Inclusion

[Mark]

For the longest time, we had a TAS section. With the extended universe books attempting to fill in the blanks for alot of things, I was wondering what the odd are on including some of the info from the novels on the main site?

I mean, obviously we keep the script in white for non cannon, and even maybe assign it a subsection of its own, but there are alot of fans, and after all, the DITL site IS supposed to be a database.

I know that GK and IK are not fans of the books, but there are some of us who would be willing to compile some data, so we could include ships like the Luna Class and so forth.

[IanKennedy]

The difficulty I have with this is that the buttons on the menus are not coloured according to source, nor is the title of each page. This means that someone reading it doesn't realise right away that the info isn't canon. The other issue is that we no longer simply colour text. These days we reference it. For example we say what information comes from what source. The way this is done is to use the id number from our reference list. The raw text looks something like this:

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{The ships carry an extremely heavy torpedo armament of no less than 15 photon torpedo tubes. Seven of these are mounted in the large roll bar pod, all facing forwards; the remaining eight are located in the saucer section, two of which face directly out to port and starboard - an unusual feature in a Starfleet vessel.#1006}

This results in the text being displayed as green and places a little superscript number next to it. It's green because reference 1006 is a backstage reference namely "Star Trek : The Magazine". Expecting other people to write text in this way is a huge ask as it would need to be done manually (we have a web interface to help us do it). Once you start talking about sources that are not in our reference list, like most of the books, make life even more difficult as they would have to be added.

[Mark]

I see your point, but considering all the info would come from strictly non cannon sources, the whole thing would be easy.

I was thinking one simple section called "Extended Universe". If your open to it, we could run it almost like a secured wiki (ie we write it up, send it to you, and let you post. This way, nobody starts screwing with it). This would extend the main universe's info. New ships, characters, species, and major events. Of course, a quick disclaimer of its cannon stuff, phrased for the DITL such as "The information contained in this file has not been confirmed as historical fact by the Institute." or somesuch.

[IanKennedy]

I see your point, but considering all the info would come from strictly non cannon sources, the whole thing would be easy.

I was thinking one simple section called "Extended Universe". If your open to it, we could run it almost like a secured wiki (ie we write it up, send it to you, and let you post. This way, nobody starts screwing with it). This would extend the main universe's info. New ships, characters, species, and major events. Of course, a quick disclaimer of its cannon stuff, phrased for the DITL such as "The information contained in this file has not been confirmed as historical fact by the Institute." or somesuch.

Typically we would like to say which book each bit of info came from, we've even done page numbers before. To do that you have to use comments along with your reference, as in:

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{This comes from book 1#1234'Page 10} {and this from book 1#1234'Page 12}

etc.

[RK_Striker_JK_5]

Problem would be including what. There's so much out there, with books contradicting one another... what would you choose to use?

[Mark]

The same way GK made sense out of a bunch of the contradicting data on the main page already. If anyone is willing, we collaberate on it, come up with the best answer, and supply sources for our info.