Forums: Helping Hand > Death of the Living Forgotten Realms
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In early 2008, one of our users proposed that the Forgotten Realms Wiki should host the Living Forgotten Realms, an international organized play meta-campaign.
This was suggested despite the Living Forgotten Realms already having their own wiki that covered the exact same material. No one objected, and so this user and a handful others created a whole bunch of articles related to the Living Forgotten Realms. They also asked Wikia/Fandom staff to create a separate namespace to keep this material separate from the main focus of the wiki.
Since there already was an existing "official" wiki, the effort here at the Forgotten Realms Wiki never really caught on. Most of the content on this wiki was written by the same user who made the original proposal. They stopped adding information at some point in 2009. The Living Forgotten Realms stopped receiving support from Wizards of the Coast in 2010. The "official" Living Forgotten Realms wiki kept going until 2013.
With that in mind, the Living Forgotten Realms content on our wiki is:
- An unofficial replica of non-canon information about a series of linked home games.
- Abandoned, as it was never embraced by the actual Living Forgotten Realms organization, who chose to keep to their own wiki.
Having read through the Living Forgotten Realms content available on our wiki, nothing of value would be lost if we simply removed all of it. I therefore propose the following:
- All articles and files related to the Living Forgotten Realms project should be removed.
- The "Living Forgotten Realms" namespace should be removed.
Note that we would still cover the official and canon parts of the Living Forgotten Realms, i.e. the modules released by Wizards of the Coast.
I support this whoteheartedly. One question, do we have a link of the official LFR modules?
Ruf (
talk) 13:04, 9 November 2021 (UTC)
Agreed as well. Rest in Peace.
What LFR materials are actually on the wiki? I mostly see a catalog of adventures and "scenarios", so I would ask (a) what is canon in the context of this material? (I vaguely recall hearing that WotC declared "some" of the material to be noncanon at some point), and (b) does it fit with our ethos on preserving otherwise lost media related to the Realms to keep a page that catalogs all of this material, even the stuff that WotC has since abandoned?
For the sake of easy navigation, here is the
LFR main page, here is the
LFR category, and here is the
external site where LFR material appears to still be available for download.
The issue Arodp88 brings up is related to LFR, but not directly relevant for the discussion here (just pointing this out to avoid confusion).
It is still a point worth mentioning, though. This wiki's current position is that all organized play content with Wizards of the Coast's seal of approval/officialness should be covered. This excludes all of the content published after LFR lost official approval, of course. Removing the Living Forgotten Realms content discussed in the original post has no bearing on this at all.
I suppose I just outlined the source of my concern rather than the actionable part of it, so let me clarify: of all the material present in the LFR portal, what are we actually interested in keeping and to where will it be moved? Will we simply be moving the adventure lists to a new page? Should we construct an article explaining what LFR was? Do we want to take any steps to preserve the canon material by updating deadlinks to archived or otherwise still-existing versions of the adventures? It's not clear to me what the actual scope of this project would be.
One technical point: I don't think we can remove the Living Forgotten Realms namespace. There is content stored in it (even if it gets deleted, it's not unrecoverable).
Opposed. I think it should be maintained as an archive on the wiki.
Support deletion. I think this falls outside of the scope of a lore wiki.
@Arodp88: We would be deleting all of the content in the Living Forgotten Realms namespace, because none of it is official or has any bearing on what the actual LFR was.
We will still be maintaining information on the actual LFR, just like we would for any other official organized play campaign—but this is really a separate matter.
As for the official LFR modules, these can be linked to on their own respective (regular-namespace) articles on our wiki.
If someone wants to archive these pages, they can run the wayback machine on them before they get deleted. It is fan content hoever, and goes against the wiki's homebrew policy regardless.
