User talk:Outhra

Welcome
''Welcome to the PPC Wiki, Outhra. Since you have edited the User talk:Caddy-shack page and created an account here, it seems you intend to stay. To avoid becoming confused and eventually insane, as so often happens, you should make certain you understand what the PPC is and the proper way to sign up before you continue on and encounter the Marquis&mdash;he does not dispense mercy and he is less tolerant of fools than I.''

''If you have not yet introduced yourself to your fellows, or even if you have, you should read the PPC Constitution as well as the Board's FAQ if you have any questions about their behaviors. Any incidents you cause on the PPC Posting Board will not warrant you any assistance from the Tiger Lily and the DIA or Captain Dandy and the DES; please adhere to the aforementioned Constitution, as the results when the Board's inhabitants are irritated do not bode well for anyone. Consider yourself warned. Now, if you will excuse me, I have troublesome agents to attend to.''

--- Sunflower Official (Talk) 19:15, March 12, 2013

Editing stuff.
Hi there. I notice that you're enthusiastic about editing, which is good, but I think you might be getting a little carried away when it comes to categories. Most recently, you've added some Flower pages to the Mirror Multiverse category, which is not necessary because they're already listed in the Mirror Multiverse People sub-category. Plus, if you take a look at the Mirror Multiverse category, you'll notice that no other characters are listed there, for the same reason: they're already in appropriate sub-categories.

For another example, the Batman page is about the character, not the continuum, which is why it's in the Canon Characters category and doesn't have missions on it. It doesn't belong in the Continua category. (I already fixed this.)

You should really take some time to look at the categories to see what kinds of things belong in them before adding stuff. Lots of them have descriptions that will tell you just that, but you can always ask, too. I have a whole section of my Talk page devoted to wiki-editing questions, so feel free to drop by. {= )

Neshomeh 05:24, March 30, 2013 (UTC)

Hey hey, I'd like to start the basics of a page for the Agent, but right now it's just a redirect to the Glossary. Help? Lily Winterwood (talk) 05:01, May 7, 2013 (UTC)


 * Find a reference to the character on another page. Click on the link. After it redirects, it'll say underneath the title "Redirected from [agent name]" [agent name] is a link. Click on it, and it'll take you to that agent's page. Just edit the page and replace the redirect with what you want. It's not as hard as I'm probably making it sound. I just figured out how to do it myself.


 * Hermione of vulcan (talk) 03:21, June 22, 2013 (UTC)


 * Actually, she figured out how to do it on her own a few hours after she sent me that message, and had completed the Agent's page before I next logged on to Wikia. Right now, it's got more detail than at least a third of the other pages on the wiki.
 * Outhra (talk) 12:29, June 22, 2013 (UTC)


 * Oops, I didn't notice. ~ Hermione of vulcan (talk) 17:52, June 22, 2013 (UTC)


 * Hi guys, could I have permission to create a series of wikipges about FanGirls and FanSpeak?
 * KittyEden (talk) 08:10, July 14, 2013 (UTC)


 * You'll notice, if you look around a bit more, that we already have pages on fangirls and such, as well as one on chatspeak. I'm guessing these are the equivalent to the pages you want.
 * AelinTheAmazing (talk) 17:22, July 14, 2013 (UTC)


 * I mean the different types of fangirls. I'll have a look and see if they're the same as mine... get back to you later,,,
 * KittyEden (talk) 01:43, July 15, 2013 (UTC)

Hey
Sorry to bother you, but would it be okay for me to e-mail you at some point? I think there was some stuff I meant to ask you. Hope all's well! Ekyl (talk) 01:56, May 17, 2013 (UTC)

Two Foxglove Flowers?
Maybe I missed something, but I can't see hS creating a redundant Flower when there's already a perfectly serviceable one available, particularly not given this exchange we had where I'm pretty sure we were both talking about the same individual. Would you please do me a favor and double-check with him before you take this any further?

On a related note, have you seen my comments on the Corkscrew Cattail's talk page? I'm pretty sure you don't have all the information there. Please be more careful about checking your facts. Even in a case like this, where material is (currently) missing, looking at the wiki page history to see who made the page can sometimes provide a useful clue about who invented the character, and you can always ask for more information from someone who appears to be involved&mdash;in this case, Tawaki (who used to edit under the name Korora) would be a good start.

(FYI, I'm going on vacation for a week tomorrow, so I may not be able to respond to any replies quickly, if at all. Just please check more things with more people.)

Neshomeh 05:42, June 14, 2013 (UTC)


 * Well, it was a long time ago, but I'm pretty sure I tried to come up with Flowers we didn't have, but ended up accidentally choosing one I'd never heard of. Then when we had the conversation Nesh linked, I thought that they could possibly be the same character. Huinesoron (talk) 17:39, June 14, 2013 (UTC)

Rococo Kolosov - Dude, no.
You do not get to reassign other people's characters to different departments/divisions. If Joe says Rococo is in ESAS, then he's in ESAS. That's up to Joe, not you or anyone else.

I want you to be able to work on the wiki and contribute positively, because it's awesome that you're enthusiastic about it, but you desperately need to learn better boundaries. When it comes to stuff you did not personally create, fixing a typo or link, or adding some missing information, that's one thing, but changing information to suit yourself is another, especially when it comes to people's characters. Please go re-read this before you do anything else.

And seriously, although I'm cheesed off right now, I would love to actually work with you and not just yell at you when you make mistakes. I think you're a smart guy and you mean well, but you just haven't been around long enough to have a good sense of how things work here. I've been a PPCer for ten years and an active wiki-editor almost since its creation; I have a wealth of knowledge about who's who and what's what in PPC history; and I know pretty well what's okay/needed here and what isn't. I would be a great resource for you. Please, please ask me. I have a Talk page and an e-mail address, and I'm pretty good about responding to both.

~Neshomeh 16:01, July 15, 2013 (UTC)

I'm sorry about what happened with the Rococo article. When I make edits to pages on the wiki, I try to work with the information to make it as internally accurate as possible. The way the Rococo page was organized, it had the ESAS as part of Floaters, while it's really in the DMS, and the story he was featured in says that he was a member of a special unit within Floaters, but it never gets any more specific. Since the original story is the prime source of facts in any case about any character, I worked with what was available to try and make the article work with everything else.

I admit that I should have consulted the original creator first to try and get his approval for the change to the article. I admit that I have committed infractions against the way the wiki would optimally be organized. I admit that I see how acting as I did could be very easily seen, as you saw it, as though I was trying to change the information out of some sort of malevolence or disrespect. I wasn't. I was trying for consistency, since assigning someone to a division but putting that division in the wrong department makes that instance inconsistent with all of the other instances of that division. And again, I'm sorry for causing problems with the changes I made, both in this case and in the past.

If you want me to prove myself by working with you on something, I'm open to doing so. I don't want you and the other admins of the PPC community to see me as someone who's trying to take advantage of anything or trying to be disrespectful of the previous writers in the community, as it appears you have. I'm trying to contribute as best I can, and to prove that, I would be willing to help out in whatever you'd think I'd need to do. What do you have in mind?

Outhra (talk) 02:08, July 16, 2013 (UTC)


 * Thanks for being willing to talk about this and work on it. I do appreciate that you're trying to be helpful, and I understand that you don't mean to be disrespectful. Like I said, I just think you don't know the ropes well enough yet, and you run into problems when you think you do and get overly ambitious. Ambition is good, but it needs to be tempered with caution to avoid stepping on toes.


 * Based on what you've said here, I think your missing link is that in the PPC, Word of God counts for as much as what's in the stories, and in many cases, God edits the wiki. In those cases, the wiki can also act as a primary source, so you can't automatically discount what you find here, even if it's not backed up by a mission or interlude or whatever. It can be tricky to determine who is God of what, but individual PPCers are always God of their own characters, and they're at least demi-gods of any new department or other concept they introduced.


 * Take ESAS, which was created by Elcalion (who now edits as El calion due to a lost password). It is absolutely, definitely part of the Department of Floaters, because Elcalion says it is. I can cite you the ESAS homepage (states it's part of the DMS and Floaters), the ESAS wiki page (Elcalion put it in Floaters when he wrote it), all its original agents (Elcalion put them in Floaters when he wrote their pages), the List of Departments and the Complete List of PPC Fiction (these are both pretty reliable as reference documents, and Elcalion has edited them in the past), and even the ESAS flash patch (made up by Elcalion) is modeled on the Floaters patch. Given all that, I don't know how it could possibly not be part of Floaters, and I was actually surprised to learn it had any connection to the DMS.


 * So, that's where really doing your homework on the wiki comes in handy. Page histories in particular are great for figuring out what's Word of God and what isn't.


 * What I would like is not so much to tell you what pages to work on, but to be consulted before you edit if you run into things that don't make sense to you, or if you have an idea for a structural change that you think might make the wiki better organized, or anything else that might be considered a significant change to a specific person's stuff or general community stuff. Beyond having had plenty of time to absorb the PPC's idiosyncrasies being a good source of information about why things are the way they are, the structure/organization of the wiki is something I care about and have put a lot of work into, so I want to be involved out of personal interest.


 * That said, did you ever take those Flower pages out of the Mirror Multiverse category, or correct the Corkscrew Cattail page? Fixing your past mistakes would be an excellent goodwill gesture to start with, IMO. {= )


 * I hope this hasn't been too lecture-y. I'm not upset now, but there's a lot of information I want to get across, and I've tried to keep this post as brief (haha) and to the point as possible, so it may have come out more terse than I sound in my own head.


 * ~Neshomeh 17:56, July 16, 2013 (UTC)


 * No, your reply wasn't very "lecture-y", at least not to me. Most of it was information about why you were thinking the way you were and the history of the ESAS in connection to Floaters, and I'd never tell someone to give me less detailed explanations of anything.
 * I fixed the categorization problem with the Mirror Multiverse Flowers, and created the Companion page like you suggested, but I couldn't find any new information about the Corkscrew Cattail to contest its creator. You suggested that it might have first shown up in the logs from 2008, but I wasn't able to dig up anything further back than July of that year, and the references I was able to find said that the RP had taken place closer to March. Do you have any links to the original Macrovirus RP so that I can find out if it was mentioned there?
 * Outhra (talk) 12:48, July 18, 2013 (UTC)


 * As far as ESAS goes, I don't mind the edits too much, but ESAS is and remains a primarily Floaters division. I do quite like the idea of ESAS being born out of the ashes of the Godplayers department, and having the SOD spin off from ESAS later on works too. I'm happy to keep those elements of the history in play, but I am going to have to be firm on the subject that ESAS is a Floaters division and that its first agents were Aegis and Iodin, followed by Alagos, Kern, Logan and Entropy in that order. After 2006, feel free to have any agents transferring to ESAS. What Neshomeh has said already applies about moving Joe's agents around (logically they may seem to fit SOD better, but unless Joe comes back and says so, in ESAS they must stay).
 * I like it that you're keen and looking to contribute, just check before making sweeping edits in future, especially where the creators of a department are still alive and kicking.
 * El calion (talk) 14:03, July 18, 2013 (UTC)


 * Elcalion, thanks for weighing in. {= )


 * Outhra, thanks in general. {= ) All that looks good&mdash;though I am curious about how you accidentally redirected those five pages to the Glossary at first. Are you using the Rich Text/Visual Editor, perchance? I have a long-standing enmity with it, so I tend to suspect it when weird editing gremlins happen.


 * As for the Corkscew Cattail, the RP isn't up yet (that is actually on my agenda for today), but Tawaki is the one who started the whole macrovirus thing, as July points out in her pre-mission notes, so it's a good bet that he created anything new that relates to the event. Tawaki is also a big Myst fan, so it follows that he'd introduce a Myst-native Plant. Plus, I know this is sort of apocryphal, but I was there for the whole thing, and I know July, and I'm pretty darn sure it wasn't her. Actually, you know what, I'll ask her about it if I can catch her online this afternoon.


 * ~Neshomeh 14:40, July 18, 2013 (UTC)


 * I tend to use the Visual editor, yes. I just like the way that it allows me easier access to some features that I don't always remember the coding for. I created the redirects intended for the Companion page by modifying a redirect to the Glossary, which may be why it acted how it did. I changed the link destination originally, but when I edited the redirects to how they are now, it showed both links in the redirect, and I'm not sure why. Maybe something just got confused along the way. Maybe it was me screwing up. I don't know.
 * Though, if changing to the Source editor is more likely to keep redirects from going to the wrong page, I'll do that in the future if I need to redirect something, or I'll at least switch to it to double-check.
 * How are you doing with the search for the original RP threads, by the way?
 * Outhra (talk) 09:02, July 19, 2013 (UTC)


 * Aha. So this is where I try to convert you to the Righteous Path of Source Mode. {; ) I prefer it because it allows for precise control of what I'm doing, and it does avoid weird issues like that. What sorts of features are you referring to? Infoboxes and other templates? I can show you where to get the code for all of them, because I personally made sure it was easy... *beckons, tempts, etc.*


 * The status of the RP threads is that I'm (perhaps ironically) slogging my way through adding them to a website that forces me to use their sitebuilder, which is like Visual Mode but worse because there are CSS modules involved, and the code it generates has lots of garbage in it, and it would be a million times faster and easier for me if I could just code it myself instead of dragging and dropping boxes and fighting with it to get the positioning right and then fighting with it some more to convince it I want paragraph breaks in the text instead of just line breaks.


 * ... So, yeah. The good news is, they're not lost. The bad news is that I don't think the Corkscrew Cattail comes up at all, and even if it did, that RP started in mid-March, so it doesn't exactly help. The log of the Fifth Anniversary Celebration might have been what I was thinking of, but I'm not sure. It might have been one of those things that just came up in other discussions, perhaps regarding New Caledonia. I did some digging, though: the New Caledonia wiki article was created in January 2008, and Tawaki (as Korora) edited it to add a note about it being used as a TARDIS dock on March 2, the same date he created the Corkscrew Cattail's page.


 * ~Neshomeh 15:24, July 19, 2013 (UTC)


 * FML, I've been looking in everyplace but the right one. Here in Tawaki's LJ is the first mention of the Corkscrew Cattail, date of March 2, 2008. It's at the end; blink and you'll miss it, but it's there. Whew, mystery solved!


 * ~Neshomeh 13:16, July 20, 2013 (UTC)
 * "Blink and you'll miss it" seems to describe a lot of Tawaki's introductions to the canon... Huinesoron (talk) 17:56, July 20, 2013 (UTC)

Possible Project
While I'm here, I actually did have a thought about something else. I've just about wrapped up my project of going through all the agent and staff pages to make sure they've got links (if I can find them) and are formatted more or less consistently, and I'm thinking of setting my sights on the department pages themselves next. I've edited them somewhat irregularly in the course of working on the character pages, and lots of them definitely need more work. I've noticed sort of a pattern emerging for how they're best organized, but I'd be interested in your opinion and any suggestions you might have going forward.

Currently, I think the best organization for department pages is this:
 * The lead section gives the department's name, director, flash patch, and what its staff are called, maybe a snippet about what it does;
 * a Description section for its functions and any physical details that are known;
 * sub-sections for Methods and/or Special Equipment; some pages currently have sections for these;
 * a History section for any important events or changes relating to it;
 * possible sub-section for Meta-History, though the lines tend to blur quite a bit, so it may not be prudent to try to separate the fictional from the non-fictional;
 * a Known Agents/Staff/Personnel section (gotta pick a consistent term for this one);
 * a Divisions section with sub-sections for each (if applicable);
 * and a Missions Reports/Stories/Records section for links to the Complete List of PPC Fiction, department home pages (if they exist), and other stories about department activities. (I'm leaning toward Mission Reports for Action departments and Records for everything else, or possibly Department Records across the board.)

Fleshing some of them out, especially Infrastructure departments, may take a good deal of research, since information is scattered across lots of stories which may or may not contradict each other.... Thoughts about the article format, though?

~Neshomeh 14:40, July 18, 2013 (UTC)

What about departments that never had any stories, like the Department of Plagiarism? We can't really say anything about a department's known functions if it doesn't have any known functions. I'm not even really sure what the DP does, mission-wise.

That said, I like the basic layout idea. I'll cast my vote against adding the meta-history section, since it wouldn't really add to the article from a PPC standpoint and a lot of the departments would either have their meta-history readily available or most of the information about its founding would be lost over time. Plus, unless it's a really unique and interesting department origin (in which case we should at least mention what makes it unique somewhere), most of the instances of meta-history would be "there's a lot of bad fanfiction that ____s, so some Boarders decided to approve a department specifically to deal with ____".

I think we should go with Personnel for the term of "people who work in a department". Not everyone is an Agent, and while everyone is Staff, the way Staff is used in the wiki's context would make using it less preferable than using Personnel. The term Personnel is a little generic, but it's unambiguous, and I think that's important for a general term.

Would Interludes featuring mainly a single department or the internal processes of a department count as part of that department's stories list, or just as part of the history of the agents involved? Because if interludes or similar stories are included, I think we should go with Department Records for the PPC Fiction term, just for simplicity's sake.

As for the History section, I'm not sure where we'd get history for some of the lesser-used Departments, like the DIAU or Despatch. Would we just create some ourselves, and then run it by each other to see if it makes sense, or would we leave it in the form it is now, as only a few sparse sentences? As it is, I'm not sure where we're getting Despatch's history from, since some of it contradicts itself. Some sections say it was formed from Trans-Dimensional Snatching and Trans-Dimensional Hopping Departments and other say it was originally planned to be split into those two.

What do we do in regards to flash patches for the departments that don't have any, like DAVD? Also, I've seen that some divisions have their own flash patches, since the ESAS has one and I've seen a Multiple Offenses patch mentioned a few times, but does every specialized division have one? This is rather tangential to the rest, and actually deals with a different issue, so maybe we should just table this for now and work on the pages for departments with established flash patches first.

Once we work out the details, I think we should work with the Action Departments first, since they have more information to use for the pages and thus we can see how the new format looks like when given optimal information to work with. I nominate the Department of Floaters page as the first test subject, since the department has so much information to work with, but its section on the wiki has practically no information now. It would be a good first run of the format.

Outhra (talk) 09:02, July 19, 2013 (UTC)


 * Hoo boy, lots of ground to cover! For things that don't have stories, yeah, there's only so much we can do. We can make educated guesses as long as we couch them as guesses, though. The Department of Plagiarism probably dealt with fanfics ripping text straight from the source material and/or fics that rip off other fics. I suspect mainly the latter, given what I know of our history; not gonna get into it here.


 * That's actually an instance where the meta-history may be as relevant as the in-universe history, though. The DIO is another, and the one that made me think of it in the first place, and the Department of WhatThe has some notable history regarding its name change. That sort of thing does seem to be the exception rather than the rule, though.


 * Re. Personnel, I'm actually rethinking this. If the description of what the department's people are called is in the lead and what they do goes in Description, then really all that needs to go under Known ____ is the list of prominent/existing members. Shouldn't it be Known Assassins, Known Bad Slashers, Known Nurses, Known Technicians, etc.?


 * Basically, what I think should go in Department Records (I like that) is 1. a link to the department's home site (if it has one); 2. a link to its section on the Complete List; and 3. additional links to any stories that are mainly about or set in the department that don't fit in 1 or 2. So, I think the answer to your question is yes. {= )


 * I should note that References may be needed, too, for information that comes from stories that don't fit in Records. (FYI, I tend to use Sources on articles where the vast majority or all of the information comes from just a few stories, References for lots of individual line or paragraph citations. "Mission Reports" and such function as Sources. I use superscripted links without text as inline citations when there's just one or two and having a whole section for them would be silly. I've been thinking of making a guide for this.)


 * Re. History, no, we should not be making things up. If it's sparse, it's sparse; it can always be expanded later if someone decides to do something with it. Despatch's history comes primarily from "Tales from Despatch" by Meg Thornton; or at least it should. My memory of the in-story explanation is that Despatch was mainly meant to cover Snatching, but was overseeing Hopping until such time as it could split off. That never happened, so Despatch is now formally both.


 * Re. flash patches... eh... I'd just say that it's unknown; again, it can be filled in later if anyone ever feels like writing about it. There was a time when we made a bunch up to fill in the blanks for the Manual (always running them by the Board for approval), but my feeling now is that that cheats future writers of the fun.


 * I agree with starting in Action, but the DMS might be better than Floaters. There's no ambiguity about where it came from or how it works; Floaters is a little more complicated.


 * ~Neshomeh 16:29, July 19, 2013 (UTC)


 * Is the DP's meta-origin related to what happened with Rhus's writer back in 2003?
 * The Known Bad Slashers/Known Assassins/Etcetera makes sense, but what about for departments that don't have special titles for their agents, or at least none that have been shown yet? DAVD comes to mind again, as do the DIAU and the DO. Would we just default to Personnel for them? Because if we do, it would look a little off in comparison to the others, IMO.
 * Well, I wasn't saying just make up an entire history section for the department; that's not what the wiki is for, and I know that. I was thinking along the lines of coming up with when it was founded or what caused it to be founded in-universe, the sorts of things people wouldn't usually put in their stories unless they were doing a deliberate exposition dump. Like the current blurb in DIC about it being formerly merged with Despatch, for example.
 * Floaters can come second, then. That sounds all right.
 * Outhra (talk) 15:55, July 20, 2013 (UTC)


 * I don't know for sure, but that's my guess.


 * I think it would default to Known Agents or Known Staff if there isn't a special title. That shouldn't look too weird, since it follows the same format.


 * Hm, I'm not sure where you're drawing the line between "making up" and "coming up with." In any case, the thing about the DIC and Despatch didn't require coming up with, because that information is located in this archival post on the PPC LJ, which explains its own origins. The most relevant part is PPC History, toward the end. The LJ has a lot of good stuff like that on it.


 * ~Neshomeh 17:50, July 20, 2013 (UTC)


 * Slightly off-topic (sorry!), but the Complete List of PPC Fiction... how complete is it? And how complete do we want it to be?
 * I ask because I'd basically forgotten it existed - more precisely, my memory was that we were maintaining it purely as a mirror for the LJ version. As a result, it hasn't been updated for many of my more recent stories.
 * Now, I can do that, but a) do other people have the same or similar impressions, and b) how complete should it be? Should, for instance, my story about the origin of the Hippie Sequoya be on there - and if so, where?
 * I ask because I think it would be good to have a literal list of every PPC story, which one could skim down and click what looks interesting. But at the moment, I don't know that's what we have. Huinesoron (talk) 17:06, July 18, 2013 (UTC)


 * I'm not sure exactly how complete it is, but I agree that it should have everything we can link to. It's been more than just a mirror for some time, actually&mdash;in fact, it's part of standard wiki mission-posting procedure.


 * I imagine backstories and other things that don't fit in a specific spin-off or department would go somewhere in the Miscellaneous PPC Writings section at the bottom. There's already a sub-section for History stuff, too, and there could probably be sections for Future and other AU stuff.


 * ~Neshomeh 17:40, July 18, 2013 (UTC)


 * There should be a sub-section for Flowers stories, too, like Huinesoron's Awakening and Behind the Times stories. I know there are probably plenty of Flower-centric stories out there, and even if there aren't, there will probably be a lot in Miscellaneous that can be sub-divided, and that seems like a good point of division.
 * Outhra (talk) 09:02, July 19, 2013 (UTC)

Sporkworthy Story
Hey. i know Im new, but I recently spotted a really bad story on the Harry Potter fandom. A brief summary is as follows. Harry, after getting two points taken off him in Potions, shouts abuse at Snape who forces him to test his potion on himself. Harry brewed it wrongly and it turns him into a girl. He is reintroduced in to Hogwarts as Harrieta Potter and everyone believes that she shares no relationship with harry. Harrieta is resorted into slytherin.She falls in love with Draco and starts paying attention to fashion. Meanwhile Ron becomes antifeminist and takes Pansy as a girlfriend. Harrieta renames herself Crystal and goes shopping with Hermione and a bunch of other girls including Professor Trelawny. And meanwhile Dumbledore is completely ooc.

Now if that isnt sporkworthy i dont know what is... KittyEden (talk) 12:27, July 19, 2013 (UTC)

Outhra doesn't run the wiki or the PPC; if you've found a badfic you should probably put it in Unclaimed Badfic and post about it on the Board. Hope that helps. :P Ekyl (talk) 12:29, July 19, 2013 (UTC)

Okay sorry

KittyEden (talk) 14:34, July 20, 2013 (UTC)

There's a badfic thread up right now. You can post about it there if you want to, and someone might take it take it as a mission. From what you put up here, it certainly sounds terrible enough to mission.

Outhra (talk) 15:55, July 20, 2013 (UTC)

WHere is the thread?

KittyEden (talk) 02:06, July 21, 2013 (UTC)