Lore talk:Library

Possible additions

It was pointed out in another talk page discussion that Imbel Genealogy doesn't have a lore page. I can't think of a good reason for excluding it, but I thought I should ask if anyone had objections to it being added to the library. This also got me thinking about what else ought to be in the library, so I combed through the Morrowind and Oblivion texts for a few others we might want to add. Besides Imbel Genealogy, I believe the texts below to be good candidates for inclusion in the lore library:

Oblivion:Akaviri Diary Translation - As the diary of an Akaviri, it gives a unique look into the mind of a First-Era Akaviri soldier.

Oblivion:Jearl's Orders - Gives some insight into the inner workings of the Mythic Dawn.

Morrowind:Hasphat's notes for Cosades - Has some details on the aftermath of the Battle of Red Mountain that I don't think any other source in the library currently gives

Morrowind:Honorable Writ of Execution - A generic Morag Tong execution writ.

Morrowind:Kagouti Mating Habits - Details on the Kagouti that I don't think can be found anywhere else.

Morrowind:Nerevarine cult notes - Includes some background information pertinent to the MW main quest. There's little if any unique information not already in the lorespace, I think, but it's certainly lore-heavy. And it's always nice to have another corroborating source considering all the misinformation and conjecture surrounding the subject matter.

Morrowind:Note from the Archcanon - A communique which gives some insight into the approach the Tribunal Temple took in regards to the advent of the Nerevarine.

Morrowind:Notes from Huleeya - Contains a large amount of interesting info regarding Ashlanders.

Morrowind:Parchment with Scrawlings - Weird cultish poetry. We already have plenty of it in the library, might as well add to the pile.

Morrowind:Saint Nerevar - A pamphlet with a somewhat inaccurate account of Nerevar which is needed in a main quest. It's valuable in that it was prepared for western readers - this is how the Dunmer portrayed Nerevar to the rest of Tamriel. It's the stuff they evidently believe to be the "highlights" regarding Nerevar.

Morrowind:Senilius' Report - Provides a noteworthy insight into how Dwemer technology operates.

Morrowind:A worn and weathered note - It doesn't give much insight in the TES world, but it has some inherent value for its prose. I personally think it's one of the more interesting writings in the TES games. But I'm a bit biased regarding this one, as I attach an unsubstantiated meaning to it.

Morrowind:Zainsubani's Notes - Detailed information on Ashlanders. It's the best, possibly only, source available on a few of the finer points of Ashlander customs.

Minor Edits^{Threats•Evidence} 03:03, 15 May 2013 (GMT)

I would also suggest either adding Morrowind:Red Book of 3E 426 and Morrowind:Yellow Book of 3E 426 or removing Morrowind:Brown Book of 3E 426 from the library. I'm leaning towards removing it, because it seems to only have Morrowind specific information in it. Jeancey (talk) 18:45, 15 May 2013 (GMT)

I missed those because I skipped the page on MW faction books. I would actually support their inclusion, as though the information they offer is limited to a certain place and time, all the information they provide has historical value not limited to game-specific devices or concepts. Minor Edits^{Threats•Evidence} 01:56, 16 May 2013 (GMT)

Okay, I'll start adding the texts I consider to be the least controversial, and I'll just keep going unless someone tells me to stop. Minor Edits^{Threats•Evidence} 07:44, 20 May 2013 (GMT)

References?

Is it worth adding references to the "Mentioned Texts"? I imagine some people would like to know where they originate from. Something simple like "Cicero's dialogue in Skyrim". --Jimeee (talk) 09:16, 10 July 2013 (GMT)

If you'd like. Searching for most if not all of these titles on the site will only yield one result, so there's not much benefit to citations.

To be clear, since I haven't brought this up before, I started the section to solve a categorization dilemma - we had some pages for books which didn't actually exist in the games, and thus had not been categorized properly into any of our lore categories. This seemed like the easiest and most proper way to incorporate them into our Library. For the sake of being comprehensive, this turned into a list of all the mentioned-only titles in the games which I've been able to find. By adding them, I'm not advocating that we make pages for any of them. The pages which have already been made are not really wrong, so I didn't want to have them deleted, but there should be a lot of lore to summarize for a page on a book we haven't actually seen to become necessary.

I was thinking of starting a discussion over whether to include "the Keeping Tomes" at all. All the entries thus far have been, I think, proper titles for texts, and "the Keeping Tomes" may be a more generic term for a set of distinct writings. I don't want to "open the floodgates" to a bunch of vaguely referenced documents whose names we're not even sure about, or to things like the Alessian Doctrines, names of records, etc. The list could become bothersome if its scope widens. Minor Edits^{Threats•Evidence} 10:08, 10 July 2013 (GMT)

Title Links

Dwemer Inquiries

Rising Threat

Dwarves

Mystery of Talara

Mythic Dawn Commentaries

The Pocket Guides

These books series are the only ones, to my knowledge, that don't have title links. I just wanted to confirm that they should have title links, as in some cases, the links were intentionally removed. Minor Edits^{Threats•Evidence} 21:20, 17 July 2013 (GMT)

I'm fairly certain they all should. If almost all of the others do, then these should too. Completely separate question that I just don't feel requires and entire new section, but what are your plans for the Lore-Library category? Is it really needed? Jeancey (talk) 21:39, 17 July 2013 (GMT)

No idea. Not much of a category guy. I don't know the various ins and outs of category creation. Minor Edits^{Threats•Evidence} 00:14, 18 July 2013 (GMT)

Should it not just be merged with the Books category? --Nocte|Chat|Look 02:55, 31 July 2013 (GMT)

Alphabetization method?

Authorities differ on how to put books in order when commas, hyphens, apostrophes, and other symbols are involved, and I'm not sure which one we have been following. Does anyone know? Or does anyone have a preference? I typically turn to the Chicago Manual of Style on such issues. Regardless of what it is, it should be noted on this page. Minor Edits^{Threats•Evidence} 17:04, 25 March 2014 (GMT)

I figure the simplest thing to do is to follow the same methodology as the automatic sorting on category pages so everything will be consistent. The method MediaWiki uses for that is in descending order of Unicode code point, with the results listed there. -- Hargrimm^(T) 18:33, 25 March 2014 (GMT)

That sounds fine. Might create some confusion in certain sections of the book list; we might have to lock a few pages to keep anons from "fixing" them. If there are no objections, I'll edit this page accordingly and bring the book lists in line with it in a few days. Minor Edits^{Threats•Evidence} 18:58, 25 March 2014 (GMT)

Books L, Books M, and Books N are now arranged in descending order of Unicode code point, so take a look at them and see if it's acceptable. NOTE: Unicode gives higher priority to capitalized letters. So, for example, "Last of the Old Bones" comes after "Last Scabbard of Akrash", since the capital S comes before the lowercase o. We could always ignore this caveat and just follow the Unicode for the ordering of symbols as needed. Minor Edits^{Threats•Evidence} 16:57, 27 March 2014 (GMT)

I would follow for symbols as needed, rather than all together unicode, but that's just me. Jeancey (talk) 17:02, 27 March 2014 (GMT)

MediaWiki does note that for categories they go by "the Unicode code point order like above, but with all the lowercase letters turned into uppercase letters", so essentially case-insensitive, which would avoid non-intuitive situations like that. -- Hargrimm^(T) 17:10, 27 March 2014 (GMT)

Oh, my bad. Thanks. Minor Edits^{Threats•Evidence} 17:36, 27 March 2014 (GMT)

Mentioned Text not on List

Hello, I am new to editing, so I though I'd ask before adding anything. I have found a mentioned book that is not on the list of mentioned texts.

It is located in Elder Scrolls Online. In Daggerfall, there is an orc named Lagrog Guillon that speaks of a violent book called "Everybody Dies". The book is obviously a joke, for the orc then ponders how the book will end.

What I was wondering, would such a trivial book be added to the Mentioned Text or is it only reserved for notable works like the Lore Library.--D'arht-si (talk) 11:13, 3 April 2015 (GMT)

Sounds like exactly what we're looking for, thanks! Insignificant Revisions^{Threats•Evidence} 12:33, 3 April 2015 (GMT)

Exception to OOG

There are two texts that are essentially the parts of PGE1 and PGE3 (Cosmology and Census of Daedra Lords, accordingly), which was edited out purely for economy, and more than that, people are encouraged to search for these texts: "Interested readers are encouraged to seek out the works of Master Zenas of the Mages Guild or the Imperial Geographic Society's own Census of Daedra Lords." I may sound like Sload, but I propose not to add them, no, instead just add the links to them. Also, it would be appropriate to give the link to the excerpt from the Book of Hours. Phoenix Neko (talk) 17:26, 16 October 2015 (UTC)

Books by Length

I thought it might be useful to have a list of books in order of word count. The alphabetical list, author list, and subject list are great for most purposes, but sometimes people want to find the more important texts, which tend to be longer. The word count should come from the lore version and ignore things like [sic]. As with the other lists, compilations are considered a single work. The word count should only be the content; not the title, author, or description. Ties can be listed in alphabetical order.

Although I haven't made such a list myself yet, I would guess The 36 Lessons of Vivec would be at the top and something like Aleris the Shroud at the bottom. I remember seeing an even shorter text. As for how to make the list, it will take some time, but a program can do all the counting. I was thinking of making one for myself, so it would be nice to share it with everyone by adding it to the wiki. —Dillonn241 (talk) 08:21, 30 November 2017 (UTC)

I would question the usefulness of such a list for most regular users of the site or even the lorespace. Your implication that longer books tend to be more important isn't necessarily true, and can be quite subjective (for example Lore:King Edward is a complete snorefest IMO). If there was value in wordcount I might agree. Feel free to make a list somewhere, but personally it's not something I would find useful or be interested in maintaining. God help whoever has the job of updating such a list when new books are released. --Jimeee (talk) 11:12, 30 November 2017 (UTC)

I double Jimeee. If we are talking about making important texts more visible to people, it might be more useful to make a list for such important texts (on religion, cosmology, languages, geography, etc.). However, each article already has a list of important sources on the topic of taken article. So for example if some user wants to read something about Cyrodiil they usually would go to the "References" or "See Also" to read more on the topic. Phoenix Neko (talk) 13:55, 30 November 2017 (UTC)

The usefulness of this kind of list does not include "important texts", as the longest ones contain a lot of fiction. King Edward sprung to mind, but others like the two Barenziah stories, with two versions of each, 2920, A Dance in Fire, Poison Song. An additional difficulty would be that you would need to count the words on each part page, as the text is only displayed, not stored on the compilation page. Few books would be of significant length that are not compilations, as they are designed to be quite short excepting for the books in Daggerfall. Our page of Books by Subject is far more useful to maintain than just "longest books". Silence is Golden^{Break the Silence} 18:49, 30 November 2017 (UTC)

I should have used the word "well-known" instead of "important". As for adding a Books by Length list to the wiki, I'm not particularly for or against it. I was just bringing up the idea since I'm making the list anyway. When I'm finished, I want to compute a few interesting statistics like average book length and averages for each game. I might add the list as a sandbox under my user page. —Dillonn241 (talk) 09:50, 1 December 2017 (UTC)

Elder Scrolls Online DLC

On all lore books, we include the games in which they appear. Additionally, we put a note for plugins and add-ons with no namespace such as:

Oblivion (plugin-specific: Knights of the Nine).

It only makes sense then that we should do the same for ESO. For example, On Minotaurs would say under Seen In:

The Elder Scrolls Online (DLC-specific: Dark Brotherhood)

On the alphabetical book lists, it's easy to see how many times "Online" shows up, even if the book was added in a DLC. I think a bot is capable of completing this task by checking if the Online version has a mod header. All we really need is an extra parameter in the Book Summary template called ONExtra, like SRExtra.

A side note: we should probably change all instances of "plugin-specific" to "add-on-specific". I did this for the two or three Dawnguard books that weren't like that, but hesitated on Morrowind and Oblivion. —Dillonn241 (talk) 09:50, 1 December 2017 (UTC)

Yeah I don't see why not. Do we need "x-specific:" at all?

The Elder Scrolls Online (Dark Brotherhood)

Oblivion (Knights of the Nine)

would look tidier I think. --Enodoc (talk) 11:58, 1 December 2017 (UTC)

I agree it's unnecessary. There aren't too many from Morrowind, Oblivion, and Dawnguard, so those would likely be manual edits. —Dillonn241 (talk) 12:15, 1 December 2017 (UTC)

I agree with not including the "x-specific" part. I'd be hesitant to change the term "plug-in" for older games. Its archaic, but that's what they were called back then. Too many terms to keep track of tbh: plug-in, add-on, DLC, expansion, ESO Chapter etc. --Jimeee (talk) 15:33, 1 December 2017 (UTC)

This task is complete! I determined when writing a bot request that automating it would miss several books and possibly mess up others. Doing it manually also let me double check the mod headers in Online space. I think the result is really good, though I was considering a change to the Lore Book Entry template to put the DLC on a separate line. —Dillonn241 (talk) 03:32, 7 December 2017 (UTC)