I ended up writing more than I initially intended, I take no offence if you don't answer or read everything.
Hm, you're right, and it would have been better if I wrote "that the rights of submitters are more important here than the rights of the discoverers". Mind you, there's nothing pejorative about the word submitters: that's what they did.
Then I apologise for interpreting it the wrong way. There is so much salt around this game that I think I get predisposed to assume saltyness.
But still, when you fly somewhere that you know is going to contain something, I don't count that as exploration. Also, note that while there might be cases where somebody comes across something they deem to be worthy of submitting here, without knowing that it was there and already tagged, that wasn't what happened to Titler.
The only case I can think of I would not look in a positive way is trying to purposely "steal" the submission (though it would not really be stealing) by lurking other threads for POIs not submitted to the GMP, without talking to its OP suggesting him to submit the POI here or to do it in his name. That would be rude, I'd say, but still legit. If I were a GMP team member, that's the only case I'd even consider renaming the POI or whatever, though I'd likely wouldn't, just to have simpler and more consistent policies and rules. I guess that would be my "tough luck, should've thought of submitting it here earlier, got enough work as it is" point.
However, with all this, I wonder about one thing: did anybody look up the original submitter, and ask their take on this, and whether they would be fine with renaming the nebulae on EDSM?
I find it a bit rude to ask the GMP staff, who are doing a great job for free, to take on more work than they already do. [Strike that, it's not rude to just ask.] If that is something that upsets you, maybe you could do it. Subscribe to this thread and each time someone suggests a POI, try and look for possible earlier discoverers, contact them, etc. I'm not trying to be rude, but it's extra work and someone would have to do it. There is no such thing as a free lunch, sadly.
Also, you appear to be adamant at calling this fan fiction. Tell me, where is the fiction part? Pretty much every entry describes what's there to be seen in-game, and/or what happened there, and there's very little fiction added. EDSM is far more like a collection of logs than like a platform for fiction. In that case, articles on a game wiki could be counted as works of fiction as well.
Well, fanfiction is exactly that, taking the canon lore of something and adding to it. Fanfiction can be great. It can be collaborative, collectively built, or it can be done separately in an uncoordinated, even incoherent way. Saying this is fanfiction is not looking down on the GMP et al. I love the GMP and the rest of fan-made lore around ED. It's one of the things that I like about the game. And it's partly the idea of the game, to serve as a platform for this kind of stuff. I'm just stating a fact, that does not take anything away from its. The GMP staff agrees
noting who entries were written by, and who first discovered the subjects of the POIs. (If that's applicable, of course.) Currently, the former is not accessible, nor is the latter, and both could be quite useful for people. Like I mentioned, you might want to look up other entries by the same author, for example. Not to mention that by including everyone, you'd assign less "individual glory" (as Corbin Moran put it) than the current practice of naming only some people.
In some cases you might be right (geysers, generation ships, settlements...), but I understand what you suggest is exactly what the GMP staff don't want to do. I mean, if you want your name somewhere, there are lots of other places, like in-game tags, galactic records, POI visitors logs, EDSM tags, your Explorers Hall of Fame, etc. I understand the idea is for the submitters to be anonymous.
What you pointed out with the red arrow, "first discovered for EDSM by", should actually be "first scanned for EDSM by": the site uses this phrase for bodies. Not sure why there's a different phrase used for the systems, perhaps it was a left-over that somebody forgot to change. (If memory serves, there was a time when on bodies, it was "first recorded by"?) See, for example,
Earth and
Sol.
Although I guess the most accurate would be using "first logged for EDSM by" for both, as technically, you don't scan systems.
It might be a good suggestion, but I guess either way it counts as first-discovery evidence, and my point still stands that EDSM already records and publicly displays that data. That game also does it (though with a different mechanic). My point is the info on first discoverer (in-game and for EDSM) for most cases is there for you to see, if you want it. Why replicate it? Is that replication necessary or valuable enough? That would be a question for the GMP staff to answer.
@ khaos526, about other people renaming things that the inhabitants used for them: that example doesn't apply here, as you're be talking about areas that were already inhabited by the time others "discovered" it. I say quotes because personally, I don't count that as discovery. For example, in more accurate works, Columbus is not credited with discovering America, but with discovering a route from Europe to America. In Elite, nobody has named the unexplored and most importantly, unknown to all procedurally generated stuff. (Well, except those rare cases where Frontier later assigned non-procedural names to them.) If we were to apply your example to Elite, then it would be like a player deciding to want to rename, say, Achenar to Velvetland - and that's explicitly forbidden in the GMP.
You're using a narrow definition of "discovering". One might say the first time I find something I did not know was there also counts as discovering it. I'd suggest, for the sake of clarity, trying to use more precise terms like "first discoverer" etc. Would help to avoid confusion, as we are basically splitting hairs here.
describe what actually happened there in-game; that's non-fiction. About persistency, that's not quite what players use it for: the game itself offers persistency in the form of the first discovery tags. What it does not currently offer is a way to name your finds so that they are more easy to share them with other people.
Yeah, but the game is already fiction. And there is canon and non-canon fanfiction. The names given to POIs in the GMP are not part of the canon (exceptions apply), they are technically fanfiction, as little that added narrative may be. Again, that does not mean it's inferior in some way just because of being fanfiction.
if somebody's upset that another person took the name of something they first discovered and named it in a way they don't like (this part is important, and probably why there has only been the one such case so far), then saying that they can still include a secondary name and a new part of an entry on EDSM is of little use to them.
It may be of little use to them, but making rules based in "I don't like the current name" would just incentivize people to start whining about names. Subjective feelings are generally not a good basis for rule-making (when rules are based on subjective things they become terribly murky and arbitrary). At any rate, the GMP staff would be the final arbiters of that in this case, so I defer to them.
