Talk:Fiction on Lunarpedia

Are we active or passive?

The Lunarpedia community must decide if it wants to be active or passive. If we want to aggressively promote the idea of returning to the Moon to stay, we need to get a very large number of people in effective action on this idea.

A purely technical Lunarpedia will help technical people to be in action. It will not help non-technical people.

To reach non-technical people we must reach out. We must go were they live and feed them what they eat.

The story category is an experiment in reaching out to a much larger number of people. We need to keep it, at least long enough to find out if the experiment is going to succeed or fail.

--Jriley 05:22, 10 March 2007 (PST)

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It's not about being active or passive, and it's not technical versus non technical. Plain and simple, Lunarpedia is intended to be fact based. We're in the process of setting up a related wiki for fiction, but it wont be only lunar fiction. Should be up and running soon.

--MikeD 13:33, 10 March 2007 (GMT)

Not a problem. Just need to get ideas out and discussed.

We do need to get a clear purpose or mission statement on Lunarpedia that makes this clear. I have started a category to work out such ideas but I have not searched out The Moon Society's mission statement yet.

Thanks,

--Jriley 07:43, 10 March 2007 (PST)

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Hah!

I've been searching for that since 2000, haven't found it yet.

Lunarpedia was started mainly as a tool for encouraging growth, collaboration on projects, and very importantly, inter society relations by way of highlighting the commonalities in their goals instead of the differences.

We just put up a Mars wiki, that's almost ready to go public. The science fiction wiki will be aimed more towards budding authors than towards librarians. But the science part of the stories must be currently feasibl or at least look like it will be in the next few years.

Getting people to read and write about space stuff is important. I truly wish the Star Trek people had done a 21st century series complete with weightlessnes and space sickness and all the stuff we'll have to deal with for the first 50 - 100 years.

MikeD 18:07, 10 Mar 2007 (GMT)

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Hard Science Fiction

The type of fiction you are describing is called hard science fiction. It was invented by Jules Vern, but I am afraid it is quite out of fashion now. The limit on adult themes also makes these stories very retro. Stories of this type were the cutting-edge between about 1930 and 1960.

We can certainly move the stories themselves. The problem will be the useful support pages like "People on the Moon" and "Archetecture as Mole Hills". I am certain that these make a real contribution to people envisioning what a lunar settlement will be like.

In developing my Purposes pages I have found myself being so eclectic that I argue both sides of an arguement.

Thanks,

--Jriley 10:40, 10 March 2007 (PST)

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The great thing about running 2 MediaWiki sites is that they can easily augment each other. The People On the Moon article can remain story oriented on the fiction wiki, but can also be linked to from Lunarpedia as a valuable source of ideas and discussion. Vis a vis, the article can also link to Lunarpedia articles as sources of information. One can be fact and one can be fiction. Both can be integrated via MediaWiki interlinks and will build on each other. This approach allows a full spectrum of information using separate specialized sources which can be "tied together" in a sense.

If all goes well, this will allow an exchange of ideas and encourage collaboration between the SpaceWiki user communities and their respective advocacy groups. Jarogers2001 12:28, 10 March 2007 (PST)

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Fiction has a place in an encyclopedia if it's the best way to show the reader what an article is about. In that context, I would expect fiction pieces to be very short, just a vignette that illustrates a particular point within a much larger article.

There is a strong downside risk. If someone came the Lunarpedia expecting to find information about the moon and ran into a bunch of fan fiction instead of solid facts, that would be the last time he'd ever visit. At the same time, this is the last place one would look to find fan fiction set on the moon.

-- Greg

Imagination is the backbone of commitment

Good science fiction is the imagination of the human race. We depend upon it to light up the darkness and open the debate about what is possible and what is not. I am not talking about Mars Attack, which I loved, but serious fiction set in the near future about the people and societies who will develop from lunar colonies can be very beneficial to current discussions. Lazarus

Understood completely. I'm sorry that this looked like an open question. It's just one of a number of maintenance tasks I've not managed to keep up with.

The debate on whether or not to have fiction on Lunarpedia got a lot more vicious than I want to recount. As it happened, the solution was suggested by a process already started with the creation of Marspedia. Right now we have five wikis in total, one of which is dedicated to scientific fiction, but organizationally it needs to be thought through. All content in the main namespaces of Lunarpedia, Marspedia, ExoDictionary, and Exoplatz are automatically released to the public domain. This is perhaps a less than ideal way to release fiction, however (tutorials and stock content to add to stories I can definitely see as released to the public domain -- why would someone want to pay you or a nonprofit for a story for which you've released all rights?). How should we do it? It needs to be hammered out at scientifiction.org.

...and I really don't have the time right now. A project I expected to take my time with has become a rush job and will shortly become a panic rush job... 8\

-- Strangelv 17:47, 12 June 2007 (UTC)