User blog:Atarumaster88/My scope's got nothing! Just how big IS Force Exile?

Hello again! If you've wandered to this corner of the wiki, you're either bored, lost, or intrigued by the title. Luckily for some of the readers who looked at my next content release blog, I will spare you the "FE" puns. This time.

The topic of this blog is to answer the question: just how big is this Force Exile Series? The answer, according to the page history of Force Exile Series, about 25 bytes. Har har har.

Now that I've had my joke-of-the-blog, down to business. First, I'll give you some statistics on where the project is. Truth be told, I didn't even know exactly how big my little project was until I started writing this blog. It's a bit of an eye-opener.

As it stands, there are 3 and a half novels, 5 short stories, and two partially completed reference guides. There are absolutely no articles on Force Exile anything—my personal philosophy is to not do so. Thus, there are no Force Exile FAs and GAs. Total content amount, not including disambiguation pages and redirects, is


 * Yanibar Tales: 435 KB
 * Yanibar Guard Sourcebook: 25 KB
 * The Essential Guide to Force Exile total: 413 KB
 * EGTFE: Appendix: 9 KB
 * EGTFE: Characters: 306 KB
 * EGTFE: Droids: 22 KB
 * EGTFE: Vehicles and vessels: 44 KB
 * EGTFE: Weapons and Technology: 32 KB
 * FE I: 360 KB
 * FE II: 584 KB
 * FE III: 931 KB
 * FE IV: 438 KB
 * Total KB count of Force Exile content: 3186 KB, give or take a dozen KB or so for blogs, a hundred redirects, and disambigs.

Now, how much is a kilobyte of content? A kilobyte is exactly one thousand characters—or is it 1024? I can't remember. Anyway, that's a small difference anyway. Of course, this is in terms of the code used to generate the page, not the words that appear on the screen. So, a link, which takes four brackets, will require four more characters than just typing out a name or something. Templates, fancy-looking boxes, and references tend to eat up the byte count, due to their intrinsically high character count. So do long signatures, or ones with lots of special coding. Also, this paragraph is about half a kilobyte.

In article terms, the single longest article on this wiki, the infamous Nathaniel Kenobi Solo is 216 KB. The longest FA, Ussej Aragorn Bac 3.0, is 167 KB. To put it in terms of pages you might actually read. . . Brandon Rhea's userpage is about 10 KB. So yes, Force Exile is fairly large, I suppose. Please don't let that dissuade you from reading it, though. The EGTFE entries range from 2 to 40 KB apiece, so people who don't want to read the whole stories can still find ways to enjoy Force Exile. Also, by very nature, novels and stories should be more interesting to read than encyclopedia articles anyway. If I've done my job right, that is—if not, leave me some constructive criticism on one of my talk pages explaining how much and why whatever work of mine you read sucks.

Now, that's all very nice and well, but how does Force Exile stack up against other fanon projects? Good question. The saga as a whole contains 3.5 novels, 5 short stories, and 2 reference guides. Counting all the novel/EGTFE pages and subpages, templates, a disambig page, and all that jazz except redirects and blogs, there's 81 pages in all. And with a sum total of 3186 KB in content. Oh yes, and one featured work, if I'm going to be truly narcissistic in parading what I've generated on this website.

So, first, I decided to take a look at Project Cruentus. You'll forgive me for being reluctant to do a size check on all their content—they have 122 pages in their category. They also have 5 GAs and 2 FAs. The GAs and FAs altogether add up to 146 KB of content. One of their members can total up their overall KB size if they feel like it. Now, before you think Project Cruentus is incredibly small, let's remember this: one, they're collaborative. Their users have to discuss and fight over all the articles, as well as keep them consistent. Second, it's easier to write fanfic as opposed to articles—fewer rules to worry about. Also, they've only been around since April 2008. I have a full year on them in terms of generating content—a year which was spent spitting out FE I and FE II, as well as most of FE III.

Now, moving on to a somewhat larger project, the Squishy Vic Series. Love that title. It has at least three novels planned, along with a soundtrack and a short story or two, as well as an essential guide. There's also 4 FAs and GAs associated with it. Now, once again, I have no particular urge to go through and run page history checks on all Vic's pages—there are 122 overall, and that's too many for me to put the effort into it. Also, his project used to be bigger, before he streamlined it and cut a lot of older articles and ideas he no longer wanted. Furthermore, Vic needs to stop rewriting his novels every year and actually finish one, if I can get on my soapbox here. This project would probably be about the same size or larger than Force Exile, due to its high article count, but the fact that the author can't stop chopping things and rewriting them because he's a perfectionist means that…it's hard to tell. As of this writing, Vic has 261 KB stored up in FAs and GAs. By next week, he might have half of that amount, given his recent slash-and-burn approach.

Lastly, for the granddaddy of all fanon projects, the Alternative Star Wars Saga. That's right, the ASWS. Now, on the current Alternative Star Wars Saga page, there's about 3 novels, plus 8 short stories/novellas. Not to mention the insane article count. There's also a ridiculously high page count: 668 in the Alternative Star Wars Saga category. Wow. Furthermore, insider sources tell me that the members plan to write a grand total of 32 novels/novellas. The point is, this thing is huge. There's at least 26 FAs and 28 GAs out of this. Again, you'll have to forgive me if I'm not eager to do a size count on all that of that stuff. This blog post has taken forever to finish, so I'm not keen on checking a bunch more page histories. Suffice that ASWS, at least on paper, is significantly larger than FE. In fact, even if each article only had 5 KB of content for an average—which I happen to know is not true, right now, there's more ASWS content than all of Force Exile. Kudos to their participants.

My goal here is not to show off just how massive Force Exile is. The comparisons are not to put down or elevate any of the other parties, or any readers—just to give an idea of the scope of the Force Exile project. I really had no idea how large it was, and when I first started writing, I never thought I would have this much continuity. Never. It just kept growing, and I may decide to make some cuts, especially to the EGTFE stuff. I knew there was "a lot" of content. I didn't know how much. If you feel daunted by exactly how much stuff I've put out, don't be. This isn't a contest. If you've set yourself a goal of surpassing Force Exile, well, good for you. It won't bother me. My goal is write an interesting universe populated with characters, locations, events, and stories that intrigue and entertain people, hopefully enough that they continue reading. Nothing more, nothing less.

I was going to write about how much of the total project I've completed, but this post is nice and long, so I'll leave you with this:

"Never write anything for the sake of popularity or awards. Write what you want because you want to."

- Me

If this mindset is the only thing I leave as my enduring legacy on SWF, I'll be more or less content. I'd rather be known for the quality of the ideas I bring with me than how much hammy fanon I put out.

Until the next blog post, have a Super Terrific Friendly Un-frustrating day. Atarumaster88  ( Talk page ) 04:31, 28 February 2009 (UTC)