The Discovery Wiki



Welcome to the !
The Discovery is a strange place on the internet, a little corner where writers, creators, and people of limitless imagination come to design new worlds that can be used by anyone for their own art - books, film, television, comics, games, illustrations, music, or anything someone is inspired to do. The Discovery is the ultimate collaboration - crowd sourced world building in the 21st century.

The philosophy of The Discovery may seem strange at first, until you realize this is the way our ancestors have been making art for thousands of years. The concept of Intellectual Property (like copyright, trademarks and patents) is relatively new in human history, coming after the invention of the printing press. Modern copyright law was largely written in the early 20th century with sometimes devastating effects on cultural freedom, expression, and collaboration, leading to mass produced cultural products that are made by a small part of the population to be mindlessly consumed by everyone else. The community founders of The Discovery have identified this as a possible condition that leads to widespread unhappiness and atrophy of our individual and collective imaginations, like with an outsourcing of our imagination skills to designated creatives, as well as a cultural forgetting on how to truly and selflessly collaborate for the sake of the art itself.

Since The Discovery is meant to be a relief valve on the creative failures of our modern world, this will be a space of new conflicts and new solutions for most readers and contributors. We ask that you try to fully understand our philosophy and rules, and treat each other with a soft touch - we are all unlearning, and relearning, together.

The Rules

 * 1) Everything here is under an Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike International License. You can not copyright, trademark or otherwise claim exclusive intellectual property rights on any of the material on this wiki. All works made with material from this wiki must be under the same license. This license is almost the same as Wikipedia
 * 2) All material written here must either be original or using existing material within the public domain. No direct fan works are allowed. Homage, allusion, pastiche, and derivative ideas are welcome. For example - you can't make a wiki for the Marvel universe, but you can make a universe of superheroes.
 * 3) No one has authority or ownership over any world on this wiki, even if they came up with the original idea. Any world can be added to or further developed by any contributor, without direction or permission. We ask that contributors try to stick within the tone established for each world, but be prepared to be flexible. Trying to incorporate the ideas from an idea troll or prankster is an important creative skill that storytellers have had to develop since time immemorial. Try "yes, and..." instead of "no, mine."
 * 4) Existing content can not be deleted or changed once entered, only built upon and developed. Contributors are free to reorganize and edit articles without limitation to increase readability, as long as the original idea is maintained to the best of your ability.
 * 5) Worlds that "cross over" will be considered one single world-building project on this wiki, and will be combined. We recommend using crossing over conservatively to preserve the diversity of ideas and worlds.
 * 6) External works inspired by The Discovery can be incorporated into the world they are based on, or spun off into a new world if they are a significant departure from the original material. We will leave that judgment up to the community at large.
 * 7) The Community moderators will remove any link or material that limits the participation of any individual or group of people without notification or warning. This is not a free speech, but free expression space. An individual's choice of speech must not limit the expression or compromise the safety of others. This includes, but is not limited to: hate speech, intimidation, inciting violence, using this platform to solicit business or sell products, phishing, malware, use of copyrighted works, etc.

Tips on Starting a New World

 * 1) Start with "Add New Page" and write an overview, introduction, or statement page for the new world. This can include a summary of the world you want to build and a statement on what ideas you want help to further develop
 * 2) Begin with your 6 W's - Who, what, where, when, how, and why. Genre is not necessary, but can be used.
 * 3) Most worlds will eventually need to develop individual characters, populations, geography, technology, language, culture, history, religion, and conflict, among other details. These topics should branch out into their own sub-pages as they are lengthened to include multiple headings and minutia.
 * 4) Be prepared for other contributors to jump in and start collaborating right away. If you have a lot of material to contribute at once, we recommend outlining it in a word processing program first, and then putting it on The Discovery all at once.

Tips on Contributing to an Existing World

 * 1) Begin by helping with editing and page organization so you can get a "feel" for the world.
 * 2) Broad strokes are often a lot of fun, but details are what make a world live and breathe. Creating individual people, single events, or other smaller pieces can be a great way to start collaborating while learning about a world.
 * 3) The timeline and universe of a world is limitless. If you are struggling to find a spot in the current history for your idea, look further ahead or back in the timeline, or elsewhere in geographic space.
 * 4) Don't panic if you make a mistake with the existing "canon", like contradicting history, names, or spellings. Simple spelling mistakes can be edited, but major contradictions to the canon should be kept once committed. They say 100 witnesses to an event will have 100 different versions of how it went - view contradictions as a writing challenge rather than a mistake.

Creating an Author Page
Contributors who make meaningful additions to The Discovery regularly for 90 days are allowed to create an individual author page based on the template provided in the Contributors' Resources. Any author page linking to unsafe, pornographic, phishing, or otherwise unwanted external sites will be removed without warning.

Important articles


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