Fantasy Lexicanum needs to be split in two
While the Mortal Realms, the setting of Age of Sigmar, is a sequel to the World-That-Was, or the Warhammer World of Fantasy Battles, they are too fundamentally different and share too many names to share the same Lexicanum. I already made this suggestion several times before, but never actually got an answer.
For those that do not know the context there was an event in Fantasy Battles, called the End Times that ended with Chaos winning and destroying the Warhammer World. The winds of magic became eight new realities, the Mortal Realms, that the few survivors of the End Times come to inhabit. Several millennia pass with Sigmar building civilisation and making a pantheon of gods, only to have everything wrecked once again by Chaos. Then another millennia passes and Sigmar manages to beat back Chaos for a while with the Stormcast Eternals.
This makes it a continuous problem to have both settings share the same Lexicanum, with a lot of articles linking to things that share name, but have nothing to do with each other or are the continuation of something else, but due to certain situations are completely different in nature. There are a lot of problems with having what are essentially two wikis crammed into one and the solutions I apply are not as good as splitting the lexi in two. I will now list a few of the problems I found:
- One thing is a continuation of something, but they are fundamentally different, like Skinks. In FB Skinks were bio-constructs created the by the Old Ones; in AoS they are daemons made out of Azyrite Energy created by the Slann. There are also implications that, for example the Mortarchs and the Gods of the Mortal Realms are not the same characters from the previous setting, but rather recreations built from memories. In some others they are fundamentally the same, but there are slight nuances, like the very messy Plague Priest article, that are fundamentally the same, but the context is different.
- Thing shares the same name, but they are irrelevant to each other, like Paladins. Paladins in FB are horse riders from Brettonia while those from AoS are a conclave of Stormcast Eternals. In that same regard is the article Skyhost, which is a band of Brettonia Knights, but also a group of Prosecutors in AoS.
- Half the time we don't know what articles are missing or need to be split, because many articles share names.
- Categories that share the name in both settings, but do the differences between the settings makes no sense for them to be together. A few good examples of these are the deity categories, which I made into two because the settings are so different that it made no sense to have them grouped together. Another good example is the Daemon of Chaos faction, which in FB is a large faction containing all the Daemons in the Setting, but in AoS only includes Daemons of the Chaos variety that are fundamentally unaligned(Soul Grinders, Daemon Princes, Furies and Be'lakor).
- Articles are not automatically identifiable as being from one setting or the other, and because of the previous "shared named" problem, one could click on a link from one setting and ending on a context-less article about something else entirely on the other. Creating two warning templates is the only solution to that, but nobody is going to do the job of applying those to 3000 articles.
- Roughly one third of the people that I try to recruit tell me they don't want to work on the Lexi, because having two so fundamentally different setting on one lexi is too much of a mess to deal with. They also said they would join if the Lexi was split in two.
- The sourcing for the Fantasy Battles side of the Fantasy Lexi is not very well made, and it kinda drags down the AoS side of things since I made sure since it's inception to have everything as well-sourced as I could and told other people to do the same.
I've tried applying a bunch of solutions to the above-mentioned problems. Splitting articles, putting disambiguation articles in their stead, putting notes between parenthesis within the category name, among many others. But the truth is that they are nothing more than band-aids that while individually they solve the problem it also generally makes the Lexicanum messier, harder to navigate and harder to edit. Even if I continue to apply these solutions, the other problems it creates will continue piling up making it a severely less appealing wiki to look at. If I ever leave(not to be taken as a threat, just a fact that life is unpredictable) it's unlikely that anybody will be able to figure out every solution I came up with and will more than likely make a even bigger mess of things.
There's also the problem with the new edition of the Warhammer Fantasy RPG on the horizon, it will further expand the old setting(through rumours say it will be in an alternate timeline), which will add further content to the original FB setting without touching the AoS one, likely to make the previously mentioned problems even worse.
TL;DR: There are several problems with the Lexicanum because it has two settings that are too different from each other but share a lot of names. I've tried to apply a bunch of band-aids to fix these problems, but eventually it will become unsustainable and become a bigger mess than it already is. Worst is if I ever leave, probably nobody will be able to figure out every single one of them of these solutions.
Even Simpler TL;DR: The current Fantasy Lexicanum is a mess, equivalent of someone trying to make a single wiki with content from Warhammer Fantasy Battles and Warhammer 40k.
The only good answer to all of these problems is to split the Fantasy Lexicanum in two. One for the Fantasy Battles setting and the other for the Age of Sigmar setting. Things that happen in alternative timelines, like Blood Bowl and possibly the future Fantasy RPG 4th edition should remain the Fantasy Battles Lexicanum.
