!!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 Chapter 2], 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. 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]
* [Menagerie of Characters|http://themenagerie.net]
* [The Compleat Index of Wheel of Time-Related 'Net Resources|http://www.ece.umd.edu/~dilli/WOT/WOTindex/]

! 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? Unfortunately, the answer is, not a lot. You're fairly safe in the chapter summaries as long as you stay away from the footnotes. A chapter summary covers only the content of the chapter with no other information. The footnotes usually just direct you to where you can find further clarification without revealing too much.

The characters section is where you will run into problems. If you've forgotten about a minor character, there probably won't be too much extra information, but details on more important characters are presented chronologically which means a spoiler about their early life may be one of the first things you see. 

Some sites try to build in spoiler-proofing. You input the last book you read and the site will only reveal stuff that happened though that book. EWoT is just too big and complicated for that. So. We apologize in advance, but there just isn't a lot we can do prevent spoilers. 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