Lady Nerevar wrote:AKB wrote:I'm not sure the cows were necessarily a reference, it's quite possible for more than one person to have an idea.
It's confirmed by one of the lead designers to be a reference to the Aldudaggas. And really, more than one person independently invented giants being really fond of painted cows?
BetaB17 wrote:Do explain, in MK fashion, how giants could do such? I can imagine thus how else it could be done, but I wish to spare my brain cells from reading MK's off-canon works
Why shouldn't they be able to?
Lady Nerevar! You don't stop by often enough! Your site has been spreading throughout
our sources. I'm unaware of such a confirmation towards that being a clear reference, not that I doubt you, I'm just unaware of it existing. I also don't see why it's impossible for multiple people to think up painted cows simultaneously. That cow does look cool, after all. I also don't see the issue with giants being able to use the Thu'um. They certainly needed more going on than they had.
Lady Nerevar wrote:There is a library from which fans and developers pick and chose, but getting anyone (including the devs!) to decide what is part of that library and what in that library is true or still relevant is impossible. There are far too many loopholes, even ignoring out of game ex-developer texts. What about previous drafts of texts? What about stuff that's in the data but inaccessible in game? What about things shown in early drafts of the game but cut in the final release version? What about the game contradicting itself because designers didn't talk or don't agree? What about fan made but developer published media?
If something clearly and utterly contradicts previous information, we mention both version, old and new.
Ebonarm was silently removed from a book mentioning him in ESO, which we clearly mention to address the fact that the developers have kind of swept this character under the rug. He still exists as part of the greater setting, but we're going to mention the fact that the developers are not treating him as a continuing part of the series, for whatever reason.
But for the rest of that, we try to be inclusionary with tons of asterisks mentioning its origin.
For example, previous drafts of texts are noted if they are interesting (in some way divergent from the original, not just essentially a similar, but cleaned up version). As an example, here's our article on
Avrusa, where the notes mention that the original script had Avrusa as Aduri's mother, not sister. Less interesting ones are usually left on the cutting room floor, though. I just find it hard to fit every little divergence in the script, when it's a change like "Would you pass the peas?" to "Could you pass the peas?", and when such minor alterations cover almost every line. It's not trying to be exclusionary or ignoring some hidden secrets of the series, it's simply trying to keep the pages manageable in such cases where every line was rewritten, just slightly. I can think of fewer cases of texts going through this last time I did some serious game file digging, but I can't name any examples of this off the top of my head, unfortunately.
As for inaccessible information, that's mentioned as well, clearly noted as not being represented in anyway but within the game's internal files. See
Scouts-Many-Marshes. Were you aware that he was friends with Ulfric Stormcloak? You wouldn't be able to tell so from his comments about him, how he wishes he is reincarnated as an Argonian living under the tyranny of a Nord so that he knows what it's like. But his actor entry has them being labeled as friends, so that is recorded, even if it's not necessarily reflected within the actual game.
Cut content also deserves its place, alongside notices that it was cut. We have articles on cut quests and characters, like here's a section on the removed
Windhelm Pit as a random example, which gets mentioned on some relevant pages like Alain Dufont's.
As for contradictory content, we try to mention everything if at all possible, I can't think of many cases where we don't alert users of multiple takes on certain situations when there was clearly supposed to be multiple points of view on the subject, like on the multiple views on who Tiber Septim was.
As for fan made but dev published material, it becomes usable once the developers use it. Maybe not the original document for it, but we're not going to not mention it being a part of the series once it has become a part of the series. We would probably note the original source in such a case, with a notice that it comes from outside of the usual sources of information. I'm having troubles of thinking of things that fall into this category to provide examples.
Lady Nerevar wrote:UESP has set down a standard library for what it considers worthy of listing on its pages. TIL has a different standard, as does the official forum or reddit or anyplace else TES lore is discussed. Often, they don't agree on what that standard is. I see that as a positive overall - someone who wants to write their own C0DA can do so on r/teslore, while someone who doesn't wish to hear anything about C0DA can hang out on UESP. But attempting to say that there is only one standard library of references for the whole community is just foolish, not least of all because the people within Bethesda softworks cannot themselves agree what that library is.
With all that said above, is the UESP's methodology not a fair way of going about things? The UESP tries to maintain a standard of excellence, while remaining as unbiased as possible, while still trying to present this setting in a readable fashion. I think the only firm difference in policy here is that we try not to host purely OOG content ourselves whenever we can avoid it, we do link to it if we feel it is necessary to further explain the concept. Those links, incidentally, go almost exclusively to your site, which should boost your search engine rankings and traffic, if ever so slightly. Win win, right? We just make sure to draw attention to the fact that its source is outside of the usual confines of the information we get about this setting. I always thought TIL did basically the same thing, you cordon off the developer's works in their own section. Am I wrong about that?
If I had to say we drew the line anywhere for excluded content that diverges from yours, as far as my understanding goes (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong), it would be material purely created outside of Bethesda's scope by an ex-developer that was not reflected in what Bethesda did release. We also would not include purely fan created content outside of user space.
And I would not say the UESP tries to act like we're the one set of references for the whole of the community, I mean, look at our site's name. We clearly state we're unofficial, when we decide to declare ourselves to the the Official Elder Scrolls Pages, and that all other sources of any information must be sent to the Ministry of Truth for education and detention, then yes, I'd say we are in the wrong there.
The setting is ultimately whatever you want it to be, Tamriel is a playground. I'm not one to say you can't say your character is an Imperial were-elf, every time there is an eclipse you turn into a different kind of elf that can only speak in reverse tongues, which is quite good since during this time they can also only say extremely racist things. I can't say that your character comes from the Cloud Imperium of Nxaulos, which controls all of reality from beneath the surface of the world, where the capital of Nxaulos is. And if you want to say your character's journey is to slaughter every single other living being with a severed Nord's arm, by all means. Have fun with that, you crazy gem! I will say that you can't write that into our articles as an established part of the setting, though. I admit, if every other user were to disagree with me on this policy, then I couldn't stop it from being added, but most users here agree with this method of doing things. Which I'm happy for, since I'm leaving for a while this week, actually.
And this is the part of my post where I address the fact that I stepped around using the "C" word at any point before this one. No, I'm not speaking of country matters, I'm talking about canon. The word canon has seemed to driven some people to throw up their arms, "there is no canon", I've heard said so many times over and over. Nothing is true, everything is permitted. Call me a Templar, but I don't agree with that. Canon is, according to Wiktionary:
Wiktionary wrote:(fandom) Those sources, especially including literary works, which are generally considered authoritative regarding a given fictional universe.
A spin-off book series revealed the aliens to be originally from Earth, but it's not canon.
What I am saying is, the word canon, has meaning. If there is no canon, then the story of Nxaulos's war with the morves (a crossbreed of the dwemer and moles) is just as proper a part of the story as the plot of every ES game. If you wish to reject the entire notion of there being anything authoritative in this setting, then fine. Anyone can write whatever they wish about the series and it is to be treated as authoritatively as the creations and comments of someone like myself, yourself, Michael Kirkbride, or Todd Howard. It's all the same, after all. That is what no canon is to the UESP, and where I believe we differ from some that causes these arguments. If you accept anything as being more authoritative than anything else, if you treat anything as more worthy than anything else, if you embrace a notion of there being a library from which fans and developers pick and choose, implying there is anything that might be outside it, then you're not rejecting the notion of canonicity, based on what it means to me.
And that is why the UESP tries to act like there is such a thing as canon. Not because we're exclusionary, shallow minded loreists. No, we do it because we try to provide the fullest picture of the setting as we can, but that requires there to be an actual picture to look at. If we did not reject fan works from lore, we would have to include on every article "This character was killed with a frozen Nord arm, because Xxdongslayer69xX wrote that". So if an ex-developer writes a work that has no real bearing on the rest of the series, and could even be directly contradictory to virtually everything else, we don't have much of a place for it. We treat it the same as were-elves, or underground cloud empires, or morves. And yes, we'd have considerable discussion about this, almost guaranteed, to really confirm if we do or not want something like that here. That could change, if the developers gave it official treatment, or just published it in the next game, for example. But we'd still draw our line at some point, without the entire culture of this site as it is changing.
So disagree with our methodology if you wish, but I can't see us disagreeing upon what canon is in anyway that isn't just semantics, which is a conversation which I can't see advancing in anyway productive.
