Forum:How to deal with new volume numbering scheme in the Chronology and elsewhere on this wiki

Now that the Foglios are done with their vacation, it appears that the long promised "part 2" of the story is beginning. The first page published after their return is identified as "GG Act. 2 Vol. 01 Page 001". This presents a problem for this wiki in that it breaks the numbering scheme for the volumes of the story used in the Chronology and elsewhere so far, which has been to use the number of the volume in Roman numeral form.

Now the "act" or part of the story has to be identified, as well as the volume number. It isn't clear if the Foglios are using "acts" as the official name of the parts of the story or if it serves as a kind of placeholder. In an email sent to me a few years ago, in response to a question about the "end of the first part of the story," Alice Bentley said, "There is some talk of changing the format of the titles for future volumes, to make it easier for new readers to jump in midway, but we are a long way from needing to decide how to package Vol. 13, so there's lots of time to work out how that's best done." (This was when the Foglios still though volume 12 was going to be the end of part 1 of the story, so "Vol. 13" in Alice's quote should really be Vol. 14.) So perhaps we can look forward to something like Agatha Goes to Paris: The Travels of Agatha Heterodyne, Volume 1 as the name of this new work.

Be that as it may, some things need to be decided. Do we use something as simple as prefixing the volume numbers of Act 2 with a Roman numeral II, e.g, II-I? If so, do we retrofit the previous volumes numbers with a Roman numeral I prefix, e.g., I-I, I-IV, I-XIII, etc.? I am not sure why Roman numerals were selected for volume numbers in this wiki; I dislike them personally and would rather see Arabic numerals used myself. Perhaps this is an opportunity to make such a change? Another possibility is to just keep going as we have been and call the new volume number XIV, but that seems to likely to cause enormous confusion in the future.

This message is just an attempt to get a discussion started. I welcome any suggestions that are better than the sketchy ones I've made. -- William Ansley (talk) 22:41, March 4, 2014 (UTC)