Lore talk:Pocket Guide to the Empire, 3rd Edition/Foreword

Math is off. Noteworthy? Sic tag?Edit

You think it's worth pointing out that the math in the forward doesn't add up? It says the Second Edition came out in 3E 331, and 121 years had passed, which would put the date of publication for the Third Edition at 3E 452, a year which doesn't even exist. Since it was actually published in 4E 432, 101 years after the Second Edition, I'm assuming the phrase "one hundred and twenty one years" should actually be "one hundred and one years", and other pages on the wiki, like the Third Era timeline, basically seem to assume that's the case. Point being, should we just continue to ignore it here, add a note, or slap a sic tag on the phrase? Minor Edits^{Threats•Evidence} 06:44, 13 July 2012 (UTC)

Edit-Went with a sic tag. Minor Edits^{Threats•Evidence} 03:41, 19 September 2012 (GMT)

Possible lore-friendly explanations:

• It says the 2nd Edition was commissioned in 3E 331. It might've taken 20 years to write. (Wait, that would make it 20 years off in the wrong direction. Maybe they wrote it before the actual commission? Nah, that doesn't make sense. Scratch that.) Better would be that the 3rd Edition took 20 years to write, but it was available at the time of the events in Oblivion, so no dice there.
• The forward was written 20 years after the rest of the book maybe? That's not unheard-of. It would imply that possibly all the events of Oblivion were basically told as a flashback from the perspective of the Pocket Guide...
• Maybe there was a 20 year gap between the end of the 3rd Era and the start of the 4th? That nobody ever mentioned anywhere else? Yeah, that's crazy too.
• Martin's ascension qualified as another Dragon Break and screwed up the laws of time and space? Okay, I'm reaching here...
• The scribe was really bad at math? Or his pen slipped? (Shift the blame for the error off the devs and onto the fictional author of the note...)

Okay, I give up. It's probably a typo. Though I don't like the way note in the sic tag says it's a misspelling. There's a difference. The words are spelled correctly, they're just wrong. TheRealLurlock (talk) 11:41, 19 September 2012 (GMT)

We could go back to ignoring it, then, switch to a Non Book note, or we could use {{hover}}. Now that I think about it, most other pages I've seen which have a factual error use a Non Book note. Also, The Third Era Timeline confirms 3E 331 was the publication date for the Second Edition. Minor Edits^{Threats•Evidence} 15:05, 19 September 2012 (GMT)

A couple more options. I'm pretty sure there's a way to use {{Sic}} and modify the description so it wouldn't say misspelling; like using {{hover}}, though, it could be misconceived as being in-game scribbling. Finally, we could go ahead and modify the text, like what was done for 2920, Evening Star (v12). Regardless, a note would look something like this:

Editor's note: One hundred and one years separated the Second and Third Editions, even though here it claims one hundred and twenty one years had passed.

Possibly followed by:

UESP has corrected this flagrant typographic error at the cost of modifying the original.

Minor Edits^{Threats•Evidence} 15:27, 19 September 2012 (GMT)

Couldn't be in-game scribbling, since neither version of the PGE has to my knowledge ever appeared in any game. I think they were published as paper copies with the Collector's Edition of Morrowind and Oblivion, respectively, but I could be wrong. (I just got the regular editions myself.) TheRealLurlock (talk) 02:55, 20 September 2012 (GMT)

Yeah, I just said in-game because we treat the PGEs as in-game sources. I just meant that if we used {{hover}}, it might create the wrong impression, as that's how we portray the scribbling of the Altmer scholar who added little notes to PGE1. Minor Edits^{Threats•Evidence} 03:04, 20 September 2012 (GMT)