the Mythos, and make them look more presentable. I’d be willing to take part in that initiative. This is the option I’d vote for.

5) We simply rewrite all of the articles. This would be very labour-intensive, and it’s not something I would enjoy doing, but if other editors are willing to do a part, I would pick up my share. Again, I don’t have any experience with Lovecraft’s real life, so it would necessarily be online research only.

If anyone disagrees with anything I’ve said here, then please tell me where I’m going wrong, but it’s something that’s been bothering me for a while now.

Fil

So there are three things I'm wondering:

1. I wanted to add some more options to the Infobox but to keep it clean meant breaking it up with headers. Do people reckon that clashes with the wikis current style and if so, should it be removed or added to other infoboxes.
2. The Manual of Style specifies that each article should be introduced from a real world perspective but this is very rarely done in practice. I would argue that the In Mythos tag and similar top bars do the job without needing to alter the text however if that's not what we want then I'll do some trawling.
3. Speaking of tags I would argue that Marvel's Many-Angled Ones and the connected pages should considered to be a part of the Adjacent Mythos rather than the Extended Mythos. Despite referencing things like the Necronomicon Marvel intentionally split certain stories off from the mythos by rebranding the Old Ones as the Many-Angled ones. In addition the Marvel wiki also seems to separate the Cthulhu Mythos from Marvel's characters etc. Again this doesn't apply to all Marvel comics.

Anyhow I look forward to hearing your thoughts and if any of these need sorting I'll probably be able to go more than two days without having to bother the forums.

I've been looking around for similar Wikia communities and among others I've found one dedicated to Hastur  and another for Cthulhu.

The first is about the same size as our own and although we're possibly too different in style to merge our pages we could both definitely benefit from linking more to one another. For example our page for the story "The King in Yellow" is essentially a stripped down version of theirs to the extent that we could cut ours down to a paragraph or so and then link to theirs. At the same time if we spoke to their Admins I'm sure the same could be done with their pages on Cthulhu and Lovecraft himself.

The second is far smaller and completely abandoned. As far as I can tell the longest articles are just full Lovecraft stories but their might be some stuff we can salvage. That being the case I'm going to apply to adopt it and if there's nothing there we can use I might apply for it to be deleted.

We've already successfully connected with our Spanish and German counterparts and I'd be interested to hear your ideas on working with the two sites I've mentioned and any others you find.

Looking around most wikis have their own custom badges so I've been trying to come up with a few for here and thought I'd canvass some opinions:
Edits = In mythos authors (e.g. from Ludwig Prinn up to Abdul Alhazred)
Pictures = In mythos artists (e.g. Pickman, not many options)
Categories = In mythos grimoires (e.g. from De Vermis Mysteriis up to the Necronomicon)
Blog Post = "The Diary of Alonzo Typer"
Blog Comment = "A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson"
Days in a Row = ?
Welcome = "The Statement of Randolph Carter"
Intro = "Through the Gates of the Silver Key" or "The Outsider"
Talk page = ?
Creator = "The Call of Cthulhu"
Pounce = "The Noble Eavesdropper"
Caffinated = "Beyond the Wall of Sleep"
Lucky = ?

There has been a recent issue with an artist who had their art posted here without his permission. He has had the image removed, and I have communicated with him and hopefully repaired the damaged relationship.

This is a learning experience. We as a community should endeavor to correctly source and attribute our art. Much of it is public domain, but some is not, and we need to make effort to use art that we have permission from the artists to use.

This is a legally gray area due to the ambiguity of Fair Use law, but it should be something we should consider to be an ethical responsibility. I will begin working my way through the material I have uploaded to correctly attribute them.

I encourage everyone else to do the same.

Correct attribution should include the copyright status and both credit and link to the artist.

We now have templates to clarify in-universe:

{{Inmythos}}

and real-world articles.

In-Universe categories can now all fall under the Category:Articles written on in-Mythos topics, and real-world categories can now all fall under the Category:Articles written on real-world topics.

EDIT: The inmythos template is now depreciated as all pages are to be assumed in-universe unless specified otherwise.

I'm trying to figure out the usage of this terminology in categories, and infoboxes.

This is a problematic issue that arises out of Lovecraft's own unfortunate eugenics worldview. He most frequently uses the term "Race" to denote various alien species (sentient and non-sentient), ex. "The Great Race of Yith", etc. He most commonly uses this term in reference to non-humans, so this has not confused modern readers.

This usage of the term is problematic because it implies that the people of the Earth, which are categorized into varying cultural definitions of "race" are somehow differentiable species. Yikes!

This leaves this wiki and those in Lovecraft Mythos content creators with the difficult task of determining how to re-classify and describe the various extant "creatures" of the Mythos into accurate categories that don't reflect an outmoded worldview.

I am of the opinion that the term "Race" is so culturally relative, as well as emotionally loaded term, we should avoid it whenever it is not s direct quote from a text. This cultivates a modern sensibility when approaching the source material, as well as fostering a more inclusive and welcoming community on this wiki.

I suggest that we continue to use the "Infobox Race" template, since that remains invisible to non-editors. However, I think we should eliminate the category: "Races". I think this should be replaced with the categories: "Sentient Species" and "Non-Sentient Species".

I will begin implementing this immediately. Please continue this discussion.

There hasn't been much consistency in terms of how this wiki differentiates the various components of the Mythos and the Real World aspects that created and shaped it.

Here are the factors as I see them that should guide our decisions:

A. We need to create categories that cover both fictional and real topics B. We need to address how to handle the inclusion of various real authors within the fictional Mythos, i.e. Lovecraft himself appears in certain later works as well as some contemporaneous Derleth works. C. We need to figure out how we want to handle or ignore what is considered "canon". Many great mythos stories don't always fit in an internally consistent universe. D. As an extension of C. We need to figure out how to handle the permutations of the Mythos timeline, i.e. alternate futures, inconsistencies, accidental contradictions, unreliable narrators, etc.

In addition, see the other discussions in the forum to help us iron out some wrinkles.