I've got to admit, all along, I've had it in my head that the intention was to fill out some of the lore on existing pages, not have pages dedicated exclusively to lore.
I'm looking at, say, the
page on Statesman. I do like the "stats" box, and the information that's in the article itself is pretty good, but I do have some concerns about it.
First, I'm a little confused why the page is name "Marcus Cole" instead of "Statesman." Statesman is by far the more popular name he's known as. Personally, I would have named the article Statesman and had a redirect from Marcus Cole to the Statesman article, as we do in the main wiki. Remember, always think of how your average user is going to access the information. Even though Marcus Cole may be technically correct, if someone is looking up information on him, they're almost assuredly going to be looking up "Statesman." It's kind of like how in the Wikipedia, "Robert Zimmerman" is just a disambiguation page, but "Bob Dylan" has all of the nitty-gritty details about the famous singer.
Second, and I know I might be sounding dense here, but I'm still a bit confused about why we need pages dedicated
exclusively to lore. I mean, some pages will by their nature be almost or all lore, such as "
Brass Monday," because they're not addressed in-game. But for articles like Statesman, it seems to me that having pages dedicated
only to lore seems a bit of a waste, as the information
fits really nicely on his main page.
I guess what I'm getting at is that I don't want people to get confused when looking up information in the wiki. Whether they're looking up badges you can get by helping (or defeating) Statesman, what his background is, what powers he has, information about his task force, or whatever, I really like that people can just look up Statesman. The only exception I can mentally make to this is if some aspect of Statesman would make the article so long that it would be hard to find stuff, e.g. all of the nitty-gritty task force details, then I don't mind splitting it out of the article, kind of like how the Wikipedia has articles on
Tennessee and on
Memphis, Tennessee. But it doesn't have an article specifically on the best fishing holes in Memphis, Tennessee. That would be a really, really short article, and if there were any reason to specifically mention the best fishing holes in Memphis, it would probably be best represented as a note in the main Memphis article.
I'm still not really sure what the goal is with either a lore-specific wiki or lore-specific pages (other than, as mentioned above, about topics that are only primarily known through their lore). I don't think lore is particularly hard to find in the Paragon Wiki, other than the fact that to some extent, the information either doesn't exist or hasn't been entered by anyone yet--in which case, I'd highly encourage folks to enter it, of course.
I'm not saying that I hate all of these ideas, I just think it's kind of weird to kind of be running two wikis within each other. I'd like to find some way to better integrate the lore information within the existing articles and/or wiki.
P.S. If you're really interested in lore, I'd suggest poking around the City of Heroes
main site and
subsite pages in the Internet Archive. There's a
ton of stuff out there. For example, ever heard of the hero
Herald? Browsing it can be slow and painful at times, but sometimes you can stumble onto some really amazing stuff. I really wish that NCsoft would do a better job of keeping their site archives intact somewhere.