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Sortes Sanctorum vs Sortes Biblicae

r_b_bergstrom 18 Nov 2021 22:17
in discussion Meta Forums / Per page discussions » Sortes Sanctorum

Looking at it further, I do note that the wikipedia page that I just reverted away did say that Sortes Sanctorum is different from Sortes Biblicae, and that sometimes the two are confused/conflated. So it may be that you were attempting to correct an error on our page. It may be that we've described Sortes Biblicae instead of Sortes Sanctorum.

If that's the case, I would encourage you to edit the page (perhaps on a smaller scale), to include some text that addresses this distinction or corrects the information here. If you do so, I would like to also encourage you to explain it in your own words, rather than merely copy-pasting text from wikipedia.

If the distinction is interesting enough to warrant the extra effort, you might consider adding a separate Sortes Biblicae page, and move the text from this page to that page, before then explaining what Sortes Sanctorum actually is on the existing Sortes Sanctorum page. Neither are topics that I know much about, I'm afraid. My gut instinct is that even if there is a distinction to be made, this page could probably fit both topics on it (at least unless we go into a much higher level of detail than we currently do).

We are not Wikipedia

r_b_bergstrom 18 Nov 2021 22:05
in discussion Meta Forums / Per page discussions » Sortes Sanctorum

Someone had replaced our Sortes Sanctorum page here with a large quote directly from Wikipedia, nearly the entire page from wikipedia.

I reverted it to the previous version. Here's why: We are NOT wikipedia. Our goal is not to just blindly duplicate wikipedia. Especially for a topic such as this where the wikipedia page is sort of a dry, dense, intimidating wall of academic text. (In fact, if you go read the talk page for Sortes Sanctorum on wikipedia, the only discussion there is about how the page there is a copy-paste job from an uncited older source with archaic diction. But that's beside the point, I guess.)

Arcanawiki is primarily a tabletop RPG site, so our articles tend to focus on interesting ways to use something in gaming. This means we're often writing in a more informal style, with an eye on what's interesting and usable for gaming or fiction writing, rather than what's of the greatest academic interest.

If there were specific facts on the wikipedia page you wanted to incorporate here, that'd be okay, but we should take care to:
a) focus on things relevant to gaming,
b) tell it in our own words instead of just copy-paste from wikipedia,
c) not delete entire pages of material written by fellow arcanawiki users without a very good reason to do so.

In regards to point c, I feel a little bad reverting your contribution. For all I know whoever made this change could also be the person who wrote the wikipedia page that I've not exactly spoken highly of. My apologies for any hypocrisy in my actions, or if I'm coming across as an overbearing gatekeeper-type. I'm not trying to chase you away, I'm just trying to explain why I undid your work so this is less likely to happen in the future.

Re: Favorite Cross-Overs: The Gaming Edition

erikinsoberon 22 Oct 2021 05:22
in discussion Off Topic / Role-Playing Games » Favorite Cross-Overs: The Gaming Edition

Word Unscrambler is the perfect tool for you. It is an easy to use, free, online unscramble word game tool to help you ace all word games. Use this letter unscrambler to find all possible words forming with the given letters.

r_b_bergstrom 11 Sep 2021 18:49
in discussion Meta Forums / Per page discussions » Rage Zombie

That makes sense. Indicating the type of media (movie, computer RPG, etc) isn't all that especially important most of the time, and we don't really have a consistent format or labeling structure. So don't stress over it.

The one media-type that I do strive to point out clearly is if a link goes directly to a video that might potentially auto-play. In those cases, I generally take care to make sure that I mark it as a video, for example:

: youtube : **Video:** [link-to-a-video-on-youtube Video-Name-goes-here]

That way, if anyone is reading/editing on their break at work, they won't accidentally click on something that might suddenly become an audio disruption to their coworkers. "Hey there, everybody in the nearby cubicles! I bet you're all now wondering if I'm on an approved 15-minute break, or goofing off on the clock!"

The Colonel 06 Sep 2021 23:21
in discussion Meta Forums / Per page discussions » Some Scientists Believe The Universe Is Conscious

Given the amount of asshole posts we've had to hoover up over the years, your reaction is understandable.
The post was inspired because quite a lot of those bullet points seemed to echo stuff from the game. The Fallen London universe has some really weird, deeply buried lore involving self aware stars and things … there are three games out there, the freemium browser RPG Fallen London, the underwater sea-skippering game Sunless Sea and the flying space steam engine game Sunless Skies. All three tie together and involve literal alien space bats.

The Colonel 06 Sep 2021 23:15
in discussion Meta Forums / Per page discussions » Rage Zombie

Thanks - the step to disambiguating multiple "movie" or "cRPG" labels is what has been scuppering me. I'll see what I get wrong next time.

How the Bibliography entries work.

r_b_bergstrom 04 Sep 2021 08:49
in discussion Meta Forums / Per page discussions » Rage Zombie

I will try to explain it.

The syntax is fairly simple, but must be followed very precisely. Any deviation will break the bibliography block. Here's an example, and instructions:

[[bibliography]]
: label1 : link or name
: label2 : link or name
[[/bibliography]]

Each bibliography entry MUST be on it's own line.
Each bibliography entry MUST be located between the words "bibliography" and "/bibliography" that open and close the entire bibliography block, just like in the example.
Each entry MUST start with a ":", then exactly 1 space.
Replace "label1" with any alpha numeric string you want.

• No special characters.
• No spaces.
• You can't use the same label for two different entries on the same page. They must be at least 1 letter different.
• Other than that, what the label is doesn't really matter. No one will see it except when they're editing the page. Feel free to just make something up, but keep it relatively short.

After the label, there must be exactly 1 space, then another ":", then exactly 1 more space.
After that, you can put whatever you want in the place where I wrote "link or name".

And that's all there is to it.

So, for example, if we type in:

[[bibliography]]
: 28 : **Movie:** //28 Days Later//
: LastofUs : **cRPG:** //Last of Us//
[[/bibliography]]

It will display as:

Bibliography

1. Movie: 28 Days Later

2. cRPG: Last of Us

I hope that helped. Let me know if any part of it is still confusing.

Fallen London?

r_b_bergstrom 04 Sep 2021 07:13
in discussion Meta Forums / Per page discussions » Some Scientists Believe The Universe Is Conscious

Someone wrote on this page, in response to a bunch of my bullet points: "Has someone been playing Fallen London too much?"

No, actually, I've never heard of Fallen London. What's that?

(googles it)… oh, I have played a bit of the computer game Sunless Sea, by that same publisher, which seems to be in the same series, but I can't remember any part of it having to do with the universe being conscious. Maybe I didn't play far enough.

P.S.: I knee-jerk-reflexively deleted your line on the page, because I didn't see how the random bit of snark without context helped the page at all. But that was really rude of me. There should be a pretty high bar for just deleting someone else's contribution. Far higher than just "I don't understand your reference." I apologize for that. I was just unnecessarily being a jerk, and really shouldn't have deleted that. My bad. I've since tried to revert to your version, but the reversion is not propagating just yet. Hopefully it will revert correctly given time.

The Colonel 17 Aug 2021 22:51
in discussion Meta Forums / Per page discussions » Rage Zombie

thanks - never have been able to get the Bibliography section to work…

The Colonel 27 Jul 2021 13:21
in discussion Meta Forums / Per page discussions » List Of Religious Titles And Professions

For those who love their old skool D&D, did anyone ever work out religion an "Eye of the Law" belonged to?

Keep your eyes open for this bug when editing pages

r_b_bergstrom 27 May 2021 18:39
in discussion General / General Discussion » Keep your eyes open for this bug when editing pages

I've noticed on two different days recently, that the arcanawiki (and I'd guess all of wikidot) is having a strange bug, that could cause us to lose content if we're not careful.

Basically, if you save a page, and then re-open it within a few minutes to make another edit, it is sometimes not opening the new version you just saved, but instead opens the previous version. So then if you make a change and save it, the previous edits are either lost or hidden in the page history.

As near as I can tell, the way to avoid this is to wait a few minutes between edits. Eventually, the changes you made propagate to the editing function. I haven't played around with it enough to figure out if its an issue with a specific browser, or if it can be fixed by just clearing your cache / reloading the page. It's only happened a few times that I've noticed, but I imagine it'd be easy to miss if the previous edit was small, and/or was done by someone else.

The best work-around is probably planning out your changes in advance so you don't have to re-open the page twice in a row to add the little thing you forgot on the first draft.

If editing a page that someone else has recently worked on, please take a moment to visually inspect it and make sure that the version you've got open isn't missing anything. Thank you.

The Colonel 24 Apr 2021 12:47
in discussion Meta Forums / Per page discussions » Why The Egyptian Army Didnt Shoot

Ah, that explains it.

r_b_bergstrom 23 Apr 2021 17:19
in discussion Meta Forums / Per page discussions » Why The Egyptian Army Didnt Shoot

It was a redirect page, I just forgot to go back in and put the redirect tag on the page until you pointed it out.

Wikidot page links can get weird sometimes if the page title is beyond a certain length, or if the page title has any non-letter characters in it. The page in question has the title/header of "Why The Egyptian Army Didn't Shoot", but actually has a url of:

http://arcana.wikidot.com/why-the-egyptian-and-tunisian-armies-didnt-shoot-and-why-the

Note there's no apostrophe, and there's also extra words in two different places.

The Colonel 21 Apr 2021 23:10
in discussion Meta Forums / Per page discussions » Why The Egyptian Army Didnt Shoot

I was thinking of linking the "why the Egyptian army didn't shoot" myself, but ran out of steam, so more power to him. My first thought was a re-direct but there was no sign of it, so the board being weird is as good an explanation as any.

quarkstomper 20 Apr 2021 23:36
in discussion Meta Forums / Per page discussions » Why The Egyptian Army Didnt Shoot

I'm guessing, but I see that r_bergstrom posted cluster of posts/revisions related to military/military units. I'm thinking that he wanted to link the "Egyptian Army" page to these other ones and something went wonky.

---

"All the World's a Stage and Everyone's a Critic" — Mervyn Alquist

The Colonel 20 Apr 2021 21:36
in discussion Meta Forums / Per page discussions » Why The Egyptian Army Didnt Shoot

Maybe I'm being thick here, but why is this page showing up as new all of a sudden?

r_b_bergstrom 10 Apr 2021 07:22
in discussion Meta Forums / Per page discussions » Sub Neptune

Just thinking out loud: Recent observation suggests mini-neptunes are the most common planet-type in our galaxy. That means it would make sense for them to show up a lot on our random planetary system tool. So, if you were wondering, that's why I made a sub-neptune redirect page, and put an "rps_badplanet" tag on. Doubling their frequency in the tool is a slight nod towards increased realism.

The Colonel 09 Apr 2021 13:32
in discussion Meta Forums / Per page discussions » Muons: 'Strong' Evidence Found For A New Force Of Nature

Had to read twice to figure out that there is a Batavia in Illinois … on first reading: "not far from Chicago"? - it's on the other side of the planet! Although come to think of it, there's probably one in Holland as well…

The Colonel 23 Jan 2021 18:54
in discussion Meta Forums / Per page discussions » Tires

Had to clean up the formatting and add a bit of content to the initial entry. Ironically, as per the story usage suggestion, the tires are likely to outlive most of the other parts of the machine, but I've left that in anyway.

r_b_bergstrom 22 Jan 2021 23:02
in discussion Meta Forums / Per page discussions » Ship

Thank you for adding the clarification.

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