Talk me out of attaching a wiki to the forum

[Mark Seifert]

There's a bunch of things I'd like to do that a wiki would be well-suited for -- collect and organize monthly solicit info/links for one thing. And the other thing is... if any of you ever go over to the cgc forums, there's just a MASSIVE amount of historically interesting info that gets posted by longtime dealers and collectors that just gets lost in the neverending flow of threads. And the same goes for other forums. IMO it's time we as a community start preserving interesting historical (and other) info in a more permanent / structured form.

But of course... potential problems with coordinating a wiki and the various problems that you hear about developing at wikipedia.

Still... I think I want to do it. But what do you think?

[_OM_]

...Otay, but I get to be an admin whose job is to keep catamites from vandalizing articles. Anyone familiar with the two Wikinazis Will "Sceptre" Nobel and Matthew Fenton will know what sort of trash I'm talking about.

...You might want to implement some other rules that will prevent problems down the line that Wikipedia is already seeing:

• Allow original research. All research and conclusions can be defined as original, and the "[original research?]" tag is one of the most abused ones on Wikipedia today. Vandals use it specifically to cast doubt upon articles, especially genre-based ones, and they usually slap on the tag and don't back up their accusations on the Discussion page for the article in question. If they don't explain themselves on the Discussion page, then the tag is automatically removable.
  
  
• By the same token, place a time restriction on the "[Citation Needed]" tags so that the person requesting/demanding it a) has to explain why the cite is necessary, or b) has 90 days to find the cite themselves, or an admin can just delete it and move on. This is to prevent vandalization caused by a troll pretending to be a n00b and tagging an entry that's common knowledge with a CR.

...Dammit. There's one other aspect of Wikipedia that I can't stand, and I can't recall it at the moment. I'll go see what some of the retarded admins are screwing up and get back to you on it

[DarkKnightJared]

I'm probably dense/not getting it, but what would be the inherient purpose of the wiki? Is it just to list the solicitations, or is there other reasons that I'm not thinking of?

[DionCautrell]

As long as it offers something distinctive, i.e. different from other comics-oriented wikis, I think it can work. Several of us will have to be willing to step up as volunteers to get things moving (and keep them running smoothly); it's a ton of work to ensure entries are current/accurate and remain so, etc. And that's saying nothing about the work involved for Mark.

That said, community efforts of this sort generally need a focus to stay active and productive. What is the "value added" in, to paraphrase Mark, collating solicitations and other historical information? How can we frame/focus the wiki to ensure it's not redundant to what's found elsewhere or, to put it the other way round, to ensure it's something people will want to use and/or participate in?

[Peter J Poole]

It's a big project.

Projects need evaluated for benefits vs cost.

Cost here is effort, which breaks down to time and manpower involved in setting it up and keeping it running. There may also be hidden costs - if you have a bunch of people manning the wiki, do they end up as the wiki-clique? Plus some of the cats that wander in will need much more herding than others... Some degree of angst and arseache will be inevitable...

Benefits are - broadly - it's a 'cool' thing to have, it may enhance site stickiness or put more bums on seats.

My instinctive response is put it on hold for three months. Get us fully walking before we run.

Cheers.

[Emperor]

Wikis are a good idea, the key to remember is that at their heart they are just a system to allow collaborative creation of web pages. The key is to define what you want to do with it. Wikipedia use it to create an encyclopedia, Wiktionary use to create a dictionary. If you can define what you want it to do, then there is no reason not to go for it. Aiming for a comics wiki is pointless (as it is being done elsewhere in a number of places) and will fail (as it is a big project which requires an awful lot of people).

I am an admin at Wikipedia (not sure if an angry mob will descend on me with torches and pitchforks ) but I'm not really sure there is much beyond the technical aspects that can be taken from that. However, one approach I like is to have a wiki that runs in parallel to the rest of the site, and is used to draw all the information together into one place. In the early days of wikis I scouted a few out and helped design a bespoke one that ran as a broad-ranging FAQ (as the same topic can come up again and again, it helps save time and also helps people) but branched out into tutorials, opinion pieces and more light-hearted material. I've recently installed the Wikipedia wiki on I site I help run and integrated it with a forum (so you use the same login and editors are assigned through a forum usergroup) and it will have one place where we can draw together blog postings and forum posts for easy reference back to topics and will also contain reviews and articles that have been published elsewhere.

So how does would that work here? Well as an example you could (with permission) bring all Rich's columns together in one place and hyperlink them to relevant articles. So initially you'd have a Josh Hoopes article that would contain links to where Rich has discussed this before. Then over time you could expand this to a full article giving an overview of the topic and then break down the aliases of scams and how things worked out. Then all Rich would need do is link to the article from his blog postings and people could pop over there and catch-up on the story if they need to - it is a good example of how the same topic can be returned to a time or two and the information ends up scattered across a lot of pages and a wiki can easily draw this all together. Now imagine if Warren caches his old articles here and other people pull out things they wrote in magazines or on blogs that may now be defunct and starts caching it (there is some much interesting material out there that only lives on in web caches or was never online or is scattered across the Web). You'd have a top grade information source that you could then create framework for which would pull everything together. You can mix it up with opinion and satire as long as it is flagged properly (have something like an opinion box where someone like Warren could post his thoughts on a specific topic, which would be interesting.

It is also worth deciding whether you want to make it a closed wiki, so editing accounts have to be approved. This has the bonus of stopping every passing person with an opinion throwing it in but does restrict the number of editors, which can be an important factor in achieving a critical mass of bodies, which may be important depending on the size and size and scope of the project.

[Jude Terror]

www.theouthousers.com/wiki

We have one, and if you look up my page on there, you will see the kind of defacement that you're going to have to accept if you go with this unless you hire on a person just to moderate the wiki.

Also, we've had quite a few instances of wars going on that required us to lock wiki pages due to slander and fighting.

But, if you don't worry so much about keeping it clean and honest, it's fun for the community.

[Jude Terror]

A link to my Outhouse wiki page, which has some new defacements since I last looked at it which made me laugh:

http://www.theouthousers.com/wiki/in...le=Jude_Terror

[Jude Terror]

It looks like in the month of June, we had an influx of spam ED posters in the wiki, despite never having wiki spammers before. Bleeding Cool started in June... coincidence? I think not!

[_OM_]

It looks like in the month of June, we had an influx of spam ED posters in the wiki, despite never having wiki spammers before. Bleeding Cool started in June... coincidence? I think not!

...In defense of ED, I have to admit that about half of their regulars aren't your standard issue trolls like the ones we punted from here, but people who were actually burned and abused by Wikinazis and power-tripping Admins who'd used hoze accounts to get themselves voted in as admins. You can usually tell those apart from the trolls, because the articles they write for ED are long and have substance to them, while the troll articles are the ones where some maladroit throws up a picture of Obama photochopped eating a watermelon with a LOL! attached to it.