Talk:Middle-earth

I think that Middle Earth would make a better jump-off point for Tolkien's fictional universe then JRR Tolkien. -- STG

I'd agree that Middle Earth (or possibly The Lord of the Rings) is the best jump-off-point. When linking/creating these I assume we should use sublinks? (e.g. Middle Earth/Gandalf) -- General Wesc

Never mind, I see we already are sublinking from Middle Earth. I'll start listing the characters on Middle Earth. -- General Wesc

I think the characters should be included placed in the individual books, not on the Middle Earth page, except for, perhaps, the major ones- Gandalf, Frodo, Gollum, Sauron. -- SGL

There aren't any individual books. The Lord of the Rings is a single novel, which is only sold in three volumes for convenience. (And while we're at it, the proper spelling is "Middle-earth", but it's too late to change that now.) -- Xaonon

Middle Earth does far a meaning outside of the realm of Tolkienania so it might be confusing if someone wrote an article on Nordic mythology

In Norse mythology, the term is usually left as "Midgard", so I think reserving "Middle Earth" for Tolkien's universe would be acceptable.

I notice now that JRR Tolkien/Rings of power should really belong to Middle Earth. Do you think it'd be best to move them, merge the two altogether, or drop the matter? --Uriyan

I wouldn't bother at this point. When we move to the new wiki software, all subpages will be convered to normal pages. --STG

Yes, but still, a [[Middle Earth -- Rings of power]] would make more sense than a [[JRR Tolkien -- Rings of power]] (JRRT is by the way the only case, known to me, that LMS actually approved of a subpage - see Faramir). As a side rant, I often wish that there will be allowance for at least these topic pages). --Uriyan

"In Norse mythology, the term is usually left as "Midgard", so I think reserving "Middle Earth" for Tolkien's universe would be acceptable."

I seem to remember Old-English and Middle-English? texts mentioning 'middle-earth'. Certainly the Project Gutenberg translation of Beowulf does (see ftp://ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext97/bwulf10.txt).

Yes, 'middangeard' occurs half a dozen times in Beowulf. I think 'Middle-earth' is a poor choice as an overarching handle for Tolkien's creations. I don't think he often used the term for that purpose, and his principal editor (Christopher) tends to avoid it except when using it to refer to the geographical region properly so named. Much of Tolkien's writing covered events which took place outside Middle-earth itself. A page like [[Middle Earth -- Valar]], for example, would seem rather out of place.

--Matthew Woodcraft

There are two Shire's, Middle Earth/Shire and Middle Earth/The Shire. Guess that we should merge them. But which one to save? - Peter Winnberg

Definitely Middle Earth/The Shire. Remember the conversation between Radagast and Gandalf. I am now in the process of combining the two pages.

Hi everyone; there are a couple of things about the Middle Earth page that bother me, and I wanted to share them. First of all, Middle Earth is a bad name, as it is only a subset of Tolkien's planet (Arda) and universe, Eä (so say it is less relevant to the Valar and Maiar). So perhaps we should relocate our work ti either Ea or Arda?

Secondly, all authors (me included) have a natural tendency to involve more and more subjects, which involve yet other subjects and so on, ad infinitum (just look at /Elrond !). Nevertheless, I think it would be better to begin with the most basic things (like characters from LoTR), and then proceed with the more advanced topics (like Silmarillion).

And finally, is there any possiblity that we could import entries (with copyright issues settled, naturally) from the Encyclopedia of Arda, as we did with FOLDOC? That could really help Wikipedia, as much more people will get exposed to it.

What do you think of it? --Uriyan

I agree that Middle-earth is bad, but I don't think Arda or Eä are good - too obscure. Subpages are going away anyway. If all these pages will have to be renamed I'd suggest including 'works of Tolkien', or something similar, in their titles.

I'm not sure of the need for all of the pages that exist or have been linked to - where an article can be written which summarises information from different sources, I can see some value, but I think a page on something which just occurs once in a book isn't really worth it.

I guess that then we need some sort of a plan what kinds of pages will go in and which not --Uriyan

Let's try to point all links that should be within Middle Earth to really point within Middle Earth to make sure that we don't write several articles about one thing with more or less the same content. Like Vilya and Middle Earth/Vilya. I redirected Vilya to Middle Earth/Vilya. Since many of the names of Middle Earth are unique like the names of the Three maybe we should redirect them to within Middle Earth? --Peter Winnberg

That's the general idea of subpaging. Note that in links you can shorten [[Middle Earth/Something]] to simply [[/Something]], which is much shorter and simpler. --Uriyan

While the general effects of the "no subpages" policy can be debated, it definitely doesn't work here (as almost all links are internal) and make editing much, much harder. I wanted to ask whether there could be any current or future work arounds (e.g. #base [[Middle Earth]] at the head of each article). As a related note, is there a new wiky markup for tables (instead of the annoying HTML one)? --Uriyan

I had a idea to move everything out of Middle Earth and use the categories that can be found in the new software ( see [1] ) and name that category Middle-Earth or maybe Arda. Then have one of those to include the list of pages that is in this category ( done by software if I understand it correctly ). Then maybe in the future the search on wikipedia can be limited to search only one category. Or maybe use a category without moving the pages out of Middle Earth. However this would require a lot of work and I have not tested the categories system in the new software. --user:Peter Winnberg

Yes, but that doesn't resolve the main problem: link relativity. For example, in [[Middle Earth/Legolas]], I want to link to [[Middle Earth/Mirkwood]] simply as [[Mirkwood]]. What could be needed is some sort of a command to add-to-all-links-a-given-prefix (like #base [[Middle Earth]] at the top + [[Mirkwood]] in the body = [[Middle Earth/Mirkwood]]). --user: Uriyan

If we move all pages out of Middle Earth, that is Middle Earth/Saruman -> Saruman that would solve that problem. However if we don't we could always create #REDIRECTS for most links. That is, redirect Saruman -> Middle Earth/Saruman. That would also solve the problem for most links anyway ( not where there already are articles ). And then one could just create links to Saruman instead of Middle Earth/Saruman. -- user:Peter Winnberg

Yes, but that would mean that [[Middle Earth]] and the "real world" would mingle, which is perhaps not what we want (after all, ME is a separate and self-contained universe). And for the time being we already do have a solution - the default links made by the transformation script e.g. [[Middle Earth/Saruman]]. I pondered about creating a new wiki or namespace for ME, but that would be a bit too radical, I'm afraid. --user:Uriyan

It's still possible to make pages with a slash in their names. The subpage syntax might in the end become merely an accepted naming convention rather than an explicitly supported feature. --DY

I know it's possible, but I don't want to fill the pages with millions of [[Middle Earth| link prefixes! Ideally, I'd want links like [[Legolas]] to become translated somehow to [[Middle Earth/Legolas|Legolas]] so we'd able to write fluently ("[[Gimli]] and [[Legolas]] were members of the Fellowship" rather than "[[Middle Earth/Gimli|Gimli]] and [[Middle Earth/Legolas|Legolas]] were members of the Fellowship"! --user:Uriyan

Are we supposed to move everything into a Middle Earth namespace now? How is this suppsoed to work? Can someone explain this to me? -- GayCommunist

I don't think a namespace would suit us. I'll probably send a request for comment via Wikipedia-L. --user:Uriyan

That's a good idea, not only the people who edit the Middle Earth pages but also the people who edit Star Trek and Star Wars pages (probably more as well ) would be helped by a good solution to this. Peter Winnberg

There's no easy way to accommodate the following two desires:

to be able to link simply to Legolas or Frodo without prefixing "Middle Earth/Legolas" or "Middle Earth/Frodo" to make the links work
to make it clear that these are characters in J.R.R. Tolkien's vast fictional universe

I think Middle Earth was a fairly good compromise, but admittedly it's only a subset. Also, I don't like the idea of making Frodo a subpage of Tolkien: as in ((J.R.R. Tolkien/Frodo|Frodo)).

In fact, I'd like to promote all the slashed characters, places, and things in Tolkien's world(s) to top-level articles. I think we can handle distinguishing them from non-fiction.

Like:

Samwise Gamgee, companion of Frodo in The Lord of the Rings

But what about:

Glamdring, sword discovered by Gandalf

Must we say "in the LOTR", or will readers understand they can click on Gandalf (excuse me? you want to do WHAT on my head?) to get the context?

Ed Poor

Thank goodness somebody is going to do the heavy lifting on moving and redirecting all those ugly subpages. I can think of no other uses of the name Frodo, Gandalf etc. other than with Tolkien's universe. We can allways disambiguate later if need be. -- maveric149

What's the convention for disambiguating things like Venus (goddess) and Venus (planet)? Many thoughtful contributors have worked diligently on things like the planets (thanks, April!), but each solution was ad hoc.

Is there a standard? I'd sure like to follow one, whatever it is. Something like,

Put a disambiguating term in parantheses following the ambiguous term

So Sting (sword) could be a separate article from Sting (musician).

Ed Poor

Have you not read both wikipedia:Naming conventions and wikipedia:Disambiguation? If there's something not covered by those, bring it up and we'll update them. -- Lee Daniel Crocker

Thanks, Lee, I just read both of those articles. Did you write them? They were very helpful.

I think, based on reading the articles Lee pointed out, that we can safely promote all the Tolkien-related articles from the slashed hell of <code>[[Middle Earth/Gandalf|Gandalf]] to the main level of <code>[[Gandalf]].

What do you think, STG, General Wesc, SGL, Xaonon, Uriyan, Matthew Woodcraft, Peter Winnberg, DY, GayCommunist, maveric149, and Lee Daniel Crocker? -- Ed Poor