Library Scholarly Disclaimers

Portius

The Divine Scholars can reject books for a few reasons. This is one of them:

- Lack of evidence for scholarly claims (making up lore without labeling it speculation)

Ignoring whether or not this rule is useful, it has a problem. Nobody knows what actually counts as labeling a book as speculation. We've had at least one rejection that seemed pretty explicitly labeled to me, but got rejected on that basis. That is bad for a few reasons. It makes people hesitate to submit books because they don't know if they'll get rejected or not. It can also create the appearance of a double standard when one book gets through and another doesn't. If this rule is going to stick around, we need to fix that.

I think the solution is pretty simple. We just need a standard disclaimer that the library admin will always accept as sufficient to mark a book as speculation. If that label is on there, they do not reject for lack of evidence. No ambiguity and no exceptions, because those ultimately cause the problem in the first place.

The exact disclaimer doesn't really matter as long as it goes in a help file for easy reference. I would prefer this general sort of phrasing:

This book was written by a mortal. It may include lies, speculation, incorrect information, or complete fabrications. The Divine Scholars do not endorse its contents.

I think that makes it clear that nothing in the book is canonical and it isn't necessarily accurate, but at an RP level it isn't quite the same as forcing players to preface books with an admission that they made it all up. From an RP perspective, that lets us salvage the idea of using scholarly propaganda, false studies, revisionist history, and so on. Players could also agree to just de facto pretend that the disclaimer doesn't exist for RP purposes, which has more or less the same impact regardless of phrasing.

Kalnid

alternatively:

kill the rule. it's bad and lame and obnoxiously limiting. books have a designated area already where reviewers can go 'yeah no this is wrong but neat', my gravedigger book from like a decade ago has it.

Makai

Not to mention the thin line that separates literary from scholarly is the fact that there is either a belief the information is true or to be used for studies of academic nature. When things just become pure speculation, it might as well be literary. Another alternative is can just dash the two types, literary and scholarly, and just let library submissions be just that. Rather than having one work of each type for publication/prestige, can just choose any two works the Library wishes to push forward. Would probably incentivize more writing in general, considering there will be pressure to produce one of the two categories that is lacking.

Edit: Also, there's a finite amount of 'scholarly' works that can be completely canonical, as I believe it is also either against the rules or frowned upon to have a submission with the same topic and information as another work?

Portius

I'm fully in favor of both of those solutions, I've just accepted that neither of them are likely to happen. I think they're both better. Scholarly even has precedent for some speculative elements already, since people have a history of publishing ill-supported opinion essays in that category.

Enya

There was a long thread about the rule and why it's bad on every level that got locked and to which the ultimate response was "No". 

This is a decent workaround that makes submitting scholarly works less risky, though also far less interesting or engaging in this author's opinion. 

Coraline

I do like the possibility of a scholarly type subject called "Opinion Piece" or "Research" or something of the sort where you can read it with the knowledge that it's a theory or simply the author's opinion.

Or even take away the credibility punishment for rejected scholars submissions that don't have, like, terrible formatting etc. and have them work like designs do. 

Portius

Coraline said:

I do like the possibility of a scholarly type subject called "Opinion Piece" or "Research" or something of the sort where you can read it with the knowledge that it's a theory or simply the author's opinion.

Or even take away the credibility punishment for rejected scholars submissions that don't have, like, terrible formatting etc. and have them work like designs do. 

The credibility penalty isn't the biggest problem with it. Rejections don't contribute to library scores at all (assuming HELP 16.1.1.1 is accurate, anyway. LIBRARY INFO X doesn't display a change, so the help file might be wrong, or maybe the INFO is.) which is my bigger complaint about it. Credibility resets, and at least in the past there haven't been that many times when losing it would change the culture rankings.

Coraline

Portius said:

Coraline said:

I do like the possibility of a scholarly type subject called "Opinion Piece" or "Research" or something of the sort where you can read it with the knowledge that it's a theory or simply the author's opinion.

Or even take away the credibility punishment for rejected scholars submissions that don't have, like, terrible formatting etc. and have them work like designs do. 

The credibility penalty isn't the biggest problem with it. Rejections don't contribute to library scores at all (assuming HELP 16.1.1.1 is accurate, anyway. LIBRARY INFO X doesn't display a change, so the help file might be wrong, or maybe the INFO is.) which is my bigger complaint about it. Credibility resets, and at least in the past there haven't been that many times when losing it would change the culture rankings.

Oh, I have one regretful self-publisher who would be absolutely thrilled to hear this!

Coraline

Bringing attention to this thread because there were some really good points brought up here.

Daraius

I empathize with the frustrations expressed herein and endorse the proposed solutions. I will also never accept any of Portius’ writings on the vassal packs of Hallifax as anything less than gospel truth.

Devora

Support, definitely! 

Please have a place where we can go to read stuff that's admin/staff-approved official canon. And please don't make org libraries have to be those places. The current setup saps creativity and limits the ability of scholars from different orgs to come up with conflicting/unique world views.

Thank you @Enya for this: https://forums.lusternia.com/discussion/comment/190766/#Comment_190766

@Enya said:
Leave the more complicated absolute comparison to "truth" in terms of lore to a World Library application

Anaklusmos

I think it's time to just accept that Lusternia is under a dictatorship of creativity and build from there. The Vision has long trumped player input for more than a decade already.

Vatul

Devora said:

Support, definitely! 

Please have a place where we can go to read stuff that's admin/staff-approved official canon. And please don't make org libraries have to be those places. The current setup saps creativity and limits the ability of scholars from different orgs to come up with conflicting/unique world views.

Thank you @Enya for this: https://forums.lusternia.com/discussion/comment/190766/#Comment_190766

@Enya said:
Leave the more complicated absolute comparison to "truth" in terms of lore to a World Library application

I agree with this, but on the admin's side. There are some things mortals will not ever be able to know. And thus we can't know outside of it. So maybe something that's fairly [REDACTED] for all the [REDACTED] may work for the [REDACTED} information.