Currently, it is the policy of the Dune Wiki to keep pages separated by canon.
For most subjects, this means a minimum of three pages for information present in Original Dune, Expanded Dune, and the Dune Encyclopedia. However, this can expand to up to six pages including David Lynch's Dune, the two Sci Fi Channel miniseries, and Denis Villeneuve's current Dune cinematic universe (including Dune: Prophecy), and can go even higher if we include pages that cover the many video game canons and other apocryphal sources.
Naturally, in most of these cases it makes perfect sense to keep the pages separate, as the various iterations of characters can essentially be considered different people. Duncan Idaho has an entirely different biography in the Dune Encyclopedia than in Expanded Dune, for example.
But I'd like to propose that in some cases--particularly where the differences between canons are minimal, and perhaps even relevant to each other--it may work to the benefit of editors/readers to merge pages, making sub-sections for each canon. This will help editors by keeping page count down and making editing easier, and it will help readers by facilitating a streamlined user experience, not requiring them to hunt for information across multiple pages.
By way of example, let's say I'm a new Dune fan who has just watched the latest films and thought the ornithopters were really cool, and I want to learn more about them. I might go to the Dune Wiki and type in "ornithopter", but when I see the banner at the top of the page linking to the various canons, I decide I only want to read the "prime" canon (thinking that's what was represented in the movies), and so miss all of the information about Heart Scallops and all that wackiness simply because it isn't present on the page.
If our purpose is to help the public learn more about Dune in all its iterations, it doesn't make sense to me that in cases like this, we obscure information by requiring it to be read across multiple pages. Again, my proposal isn't that we merge every alternate canon page, but only those with one or two paragraphs worth of differences, or differences that are relevant to one another (in this example, the Heart Scallop might represent ornithopter technology from the biopunk era of the Scattering, showcasing how similar technologies change over time).
If this isn't an idea people support, I would at least like to propose that sub-sections be added to pages with links to the alternate canons, so if readers look for information on a single page, the layout makes it clear there is more to read elsewhere, with perhaps small one-paragraph summaries where relevant. This is something currently done on Halopedia to great effect.
We could easily implement a similar system here.
This was a bit of a long post, so my apologies, but hopefully it's enough to at least get people thinking/discussing ways to streamline things a bit for editors and readers. :) Looking forward to hearing everyone's thoughts!
