I've attached this to ritual tool as I don't think we have a stupid ideas page.

But we may as well leave it where it is for the time being - I've reparented it to chemical weapons. I guess you could call it a weapon against plants or something…

Insertion makes no sense for a contribution…

Another example of spammers who are likely to do their clients no good at all.

Don't know how to solve this; other than create a bunch of pages to turn those Red Links into Blue Ones.

On a totally unrelated note, the "Professor Riley" mentioned (and quoted) repeatedly in the original article is a buddy of mine in Chicago that currently plays in a Continuum game I'm running on Skype. He's been teaching classes on zombies in the media for several years now, and ends up mentioned in news articles quite often because of it. "In the future, everyone we game with will be famous for 15 minutes." :)

I used Relic as the home page; although his skull was a scientific curiousity rather than an object of veneration. I suppose I could have used Grave Robbing or Decapitation instead.

Any thoughts?

Actually, I think it may have come to mind reading one of the politcal argument threads on SJG where someone had just made an eloquent and convincing argument against something that had nothing to do with the position his opponent had taken… it was a decent bit of rhetoric, but it left me wondering how it advanced his argument. And probably baffled his opponent as well.

I've plugged it into narrative tropes for the time being as it's a sort of plot related thing.

I also note that there are no links to this page from anywhere else. (You can test this by clicking "+ options" at the bottom of the page, and then "backlinks" on the menu that that creates.) Which means the only way someone will stumble across this page is if it comes up on the random page list (given 3400 other pages, that's not gonna happen too often) or this week while it's still on the short list of recent pages. Colonel, was there a specific page or topic that made this concept come to mind? If so, we should link here from there. If not, then we should at least figure out where it belongs on the big trope lists and link from them.

I'm busy with other things at the moment (and only have a little bit of time to work on the wiki this morning), or I'd do it myself.

Role Playing Game
Tabletop Gaming Tropes
Roleplaying Game Terms

I think the last would be most appropriate for indexing purposes, but we could put links on the other pages as well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_who_disappeared_mysteriously

And this related page has some interesting content:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unexplained_disappearances

(Wait a sec. Charlie is more like the Flying Dutchman, which is a completely different story).

But since several pages on arcanawiki referenced it, I figured some sort of place-holder was a good idea. Thus, what we had. At the time I had myself on a quota for how many pages a day I was making.

If I recall correctly, this page was really intended as a placeholder that I just never got back to. There was some other page on Arcanawiki that mentioned Theurgy and assumed the reader understood the concept. Since it wasn't a term I commonly use and didn't have a solid mental definition for, I quickly slapped together a page referencing and summarizing Wikipedia and TV Tropes. I'll be the first to admit that the page I put together largely sucks… but I think it was better than leaving the other page incomprehensible to those unfamiliar with the idea.

I bet most of these 1-line tongue-in-cheek pages come about because people visiting for the first (few) time(s). Not knowing the color-coding, they click on dead links, and then feel obligated to type something to the page they just accidentally created. Getting rid of anonymous edits should prevent most of that. For the record, I don't see much benefit to continuing to allow anonymous edits. Setting up an account is easy and free, so I doubt it's much of a barrier to anyone that really wants to contribute.

I suppose it's possible, in the case of the Fletcher page, that it was someone just making an honest mistake, but I doubt it. I can't get inside the mindset that would mistakenly spell "war" with four r's. I'd think that'd be an obvious mistake regardless of primary language or level of education. But since you're giving them the benefit of a doubt, I'll also try to keep my mind open to the possibility that they had something meaningful to contribute but were battling with an incomplete understanding of English and a broken keyboard. If that proves to be the case, I'll gladly apologize for jumping to conclusions.

Some of the recent anonymous edits do seem to have been a bit … wierd … how does the record look historically for "usable contributions" vs. "wierd scrawling" vs. "spam".

I did one anon. recently because I'd somehow logged out without noticing…

I once thought that it might encourage other people to contribute without registering, but that doesn't seem to have had much success…

"Fletcher makes arrox. wit die johan and sends though art sell to knights for warrrr. he could peeesand ow freeman. salo make boww" sounds like someone having a larf at us. Even if it wasn't a prank, it's only going to confuse most readers. So we should delete it. If the original poster (or anyone else who reads this) has an explanation for the original text, they can always edit it back in, along with the explanation or attribution.

Quick formatting observation though if I may … text inside those instruction brackets that you get on opening a new page is hidden - you need to delete the brackets to make it appear.