SW420:About

"I'm gonna make my own Wookieepedia, but with sabbac and dancing girls!"

―Donald Haase

SW420 is a project to recover and embrace a lost understanding of the Star Wars Universe: what it was before the Star Wars Prequels. This site aims to provide an online encyclopedia, built on the efforts of Wookieepedia, but conforming to the Star Wars 420 Canon and with different interpretive principles behind it.

History

Using Wookieepedia has always been a frustrating experience for me. I grew up with the Star Wars EU. The Jedi Academy trilogy were some of my first non-YA novels, and I got into the Star Wars Customizable Card Game shortly after its release. I played Star Wars: X-Wing, Star Wars: Rebel Assault, and Star Wars: Dark Forces and got to read some of the Star Wars comic strip via the Dark Horse reprints. It was always amazing to read new stories and see them fitting in to the whole universe. The prequels just didn't, and couldn't.

Due to the statements from George Lucas and the methods of interpretation dictated by LucasFilm, the previous EU was maintained as canonical but merely less so than the films and any newer material. This wasn't horribly different from the previous understanding of how to harmonize EU materials, except that the EU through the 90s had been centrally reviewed and edited prior to release to be harmonious. If I wanted to look up Jorus C'baoth's history, the designers of the first Death Star, or how long Yoda had been on Dagobah, I would get answers that didn't merely expand on what I knew but replaced it entirely. Part of the methodology was not just to overrule previous information, nor to to follow the example of 'from a certain point of view', but to remove it entirely. For many years I was content to merely be a grumpy old man yelling at clouds, and poking around at my old Star Wars Encyclopedia.

4/20 Canon

The impetus for this came to me when trying to get a more detailed idea of where I drew the line after reading Survivor's Quest and wondering if I should pick up X-Wing: Starfighters of Adumar (released late '99) which I'd never read. I had often described my canon for Star Wars as 'pre-prequel', and perhaps give an explanation of how it's not merely 'head-canon' but an instance of a schism. A few times I'd called it "the '99 canon", but that just didn't have a ring to it. Then I realized that the novelization of The Phantom Menace was released on April 21st 1999. That meant that the canon I adhered to ended on 4/20/99 and could, striking, be called '420 Canon'.

Of course, the lines aren't so cut-and-dry. Clearly there was prequel material released before that, and some stragglers written without any prequel influence released afterwards. For details of the full canon, see Canon.

SW420

The primary goal of this site is to recreate the comprehensiveness and intent of Wookieepedia, but limited to 420 Canon material as sources. This is being worked on by importing a partial subset of Wookieepedia's articles (starting with articles for each canonical source, then every page that linked to those sources, approximately 50k pages) and manually editing them to remove information that is derived from non-canon sources.

A secondary goal of the site is to change some of the fundamental methodology and approaches taken by Wookiepedia in linking and building articles. Among these are:

Avoiding duplication of content

It is very common to find on Wookieepedia articles where the bulk of the content pertains to a different, but related, subject. This is very common in articles on Systems or Species where the system is only ever referenced in the context of one Planet, or the Species only has one representative. An example that has already been updated is the article for the Joralla system, which had been almost entirely a duplicate of the information in the article for the system's primary planet Joralla. It's my opinion that linking between the two articles sufficiently allows access to the information. Duplicating it out not only builds clutter but invites the content to drift apart when being updated.

A similar kind of duplication often happens between the paragraph-form content of an article and other sections. Most commonly this will be seen with Infobox contents being repeated directly in paragraph form in a 'Description' section of the article or, in articles for subjects where only basic details are known, the entire article may be made of a duplicated Infobox. This can also occur between the Appearances/Sources and Behind the Scenes section, where the latter is a paragraph form of the former.

Reduce unuseful wikilinking

Many specific keywords on Wookieepedia are almost abusively linked to. In part of the planning for this endeavor I sent a friend a sample article and pointed out the links to articles like Gender, Human, officer, death, etc. To which he replied "I wonder if it has to do with clumsy ways of incorporating automation", and for the more offensive sample "to repel the bloodthirsty invaders" (which was intended to reference a specific species) "That looks almost purposefully stupid. Like someone's messing with it to make a statement about users of this thing." I agree. It seems that many of these were done by scripts automatically create links regardless of them providing any sort of extra context, and in extreme cases like the 'bloodthirsty invaders' detracting from context.

Facilitate physical research

While the goal on Wookieepedia is for all articles to be well sourced, a number of factors hinder the ability to use articles to find the information they collect in their sources. First, reference sources are often cited without note to which sections/articles/entries are being referenced. While the more modern The Complete Star Wars Encyclopedia has a citation template that allows entry name, similar sourcing is disallowed/not supported for Star Wars: Essential Guides or West-End Games Sourcebooks. This means that if you are looking for something referenced in multiple entries or that there is no entry for it individually, it will be a long journey to find it.

Second, there is poor identification for when the content in one source merely duplicates the content found in another. Referring again to the article on Joralla, you will see the updated sources compared to the Wookieepedia versions. Now the sourcing notes how one source contains all the information in the article and the other two are merely reprints of that which add no new information (If you want to know all there is about Joralla, you can pick up either of two books, you don't need all three).

TODO - Finish and polish this