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This wiki is organized via a hierarchy of namespaces, and its breadcrumbs are set to allow navigation according to that hierarchy. Since the wiki is still being built, it seems best, for consistency's sake, to lay out some principles by which topics should be categorized, so that - with any luck - they don't have to be rearranged later.
First: top-level namespaces referring to a category of things within the world will be given a singular name. The plural 'sessions' is an exception here, partly because it was created before I came up with the rule, but partly also because the RP sessions themselves were written in an IRC channel, they're not technically within the world, just depicting its events. So there.
Second: each intelligent species native to Avishraa, or (like the Extrinsics) otherwise important to the setting, will get its own top-level namespace, since those species are the ones most likely to warrant their own hierarchies of topics; while there will also be a 'species' namespace, this is intended mainly for non-sophonts, like plants and animals, or for any sophonts that may show up in the RP but aren't native to Avishraa. It may be possible, if a sophont becomes important, to promote it to its own namespace, though ideally this should be a rare event.
Third: I haven't actually come up with any more rules yet, but I am quite deliberately leaving open the possibility of doing so in the future.
The current plan for the hierarchical organization of the wiki is as follows:
- concept: namespace for topics that aren't really physical things or people, but more like general ideas important to the setting.
- extrinsic: sophont species, sort of. Something of a cross between a living concept and a cosmic force.
- language: namespace for languages, and language families, found in the setting.
- meta: namespace for topics about the wiki itself. Like this page!
- orghysh: sophont species. Stone Age hunter-gatherers residing in grasslands.
- person: namespace for individuals, whether player characters, NPCs, or just known figures.
- sessions: storage for roleplaying sessions in the worldbuilding and Thuban continuities.
- species: for species that are non-sophont, non-native, or otherwise non-important.
- takma: sophont species. Overall most numerous and advanced species, but environmentally inflexible.
- world: for planets and celestial bodies.
- avishraa: about the world of Avishraa itself. Any further hierarchy beneath this will deal with Avishraan geography and locations.
- xtauh: sophont species. Smaller in size and number than the closely related takmar, but can survive in a wider range of conditions.
Things yet to be decided on. Keep in mind that these are questions of effective structuring of the namespace hierarchy as much as philosophical rigor; I'm trying to simultaneously avoid the situations of 'too many top-level namespaces that are more specific than they need to be', 'too many levels of namespace in a hierarchy', 'namespaces that don't accurately convey their contents', and 'namespaces whose contents are sensibly grouped together':
- Should organizations - such as religious institutions, governments/nations, secret societies - be grouped together? If not, where should they go?
- Ethnicities, cultures, and religions - and governments and most other organizations, for that matter - are usually restricted to one species, but there are now (and may be more) instances where they aren't, so they can't really be put under a particular sophont species. How to organize them?
- Since territorial control is essentially a conjunction of geography and politics, there's ambiguity in how to handle things like geopolitical units. Should they be treated as geographic-regions-with-political-info, or should as political-units-with-geographic-info? Seems especially relevant for very localized units, like cities and other settlements. (Could create two separate articles, one for geography and one for the government controlling it, but that just sounds gross.)
- Should concepts like ethnicity and religion or mythology be grouped together under something like 'culture'?