TheHoverpope/WikiPrescription
I wrote earlier about what's wrong; it only seems right to try to write something a little more constructive.
First of all, the reorganization being planned and undertaken by Deaks, Dsc666, et al, will be a good first step - simplifying the content arrangement will make it more accessible to both writers and people browsing. And more content, of course, is the next step from all of the wiki users. However, what is more interesting to me is list of the things that White Wolf themselves can do, if they want.I maintain that this wiki is a good idea, and a benevolent decision; a company reaching out to its fans, and actually interested in encouraging their involvement with a creative product, rather than trying to limit what they can do. But after that first step, the invitation and establishment, there's been not much since.
The biggest flaw remaining with the initial installation, and the wiki as a whole as it pertains to white wolf, is the whole process of copyright and internet freedom. Are there limits on what White Wolf is willing to accept published on the wiki? If so, are limits set by some company policy of what is considered inappropriate (I.E, nothing rated black dog), or would anything technically legal be allowed? Is there any point where th white wolf staff will say that the wiki reflects poorly on them and delete content? As for copyright, the wiki is very vague on what the copyright policy is - something I like. I don't like quibbling legalities, and I don't like worrying about that sort of thing too much. However, Exalted Wiki:Copyrights does state that we are granting White Wolf, as a group, the right to distribute our content through this wiki, rather than that White Wolf provides hosting space for our own ideas. What does this mean? Anyone? What sort of onus does this put on White Wolf, what does it do to writers, and who owns the content here? Personally, I have no idea - but I certainly believe it would put some minds to rest if White Wolf clearly said what was legitimate to post here, and what the actual status of material on the wiki is vis a vis authorship and ownership.
Now that that is out of the way, the more fun things to do. Incentives. White Wolf is in an interesting position here - they have clearly expressed an interest in having a self-hosted, self-run operation here, hosted off of their servers or some such thing. This apparent desire to have an official white wolf wiki is, however, undermined by the lack of any apparent official interest.
I don't know why this wiki exists, is the real problem.
As an exalted resource, they could very easily put an offsite link to the old wiki - but instead, the decision to make this wiki was made, even after it was made clear that little of the content from the old site would be available here. This implies that to some degree, there is a desire for new content to be established here, but there has been no actual incentive for this community to attempt to grow besides templates, which as far as I know were established by users, and not White Wolf staff - the grand gift in the wiki appears to have been a clean slate, without any actual benefits from affiliation with WW. This could be easily changed, of course. It wouldn't take much, perhaps very, very occassional official content posts put here, to give a real incentive for people to show up. Maybe a charm here and there, an author with an idea for an artifact could place it up - if there is actual canon being placed here, people will ravenously devour it. And it's easy, if Wikipedia is any indication, to edit-lock a page, so that canon here stays canon as long as WW wants.
A featured article system, like Wikipedia's, might prove interesting as well - as opposed to the old wiki's relatively useless front page, if there was some sort of editorial selection - not oversight, per se, as it would to a degree contravene the idea, but some sort of selection of noteworthy items, highlighting interesting events and production, something that would help pick out the best new or old work and drop it on the front page for a little while.
Clearly, when I came here, I had the wrong idea entirely. I was imagining the new wiki as a grand experimental city, arching glass spires overhead, and on the top floor of the tallest tower, contributors would stand, laughing together, each with a snifter of brandy in hand, hobnobbing with the luminaries of exalted writing. We would all stand in our very, very fine tweed jackets at this virtual party, and Nephipal would turn to someone standing nearby and say something to the effect of "Well, I think I might have costed it higher by a mote, but a good idea nonetheless." And to the left, Rebeca Borgstrom would say to someone "Well, 'Even if we could not survive / The sun smiled fire on the mountain.' - from in god's eyes but - That's the breaks, you know?" (PS - really like Hitherby Dragons.) This isn't a place where there is much official interaction or contribution - and that makes perfect sense; the company and its staff are not on retainer to entertain me. But the question must be raised - what then, makes the wiki official, besides the fact that it has a copyright policy?
