[freeroleplay] Re: Wiki Added
- From: Bryce Harrington <bryce@xxxxxxxx>
- To: FRPGC <freeroleplay@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 27 Jul 2003 10:54:31 -0700 (PDT)
On 27 Jul 2003, Ricardo Gladwell wrote:
> I've just installed PHPWiki on the FRPGC web site. At the moment it
> doesn't fit in with the overall site design but I will be working on
> theming it ASAP. I am also working on getting phpBB installed as well.
> More soon.
Cool. You may want to consider turning off the AutoLinking capability -
it's handy for when writing, but people who want to print the pages for
use will complain that it looks strange to have UmberHulkHabitat show up
in the middle of a monster description. ;-)
Does this wiki support the [[bracketed linkification]] style that other
wiki's like Wikipedia use?
> I think the wiki would be the best way to publish material from the
> FRPGC. I've seen open content produced collaboratively very successfully
> on Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org/) and I think it could work for
> us.
Cool, I was involved in Wikipedia early on; it's become one of the most
successful Wiki's out there. It also is starting to exceed the
Britannica website in number of page views!
Note that with Wikipedia one of the principle reasons it's successful is
that there are strict rules about how things are written, and that it's
very clear and testable as to whether some piece of writing belongs or
not. For example, early on we'd have people write things that were
heavy with opinion or slanted to a particular point of view; after some
lengthy discussion this resulted in the Neutral Point of View rule,
which is one of the core assumptions in the project. Also, since the
topic of the site is the real world, any assertion can be compared with
reality and corrected accordingly. Also, the nature of
one-page-one-topic works very well for an encyclopedia, so the whole
effort is highly modular.
Obviously, by definition these rules couldn't apply to a fantasy (or
sci-fi) game world, but I would bet a similar effect could be achieved
if one were to establish some good ground rules were.
> New projects would be simplicity to start and organize. It would
> also be trivial to write scripts that could export content from the wiki
> and convert it into other formats, e.g. LyX of Latex. From there we
> could then easily convert and publish PDFs, text files, etc.
Fwiw, I've tried making a script to export content from UseModWiki (the
wiki used by Wikipedia), but it turned out that the storage format was
comprised of the original plus all the diff's, so that to get the
current content you had to figure out how to apply all the diffs. I
never did get it fully figured out; instead I switched to EtText with
CVS for handling the diff's, wgetting the site and stripping the
header/footers off. :-P On the other hand, some Wiki's - like KeheiWiki
(used by WorldForge), have content that's much easier to parse (no diff
mechanism). Doublecheck the storage format of your wiki files to get a
good feel for whether it would be trivial or hard.
Bryce
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