I'm one of the absentee volunteers. Unfortunately now I don't think it will ever get better, because my life has become busier since March and I've been managing to work only on the things I know already. :P This means that for the time being I won't be able to write anything for the Varangian way, because I know so little about it that I should have to start from the basics. I had hoped to learn as I researched, but time forbids it. Of course I'm always available to upload things and help in any possible manner as long as I'll have scribal capacity.

Back to the topic at hand. I can see it's complicated and I appreciate everybody's input and the terrific amount of research that Norv has brought into it. I tend to believe that the people who are knowledgeable on a given 'hood or land, in our case Zora and Norv, should have free rein in it - accepting input and contribution from others, of course, but in general following their own plan. In such cases a scribe has to give an amount of trust to what they do.

In this case, however, I'm leery of creating duplicate lands or hoods, relative to the same territory but to different peoples and time periods. The reason is simple: not only the confusion which it would engender in the users, but the dispersion of the resources. I know that for some "the more threads the better" is a good rule (King Theodoric's ears must be whistling), and I see the reason in having many places where to find knowledge, but I prefer to see it more concentrated and I believe this is the general inclination too.

We've been talking about the VW main page, but yes, what is in it is just a draft, there is A LOT that can be put inside it. A detailed (as much as possible) history of the place, with comparisons and tables explaining how the different peoples evolved differently there. We have as much space as we need. Then, in every city, we can create as many districts as we want. One could be Viking, the other Slav... we have infinite possibilities, we just have to look for them.

I personally am very interested in the Vikings, but also in the Khazars and the other Slavic peoples in the territory. When editing Middangeard lately, that part looked like a gigantic blank. I knew that there were people the Goths had fought or traded with, but they seemed to have no place.

And speaking of Middangeard, yes, Norv is entirely right when he says there isn't a method in the way we are organizing the Germania 'hoods. I took a bold chance with Middangeard, deciding to divide it first in kingdoms and then in cities and thus losing the opportunity to have districts within the cities, a fact for which KT is still after my head :P It's not a perfect solution, but to me it felt like the most logical, because each kingdom had its own defining character. The VW is different, Scandinavia is also different... I think this is a bit confusing, yes, but also a reflection of the way things were, and of the way each of us works. Each land has its own flavour.

So I'm definitely in favour of doing our utmost to work on the VW and show its cultural diversity without the need to create a whole other land. To overcome a certain difficulty of navigation in AW, we could have in the VW page a table where all the districts are linked and detailed, maybe color coded indicating the specific time period, the people they refer to... now this is something I could help you with, I love tables, even though they are hell to code :D