Talk:Samaritan

History Section versus Case&Adventures Lists

Some thoughts about what should go where. What belongs in the History section on this page and what should be punted to the Cases and Adventures page? After some thought, I think the dividing line should be whether his role in the issue is as an actual character or as a glorified cameo. The former goes to both the History section AND Cases and Adventures, the latter to just Cases and Adventures. Thoughts?

--Yiding (talk) 05:34, 16 September 2013 (PDT)

Several thoughts and observations, nothing definitive for an answer.

Before the first Cases and Adventures page/section was developed, we had (and the intent is to still have) master Timeline pages. One was sorted by Events, the other was sorted by characters. (Another was issue sorted - but that never got published here) The structure of the Timeline pages were Event driven and the main goal was to track characters history. The Timeline pages where driven by and constructed using a Database, local on one of my machines here at home. The problem was keeping it up to date. Last entries go right up to and pretty much stop with the Dark Age books.

The Timeline Database was the direct result of my trying to contain a certain type of data. Data that got it's start on one of the first Astro City HTML pages that I built a long long time ago. The reason for the page was mainly because I was interested in pulling together the history of Honor Guard, with a focus on members and when they were involved with the team. This was a couple years before JG and I got working together because we discovered we both had similar goals (his more realized) about building something on the web to study Astro City in-depth.

I like the idea of having these annotations/timelines/cases&adventures lists. They are nice reference material. I'm not keen on how they look right now, which is why I am discoursing them being on the main character page. and rather than spending a lifetime keeping them all co-ordinated, I would like to resurrect the Timelines and find a way to keep the Database itself up to date. Doing that online would be a security nightmare, and also would require some form of change control processing and ownership and yea, even more nightmares.

The Case Studies pages have the advantage of being centric to the character or team being dissected. The disadvantage is keeping them all in sync. Very labor and time intensive. They also become a bit redundant and create the problem you mention of where to put what.

I much prefer having verbiage in the History sections. I would like to see footnotes being employed in that verbiage to reference other stuff, rather than all these links. Some links go nowhere. Some are not needed. More information can be incorporated directly into the page(check out what I did to the Outpost F link that was on the First Family page as an example). But not as a list please. Keeping these pure reference lists (like the Timelines) on a separate page (think of it as an appendix) is much preferred. At least for now. This stuff gets deep and noisy with small packets of information that become a barrier to the casual reader who just wants to find out more about a character. Not be buried in trivia that they have to sort out in their heads.

I don't yet know where all this is leading, exactly. I am very happy to seem more information being filled into the History Section. I would rather see that expand and grow, with section headings similar to the Astra Furst page (which is still incomplete but the structure is there). People that want to work on lists can add stuff to these Case Study pages. I wouldn't worry too much about duplication. For now I think they are better served as seperate pages, and I would focus on creating pages for characters that have complex histories. They might get reincorporated into the main pages if we can come up with a better layout.

I will warn and let you guys know that the Timeline Database will eventually be brought back online. The mechanism for updating it needs to change and improve, I don't have time to keep it up to date right now. But it will be coming back. That will make anything done on these case study pages even more redundant. But these case study pages have the advantage of being more centric to the character, and the list can serve as another place for contributors to take a particular item on a particular list and expand it into something that reads well, with more depth and interest, and add it to the history section. I already have notes and thoughts in my head for the First Family's rich history. Having shared all this thinking outloud, I am now thinking I will use the Cases and Adventures Page for them as a dumping ground for all that rich history so I can free up some brain cells for other projects. (Just what I need).

I am also playing around with designs for making these Case History pages look friendlier and more visually interesting. That is going to take some time to get higher up the priority channels.

Anyway that's were my head is on this topic and all that relates to it. At least for right now. I guarantee it will change as the Herocopia Project continues to mature.

footnotes

Original Honor Guard Page[[1]]
What an Issue Driven Event list might have looked like embedded into an Issues HTML page[[2]]
The Event Driven Timeline List [[3]]
The Character Driven Timeline List [[4]]

-- jb the ib --