!!Welcome!

...to our web site dedicated to the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan. This is just one of many Wheel of Time sites out there on the Web. So what makes ours any different? Why should you spend time here?

!We'll Tell You Why

There are plot summaries of each of the chapters in all the books. Following the summaries there are notes explaining what ''really'' happened and providing links to the [WoT FAQ|http://wotfaq.dragonmount.com] and other sources where the information is discussed. There are cross-references everywhere. Within those summaries and notes are links to the characters, places and everything else in there. When you go to those links, there will be a link back to where you came from as well as links to wherever else that item is referenced. You can follow links from [The Eye of the World, Chapter 2|TEotW,Ch2], to [Lan], to [Moiraine], to [Aes Sedai] and on and on. If you've ever visited [The Internet Movie Database|http://us.imdb.com/], you'll know what we mean about an abundance of cross-references. In the mid-1990's, Gary Kephart looked around on the Web for something like this and did not find a match, so he decided to start his own. Don't get us wrong; there were/are several good references out there that contain complementary material:

* [The Wheel of Time FAQ|http://wotfaq.dragonmount.com]
* [Steven Cooper's Timeline|http://www.stevenac.net/wot/wotchron.htm]
* [The Wheel of Time Concordance|http://www.tsosmud.org/wotcon.aspx]
* [The Compleat Old Tongue 2.0|Compleat]
* [Menagerie of Characters|http://themenagerie.net]
* [The Compleat Index of Wheel of Time-Related 'Net Resources|http://www.ece.umd.edu/~dilli/WOT/WOTindex/]

This site currently has [{$totalpages}] pages including:

* [{ReferringPagesPlugin page='Category Books' show='count'}] book pages
* [{ReferringPagesPlugin page='Category Chapters' show='count'}] chapter pages
* [{ReferringPagesPlugin page='Category Characters' show='count'}] [Character|Characters, Aliases & Nicknames] pages
* [{ReferringPagesPlugin page='Category Creatures' show='count'}] [Creatures|All Creatures, Big and Small] pages, including [{ReferringPagesPlugin page='Category Horses' show='count'}] for horses and [{ReferringPagesPlugin page='Category Wolves' show='count'}] for wolves
* [{ReferringPagesPlugin page='Category Geography' show='count'}] [Geography] pages
* [{ReferringPagesPlugin page='Category History' show='count'}] [History] pages
* [{ReferringPagesPlugin page='Category Items' show='count'}] [Items] pages
* [{ReferringPagesPlugin page='Category Organizations' show='count'}] [Organizations |Organizations and Societies] pages
* [{ReferringPagesPlugin page='Category Prophecies' show='count'}] [Prophecies|Prophecies, Visions & Foretellings] pages
 
so you should be able to find what you're looking for here.

! A Few Words About Spoilers

You've read the first three books and you want to keep track of what's going on, but you don't want to happen upon a tidbit of information that will spoil your reading of a later book. What to do? Or more pointedly, what can we do to warn you about spoilers? 

In the first version of this site, the answer was, unfortunately, not a lot. But that was built with 1990s technology, and a lot has changed since then. Now we are able to offer some protection against spoilers. It's not perfect, though. 

The "References" lists are organized by book, so it was somewhat easy to protect, by book, what you see. We're using "collapsible lists", as the following example shows. Click on the icon to show the references from that book. Don't worry, this is only an example, and no spoilers are actually here.

%%(border-style: solid;border-width: thin;)
Example 1:

! References
%%collapse
# In [The Eye of the World]
## [TEotW,Ch1] This important thing happened.
# In [The Shadow Rising]
## [TSR,Ch5] This other important thing happened.
%%
%%

\\The "Chronology" lists are harder because they're not organized by book, but by time, and it sometimes happens that a character in one chapter talks about something that happened in an earlier chapter in an earlier book. This makes it an all or nothing thing. We're using "collapsible boxes" to hide this information, like in the following example. Again, there's no real spoiler here.  Click on the "+" to see more.

%%(border-style: solid;border-width: thin;)
Example 2:\\
\\
%%collapsebox-closed
!Chronology
* [Rand] did this thing ([TSR,Ch5])
* [Rand] did this other thing ([TEotW,Ch1])
%%
%%

\\All of this will help, but there's other places that spoiler may slip through. So, if you haven't read all the books please use our website cautiously!

!Why We've Done This

Back in the late 1990's, Gary had been reading the Usenet newsgroup [rec.arts.sf.written.robert-jordan|http://www.faqs.org/faqs/sf/robert-jordan-faq/] for a while and noticed that many of the posters were having trouble recalling just where in the series a particular event occurred, or perhaps what the name of a certain character was. He realized that some sort of online reference material was needed. Something that did for the Wheel of Time like the [Internet Movie Database|http://us.imdb.com] does for movies. Looking around on the Web, he failed to find exactly what he was looking for (though like we said, he did find some good stuff), and so decided to do it himself.

Of course, we always appreciate comments on our site. [Let us know|mailto:encyclopaedia_wot@pobox.com], for better or worse, your opinions.

Thanks,

Gary Kephart and Bob Kluttz