www.ditl.org

Ian and I have been mulling over including entries on a few of the non canon ships of the modern post-Voyager era. Specifically, the Luna class of which Riker's USS Titan is a member, and the Vesta class of which the USS Aventine is a member.

Neither are canon but both are officially supported - both are ships that have starred in one or more official Trek novels, thus both are ships that we know or can extrapolate a reasonable amount about and get a reasonable entry on.

Including the events from those novels would also allow us to incorporate more character detail - the events of the novels, such as Picard marrying Beverly, Dax becoming a Captain, some of Riker's adventures on the Titan, etc. Naturally the canon colour coding system would let us show all this up as the non canon material that it is.

There is some precedent for this, as we include entries for Franz Joseph's non canon ships from the Starfleet tech manual already.

What say you? Good idea, or not? And any other candidates for ships to include?

I like the idea. I like having the most possible information. The fact that there is already a color-coding system in place for canon level make it a sure thing to me.

If it gets its own color in the canon index I think its a great idea.

But i wonder how you will pick which books to choose and which books to discount. Unless its and all or nothing thing, its going to be arbitary.

I disagree. This isn't like Star Wars, where the books are officially canon, and there's at least an attempt to keep them consistent with each other. Far more happens in the books than can be fitted into the time period they cover, and if there aren't a shed full of examples of books directly contradicting each other, canon, or both, I'd be astonished.

I think the site is better for sticking to the (already vast) canon source material it already does rather than trying to cover hundreds or thousands of non canon books as well, which would, as Teaos points out, be impossible without cherry-picking sources and facts.

I gotta agree with Seafort. You'd run into 'what do you count?' and there's a metric ton of stuff to include/exclude/sorta exclude in an inclusive way.

We weren't thinking of adding a new colour; they would just go in green as do all official but not canon sources.

Yes, it would be cherry picking, Is that a bad thing, particularly? We already include the Franz Joseph TM, which isn't even officially backed now, and there are tiny bits from the novels here and there - some of the Bozeman page is from the novel Ship of the Line, for instance.

As for how you choose, my thought is to limit it to the more recent novels, and to only go with the ones that get a whole series. So to begin with, the Titan series. Then possibly the Destiny trilogy... maybe the DS9 relaunch books, in time. I was only thinking about the ships, but there's no reason we couldn't add the characters, species, timeline, etc.

What motivates me on this is that whilst there's a whole boatload of canon out there, the site already covers the large bulk of it. I know there's plenty of existing canon things not on the site, gaps to fill and such. But there's very little new content coming out. Starting to include stuff from the books would give us a new seam to mine.

As I sad I like it, and don't mind cherry picking so long as its consistent. Every by author x. Or everything after y.

But I do think a different color would be nice.

Hmm, I suppose there's no reason why we couldn't separate novels from things like tech manuals and encyclopedias.

Yellow for Canon
Green for official
White for speculative
Red for novels?

Cyan for novels?

Orange for novels?

Chances are there will never be a series or movie based on the Prime verse. Embrace the somewhat linear timeline of the current novels or don't.

Color coding for novels doesn't hurt either.

As a color blind person Cyan is easy for me to differentiate.

Teaos wrote:As a color blind person Cyan is easy for me to differentiate.

Colour blind approval seconded.

I like the idea. There's no harm in being selective if you choose the officially recognised books that are reasonably large.

Reliant121 wrote:I like the idea. There's no harm in being selective if you choose the officially recognised books that are reasonably large.

That's the issue - the books where there's an argument over their status, or where their status has changed, are already incorporated into the site. Graham is talking about the novels, which have never been considered canon, and make scant effort to remain consistent between each other.

Captain Seafort wrote:

Reliant121 wrote:I like the idea. There's no harm in being selective if you choose the officially recognised books that are reasonably large.

That's the issue - the books where there's an argument over their status, or where their status has changed, are already incorporated into the site. Graham is talking about the novels, which have never been considered canon, and make scant effort to remain consistent between each other.

Since DITL already incorporates books which are questionable to some, the admins have been arbitrated on whether to include the books or not. This would be merely an extension of already extant choices and content.

Not red...

Captain Seafort wrote:

Reliant121 wrote:I like the idea. There's no harm in being selective if you choose the officially recognised books that are reasonably large.

That's the issue - the books where there's an argument over their status, or where their status has changed, are already incorporated into the site. Graham is talking about the novels, which have never been considered canon, and make scant effort to remain consistent between each other.

Actually the recent novels (since CBS took over it seems) have been much better in that regard.

I think it could be done if the admins decided something like "OK we'll use the post-Nemesis "main series" novels" or something like that.

That being said, Graham, Ian, it's your site do what you like! I know I would like to see some of this stuff in a better-curated/organized manner than say Memory Beta.