Connecting the Website and the Forums

[Drashner1]

Not in terms of narrative development, though, which I should have specified. Most of the 'plot' of Orion's Arm, the rise and fall of its empires, and the whys and wherefores of the way things unfolded was written by Anders Sandberg. His assumptions about the setting are long obsolete, like the idea of modosophonts fighting in the Version War, or indeed that the Version War was even a significant event at all and not the Archai equivalent of farmers castrating one another's cattle.

On top of that, there are numerous peripheral empires like the Laughter Hegemony, Perseus Princes and the Arion Ascendancy which haven't been touched or built on since around 2005 or so. We have more planets and well-developed star systems than ever, but historical development has ground to a halt. This kind of outdated material was how I got many of my erroneous views on the setting from in the first place. For example, this article by Steven Inniss depicts high tech societies as still being managed by sentient AI rather than vots, and that such AI 'may have agendas of their own' and implies that this threatens the stability of such societies. With the use of vots, I doubt that this is an issue anymore. 

I've considered attempting to update some of this older material, but in some cases I'd have to update multiple articles simultaneously. For example, the Restored Ambi Limis isn't the only polity in the Perseus Rift; there's 1513, the Celerin Volume, the Ulysses Network, the Hyperionites, The Blackbody Cluster, and Sweetlight. How can I write about the relationship between the Restored Ambi Limis and its neighbours when I'd have to write these neighbours from scratch as well?

Perhaps this is unrelated to how many contributors we have. But the pulpy sci-fi vibe that M. Alan Kazlev used to depict the setting is considered non-canon by the community, and yet no one seems interested in replacing the many articles that he used to push this perspective.

What's wrong with writing up all the neighbors from scratch all by yourself?

Kidding - I know that that would be more than a bit of a massive effort.

Rather more seriously - In many (although not all) cases, this issue falls under the same umbrella as reviewing and updating the Topic pages. A lot of the articles presenting the early take on things are Topics (if you access it by clicking a button, it's a Topic. If you click a text hyperlink in the Articles list at the end of a page, it's an Article). So going through and identifying which are problematic, and then fixing them, would go a long way toward addressing this issue.

In addition, as satisfying as it would be for everyone to simultaneously jump in and start updating Topics and Articles all at once, that seems unlikely to be practical and so we need to start somewhere. Even more realistically, this isn't something we're going to get done in a month, either. Although the more people we have helping, the faster it will go.

As far as people being interested (or not) in doing it - A somewhat regrettable result of the culture of OA often tends to be a tendency to let things change gradually as people feel inspired to update individual Articles or Topics. Which doesn't work so well if there is a long period where that doesn't happen. As such, a different approach is probably in order.

Would you be interested in taking part in such a project?

Todd