Talk:Negative energy

Was this page really necessary? It would have been so much easier to add this information to Negative Energy Plane and not have to change 100 links. This barely qualifies as a page under the Forgotten Realms Wiki:3 Sentence Rule and is intimately tied to the subject of the planar page. In the future, when your proposed changes touch so many pages, I suggest that you float the idea in the forum or a Talk page and see which way the wind blows. At the very least, one of the bot owners could have fixed the links for you in a fraction of the time. Wasted energy is even worse than negative energy ;) &mdash;Moviesign (talk) 06:31, December 30, 2014 (UTC)


 * I agree with the page, myself. Ditto positive energy. The magical energy is a thing created by a number of spells and creatures, and is distinct from the plane that happens to be filled with it. I wasn't happy with linking it to the plane as we did previously. The wiki needs work on the basics of magical theory like this, I feel.
 * We need to categorise it though. Perhaps Category:Energies and Category:Magic? — BadCatMan (talk) 08:13, December 30, 2014 (UTC)


 * I like Category:Energy types, perhaps? Technically, the rulebooks like to use the term "descriptors" for the cases of some such things (though not for positive and negative energy). We could do that also. ~ Lhynard (talk) 13:58, December 30, 2014 (UTC)


 * Yes, it would have been easier to add the info to the respective Planes pages, but I don't think it would have been "right" to do for the reasons BadCat suggests. To me, they are very distinct things.


 * Yes, they have a few sentences now, but that's because I didn't have the time or means to research into the subject more, but they have enough info (with refs too) IMO to not be tagged as stubs. Surely, one of the novels or sourcebooks goes into far more detail about the stuff, but I don't know where such information is. Maybe someone else does; that's when a wiki's magic fixes things. I just wanted to plant the seed.


 * As far as all the link changes, I did not know which bots you all had available to you. I realize there are only three of you admins active, which leaves a lot of work to you all, even if its things like setting up a bot to run for someone. Rather than hassle one of you, I figured I'd save you the time by doing the work myself. (And I tried hard to ensure that each change was checked minor.) It was brainless, really, and while certainly a bot would have been faster, it wasn't that much work. Also, not all were link changes; some were new links altogether, and some were already linking to a then-nonexistent page, and some were links a bot would not catch, so, as a whole, clean-up needed to be done.
 * "Wasted energy is even worse than negative energy ;)"


 * :) True, but I don't know that it was wasted&mdash;maybe inefficient, but not wasted.


 * ~ Lhynard (talk) 13:58, December 30, 2014 (UTC)


 * I still think discussion of negative energy would fit perfectly into the page on the source of that energy (I haven't seen any evidence that they are distinct). A complete treatment, spanning all the editions and their varying views of the negative energy plane plus creatures, effects, spells, items, classes, etc., would make a fine Featured Article, IMO. &mdash;Moviesign (talk) 21:47, December 30, 2014 (UTC)


 * I rather tend towards keeping a separate article, as per BadCatMan's opinion. But mainly I wanted to say, IF we keep the page separate, I am all for adding another category like Category:Energies, corresponding to Category:Substances. The energies are important in magic, but looking at it from a planar point of view, they are not magical per se, as they are comparable with elements. Maybe they could even be put into Category:Substances, but that's a bit of a stretch. Daranios (talk) 21:57, December 30, 2014 (UTC)


 * On fence on this one... (though that was a lot of edits) but I would like to have a category decided so I/we can create it :) - Darkwynters (talk) 22:03, December 30, 2014 (UTC)

Starting a seed or stub of an article is fine. People are more likely to add to an existing article than they are to create a new article from whole cloth with all the extra effort it requires.

We have two bots: the UnseenServantBot, which I operate, and the StoneGolemBot whose user hasn't been in in a year.

Long tedious edit tours are fine, we've all been there, it's a necessary part of running a wiki. :) And hey, that's admin material, that is. ;)

I'm still of the opinion that the energy is distinct from the plane. Does negative energy even necessarily have to come from the plane, or can it be created independently? Consider instead something like acid energy (whatever that is): you could write it up as a magical effect, list spells that produce it, list things that protect against it, give a little history of mages who used it, etc. That would be a fine article, and be equivalent to the positive and negative energy articles. But it wouldn't be in any way linked to a plane (elemental earth?). Even if it could, piling all that information onto an article for a plane would just dilute the focus of that article. Humans originate on the Prime Material Plane — should they be written up there?

I'm not a fan of the Three Sentence Rule, myself, but this article hardly breaks it (not least by having more sentences). Consider the guideline we've had for characters and things: if it can be found separate from the overarching topic, then it is allowed a separate article. This certainly qualifies. — BadCatMan (talk) 12:28, December 31, 2014 (UTC)