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Is there room for a long list of types of buildings and facilities in a city or country?
I'm looking for a very long and sufficiently detailed list of every possible type of facility that exists in the world today, or perhaps is likely to exist in the future. For example, the list would include "cinema", different kinds of cinemas, various "restaurant" types, "apartment"s and a rough set of those, "park", "ice cream factory", "stock trading company offices", "video game studio", "bank desk", "computer server farm", "llama wool farm", "aquarium", "public greenhouse", "solar power plant", "hydro-electric river plant", "hydro-power-magazine plant", etc.
I have a project of mine in which I am creating city. But whether it would be a game, novel, physical model, 3D city model, or a movie, isn't important. For this, it would be very useful to have such a list of all sorts of facilities I'd need to put in my city.
Is this something that even belongs on Codidact? If it does, what is the best way to collect and present the contents of the list? A question may be discoverable, but having many different answers seems unproductive. Limiting the question to a single answer could work. Would an article be appropriate? Is content added by suggesting edits? How do we quality-assure it? Do we require sources for everything? How do we maintain a source list? Again, is this appropriate for Codidact, or am I better off looking for a more traditional wiki for it? Maybe Wikipedia already has such a list?
This can really be of use outside of just "world-building", though. It's more or less similar to asking "what are the different kinds of facilities that exist in the world today?"
3 answers
Asking for a list, with answers submitting entries for that list, seems cumbersome. But consider instead a community resource, like Languages & Linguistics does. The incubator has the Article post type available, so you can use that to collect and organize information on topics of interest to a proposed community.
I also agree with the suggestion in another answer to ask where to find such lists.
I think your idea is awesome!
Asking if this "belongs" on Codidact and worrying about it is - at this point in time - not the main aspect; It should not be and it cannot be. Because such things won't come into existence ever if everybody is shy about posting them. See my post on Meta about this "deadlock-effect".
I can guarantee you: From a worldbuilding point of view, this would be an excellent reference and resource. I have not googled for it nor checked wikipedia for existing things. But I am more than willing and capable of providing lots of input for those things or answer questions about them.
Problem: There is no worldbuilding site yet. So the only option there is, is using the Incubator for it "as if it were a live site" - because that is said in the Incubator Q&A header text.
Towards the representation inside Codidact:
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I envision a category for it "Buildings&Cities".
- Task: Collection of houses&infrastructure for building "buildings" or "cities" in the broadest sense.
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Inside Questions like
- "What are the possible constituents (interiors/rooms) of a skyscraper/cinema/general public building/shop/..."
- "What are the aspects of a general city in terms of buildings for the citizens?" (could be equivalent to just the questions itself, since they represent the "buildings").
- "What are the aspects of a base a la "Supervillain' huge underground base" like seen in James Bond movies?"
- "What are the aspects of a spaceship able to travel between stars"
- "What are the aspects of the ISS in terms of building blocks"
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And the answers are for collecting those aspects.
Are articles editable by everyone? this could be used to provide collections of certain kinds. Like "Infrastructure", "Entertainment", "Groceries", "Commerce", "Logistics", "Transportation", or "A City for 50,000 people", "1M people", ...
I think a Wiki would be really fitting for this. In the end this would be something like a browsable virtual city with lots of details for the buildings.
Quality control: Should come by itself. Because there is the voting system "not so fitting" stuff would get identified soon. By comments it gets improved.
Posts to a Wiki are (hopefully) also covered in some kind of review queue or commenting feature so that there is a feedback-and-improvement-cycle.
No matter if the thing is a link list to external resources in the end or not - you never know what people are going to contribute. If the overall shape is dissatisfying after a few years, we can ponder about deleting that whole blob. But for now, I would advise against any restrictions in terms of "usefulness" on creating such thing.
4 comment threads
I do not think this list belongs on Codidact. I am not opposed to asking on Codidact if such a list exists, though.
Sam Carter suggested looking at OpenStreetMap, a suggestion I endorse. You could look at their wiki for tags like building=*
, man_made=*
, and so on. For a tighter list of interesting things which may occupy those buildings, I suggest looking at the Name Suggestion Index, which is associated with OSM.
If you're extremely meticulous, you can investigate the preset data for OSM's online editor.
1 comment thread