TheHoverpope/ATaleOfTwoWikis

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A tale of Two Wikis

Me and my family have an interesting relationship with new technology and ideas. We're often wrong on it, which I will freely admit. I thought tabbed browsing was stupid and so didn't use firefox for ages; I still dislike the mac interface, and my dad had a stack of zip drives in his closet. We tend to go in big time on anything that is very, very shiny. This was the first and primary reason that I converted to the official wiki.

The templates are beautiful. The automatic classification systems bound into the templates were spectacular, and intrinsically fixed the greatest flaws with the old wiki. After all, the old wiki was a beauty of a thing for posting new creations, but was relatively useless for finding things to use; it seemed like half of the items on the wiki were only accessible from user pages which often gave no clue to their contents, the search function was literally useless, and manually updating the index pages meant that few people bothered. Functionally, the only way to find things was to constantly be checking the recent updates page. And, to make it worse, to fix this problem means manually going through every page - it seems like a monumental, silly task.

The new wiki provided another option - a system that, once the templates were set up, could easily and automatically organise itself, with code that took only minutes to learn enough of to post, and allowed for more options in terms of page names, formatting options, and pretty much every other front I could think of. The templates alone were enough to make me almost completely leave the old wiki - after all, on the new one, if I post an artifact, it is not lost after a week but instead is easy to find, sorted by type, level, function, what have you. It's elegant, easy, and automatic.

So why didn't it work?

And I am afraid, realistically, that to this point I must say it definitively did not work. That's not to say I don't hope it will improve - but I don't think it will. This started, of course, right from the beginning. The first email about the proposal, as posted on the old wiki at WhiteWolfProposal, either betrayed a failure to understand the wiki concept or was poorly worded - it implied a centralised control of the wiki on the part of xyphoid, rather than individual content under individual control, and it asked an administrator, not the community as a whole, what the community would like. Now, from a business, this makes complete sense; however, to myself and presumably other wiki users, the concept of central control over a wiki, and particularly our work on a wiki is fundamentally inimical to the process and ethos of the project. The responses were largely negative, and right from the start this was nearly a killing blow, though I did not recognize it at the time. The whole idea of the wiki is the community, and without the support of any of the luminaries and frequent posters of the old wiki, as it were, who all voted strongly against, the new wiki was left in a position where it had to build an entire new community from scratch in order to function, all the while held up against an established source with good writers producing huge volumes of quality work. The fact of the matter is that if a writer is in any way interested in comment or use of their work, or in reading others' work, then they must follow the community.

I take it as a sign of the failure of the official wiki that so many of the names who were instrumental in setting it up, establishing the systems it ran on and providing early content, are nowhere to be seen. There are still things going up on the new wiki, of course; it is not deceased. But posting there is usually far more limited and narrow than on the old one - a single contributor a day, rather than the dozen at the old wiki. The official project, regrettably, is on life support.

I still think the new wiki is a good project - the fears of high-handed censorship from White Wolf seem to have been unfounded, the worries of site instability have not appeared, and although they haven't had much chance to appear yet, the fears that white wolf would simply seize control of contributor's work are almost bizarre - nothing would more quickly alienate their entire fan base, which I'm sure even a company would know. The problems amount to very little, and the potential is there. If White Wolf actually wants that wiki to succeed, and I don't see any especial reason why they would, they should post a concise, clear, and thorough set of conditions that lay out the rules of the wiki and their own views towards it. If they want to succeed, those rules should be as minimal as possible, should make a point of not infringing on production and of making sure that White Wolf does not claim control of our work, and they should give us a reason to switch. As is, the reason is the software - as the company that owns the whole game line, they could do better. The problem is that in every way, assocating the wiki with White Wolf was a liability, not an asset. Copyright, instability, censorship - these were the only things that White Wolf was seen as bringing to the table. It would be so easy to add some incentive to post there - official contributions, writer interaction, anything - that would really let the new wiki have a purpose.

Look, it's been a long night, and I'm tired and sick - all of this is, I'm sure, overlong and rambling. What I'm saying, basically, is that the WWWiki is failing. It's got an apparently small audience, slow posting aside from a couple of projects, and no real reason to live. And that's sort of sad.

Comments

Strangely enough, reading this makes me, for some unexplainable reason, want to post stuff on the WWwiki. hm. ~Capric

The way I see it, WW haven't provided a reason for the existing wiki community to migrate. "Ooh, shiny software" alone is not worth the effort of moving all of this wiki across. They have set up a wonderful planned lifestyle community, to compete with this chaotic yet vibrant township. "Move across, we're official!" is not a selling point to people who fear or mistrust the corporate identity. As matters stand now, those who waver on moving or not can look at wwwiki and see pages and pages of emptiness all wonderfully linked and templated, and then can look here and see content everywhere strewn haphazardly about but at least existing. WW do need to offer more than a templated, official site to entice the fan base across. It seems the new fans brought in by 2ed aren't (yet, at least) inclined to burst forth with inspiration and fan material on the wwwiki - maybe that's a flaw with 2ed not being as inspirational as 1st? I believe that WW could offer more in terms of content provided. If the developer (and authors, and other staff) showed an interest in the material being posted (or at least feigned one!), or had an interest in using the wiki themselves (their own campaign notes? Proactive Errata (ie, not cribbed from the forums by other fans)? Comments upon existing fan material (Wow, that's cool!)?), then I think that would spur interest and generate trust. (I do understand they have their own lives and may be busy with so much other work, and that they may fear they lose a corporate dollar if they post stuff on the wiki that they could be publishing in a book, or that they may have their home game ideas stolen and taken as canon, and so many other variants...). Technology-wise it's early days yet - still way too soon to see which servers are more robust. The new wiki really needs an influx of excited, inspired and talented fans who do not fear WW will steal their stuff, or sue for inadvertant copyright infringements made while creating their fan material using the WW books. These things may happen with time. The 2ed heirs to, say, Telgar, FourWillowsWeeping, Quendalon, Ikselam, DissolveGirl, GoldenH and so many others, who churned out volumes of creativity and insight into the wiki early on, need to appear and make their mark on wwwiki before it will truly bloom.

Now I'm rambling. I shall go to bed. B-) nikink

Why their Wiki was doomed from the start:

Attempted to solve a problem that had already been solved here, without a clearly expressed rationale as to why.
While not as hideous as this wiki's default skin, the site was hideous. Red links == ugly.
Vast overuse of templates. Made it unpleasant for authors.
Incredibly stupid use of categories.
White Wolf's horrible IT reputation

- Wordman

It can't have helped that WW launched their wiki right around the time that they were having that whole pay-for-play PR debacle. I don't think too many people were excited about posting their stuff to the company's wiki after having Justin Achilli, et al., tell them that any and all fan-created stuff belonged to WW, not the fans who created it. _Ikselam

You ARE aware, that there are skins for mediawiki, right?

--Democritus

Why won't I ever post on WWWiki? Because the list of categories is longer then anything I'd post. It's hideous. It makes me ill. - Telgar

I'm working on it. Democritus

I dislike MediaWiki formatting, to begin with. UseMod, the basis of our own wiki here, is much more intuitive in my opinion. Secondly I was one of the naysayers on the WhiteWolfProposal, and I didn't so much disagree with the idea of a WWWiki as I just wasn't going to be porting my content. I don't want to keep track of two wikis worth of my stuff. Finally, the sheer number of houserules I use that both I and people I work on them with are using, I imagine the WWWiki would have a fit at how not-book-exalted I am. - Trithne

Um... for the features UseMod supports, MediaWiki syntax is almost identical. You can pretty much copy and paste UseMod syntax into a MediaWiki and get the same result 95% of the time. Since MediaWiki was basically built to migrate the original Wikipedia content from UseMod, this should not be surprising. -- Wordman

You -can-, but it's messy. Userpages, for example. I could make a page called Darloth, but, on a mediawiki, I'd already have a Userpage::Darloth or something similar. Should I redirect one to the other? Who knows. It's certainly -possible- to transfer and categorize everything across, but the question is do I/we want to. I'm still undecided. -- Darloth

It's possible to turn off the User namespace. I would also be possible to add something to the system such that a link to Darloth, if not found, would lead to User:Darloth. I've thought about how to handle that issue if we moved this wiki to a MediaWiki format. The path of least resistance would be to just ignore the User: namespace, I think. That's a bit odd for MediaWiki purists, but would fit the history of this wiki a bit better, given how author-centric it is. The presence of a feature in MediaWiki doen't mean it has to be used. In principle, hosting this same site under MediaWiki code needn't change anything else about it. There is, BTW, a converter from UseModWiki to MediaWiki that ships with the MediaWIki code. No idea how good it is. I'd love to do a test run in using this code to translate this wiki, but the powers that be don't seem interested. -- Wordman

Why not mirror the wiki and try it out then? Personally, I just have to say: All those underscores man! WikiWords are nicer to look at than they are! - Trithne

The WW Exalted Wiki is currently undergoing some dramatic changes in format and organization. Among other things, some of my personal goals of the revision are:

General Goals
- rectify category linkage issues -- the previously existing and deep category linkages cause web server issues in addition to looking horrible
- increase automated options for category linkages -- see below for revised use of categories in templates
- provide quick start wiki tutorials -- targeted at first time visitors and first time contributors, users interested in more will be directed to the large body of mediawiki resources available on the web
- get the Exalted community involved -- challenge the Exalted community to get involved with the Second Breath of the WW Exalted Wiki
- add additional wiki flavor -- trying some things for new tutorials like a Student Sutra of Wiki and Elder Sutra of Wiki, tutorials still in development
Templates
- better use of categories -- more effectively provide automatic link-up/categorization of user contributions into organized but exhaustive listing pages
- provide alternate formatting from the templated page-wide data blobs currently used for Charms (and later do the same for artifact weapons, artifact armor, hearthstones, etc.) -- already being implemented see proposed (new) charm template
- once established, provide short-hand templates with brief and concise parameter namings
- require a bare minimum of template parameters while providing additional presentation options if more are provided
- all major templates provide at least: a tutorial, a short-hand template, and a default-parameters template to aid authors

It would be great to see more wikizens from this established wiki dropping by to implement some of their own ideas or even just provide some helpful suggestions and/or requests.

-- Deaks, just another contributor trying to present his content to the WikiWorld

TheHoverpope/ATaleOfTwoWikis

A tale of Two Wikis

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