Mike over at Under the Ban­ner wrote a great post on some­thing some of us LotRO blog­gers (there’s more and more of us lately!) thought deserved more atten­tion: the Lore­book.

As you likely already know, LotRO lacks a great third party data­base akin to WoW’s Wow­head. Sure, there’s Allak­hazam and LotRODB, but nei­ther are con­sis­tently updated or easy to use. Tur­bine offers very lit­tle in the way of web­mas­ter sup­port com­pared to Bliz­zard, which is likely a good part of the reason.

On the flip­side, Tur­bine offers its own inclu­sive Lore­book wiki sys­tem that is meant to pick up the slack. Unfor­tu­nately, this sys­tem is only as good as what play­ers put into it. As of late, it has seemed like there’s been less and less moti­va­tion for many to add to it. I cer­tainly under­stand that sen­ti­ment and am not out to blame peo­ple for it (it’s not like I’ve been a force in that regard ).

How­ever, many of us seem to be in agree­ment that we have to work with what we have. The Lore­book des­per­ately needs atten­tion. Any player out there likely has some­thing to add, whether its addi­tional details, images of equip­ment or updates on skills. Many things that have been added through the Mines of Moria expan­sion are still not present in the Lore­book and with the upcom­ing release of Book 7, things are just going to get worse.

Mike had some basic rec­om­men­da­tions that I wanted to also post here:

1. Take time out of play time to con­tribute to a page.  If you look up an item and know where it comes from, put a note on the page, with a link if pos­si­ble, so oth­ers can fol­low it.
2. Tell oth­ers about the lore­book and encour­age them to log in and help con­tribute data.
3. Be an advo­cate to help pro­mote the LotRO com­mu­nity and the tools out there.

I think the impor­tance and util­ity of the Lore­book is only going to become more obvi­ous once Book 7 launches. This is sim­ply because the radar now includes a lit­tle but­ton to open the Lore­book in-game. Peo­ple can obvi­ously use this for help with quests or equip­ment, but it also has the added bonus of fea­tur­ing addi­tional con­tent related to char­ac­ters and the story. Being able to look up more about Radaghast (for exam­ple) if you’re not super famil­iar with him really just makes the Lore in the game become far more engross­ing, in my opinion.

I’m hop­ing we can devise ways to encour­age peo­ple to write  great con­tent for the Lore­book beyond just praise. I would def­i­nitely like to be able to high­light exem­plary updates, but I’d also like to allow peo­ple to vote between the “best” updates for some sort of prizes (in-game or out). We’ll see if that pans out, but I think it would be a nice bonus.

Per­son­ally I’m going to make a seri­ous effort to add to the Lore­book where I can. I hope oth­ers do as well. Add a para­graph to an empty entry. Expand upon the util­ity of a skill. Add an image of a cloak you just got. The small things are going to seri­ously add up. This is not some­thing any one of us nec­es­sar­ily has to spend 40 hours a week on.

If you need help under­stand­ing how to edit a Wiki, feel free to ask. I can help out and I’m sure many oth­ers can as well.

Here’s hop­ing it all works out as planned. If you make a great edit or addi­tion to the Lore­book (or notice some­one else that has), be sure to let me know. I’d like to focus on the best ones reg­u­larly. Thanks!

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