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Glorantha IndexWelcome to the Glorantha Index, an interactive online database of Gloranthan references. In the Index you can search for names, places, concepts etc. and find references to published information about the searched subject. The goal of the Index is to cover the complete corpus of Gloranthan material in print. It is in no way complete, but contains well over 10,000 entries and over 30,000 source citations and about as many cross references.The Index is the work, or perhaps rather a labour of love, of three people: Jörg Baumgartner who has collected a huge copilation of references offline since 1994, Charles Corrigan who transferred the data to a MySQL database, imposed new structure on the material and wrote the search and indexing software and Greg Stafford who is the source of most of the stuff that is referenced. Many of you will ask about the official status of the information in this index. The index was initiated as a personal unofficial reference. Generally, the accuracy is thought to be high but it is known to:
Please help us to improve the quality of this index by registering for a user name and leaving your comments on any entries with missing or inaccurate information. These comments will initially be private and site content mangers can choose to publish the better comments to all registered site users. User GuideSearching for information is simple: go to the search page, type in what you are looking for, and get a list of hits.If you have been looking for a rare item, you will be lucky to get a list of entries that contain this term in the title or in the description text. If you pick a popular entry (say, Orlanth), you will get the first page of a list of hits. You can reduce the number of hits by searching in the titles only. Select an entry that looks good for you or makes you curious, and you get to the entry page. On the top, you find the entry title. Below on the left, there may be a list of alternative entry names, and there ought to be at least one "Tag" signifying what type of entry this is. In the center, there is a description text (on white background), followed by a list of sources. Sometimes additional information is provided in one of the sources. On the right, you get a list of links under the heading of "See Also" with related entries, and below that a list "Referenced by" for other entries pointing to this one. For popular entries, the list of back-references can become quite long. Occasionally, you will receive an empty description, with nothing but a tag, possibly a source citation, and a number of See Also links. In this case, follow the See Also links until you get some useful information. The index is a work in progress, and currently is strongest for older publications, since the last years (productive years, as Gloranthan publications go) have seen hardly any content additions while technical issues were solved. This may be frustrating when you get pointed to out of print sources, but may also be enlightening when you learn what information was hidden there. You can participate!The process to obtain a username on the site consists of several stages, only some of which are automated.Step 1: Choose the link called user (at the top center of the page). Click on "Register New User" and enter
a. Your proposed user ID Your user name can contain spaces. The site operator insists that all user ids must be real names. Therefore if you want the opportunity to add or change content on this site, you know what you must do... Step 2: The website sends an email to the address entered above. This email will contain a one-time web link to enable your user id. Click on this link or copy and paste it into your browser (or what ever is appropriate for your email client) and see what happens. Step 3: You now have a genuine user id. This will allow you to add private comments to entries that can be seen by site and content administrators. Step 4: If you are known to the site administrator and you have used your real name and you would like to contribute to the content of the index, then you can request further privleges on the site. Please contact online@glorantha.com. The site administrator can choose (or not, at their discretion) to give you privileges to
Abuse of any of these additional priviliges will lead to your user id being revoked. Once you are logged in, the index remembers your past search queries (while logged in), providing a list of links for quick access. As a registered user you can leave comments below the entries. These comments are visible only to logged in users, and are a place to leave suggestions, questions, corrections etc. The index is maintained by volunteer maintainers who can act upon these suggestions. What's Next?Charles Corrigan is working on extending the index to allow distributed content creation. The hope is that this will allow anyone to set the software up on their own website and then, if the entries that they generate meet editorial standards, the site content managers can import entries, with attribution to the originator. Let's see how this works out... |
