More Wiki Musings

[go_gentle]

Wait, you actually want me to make my crazy ideas happen? (I had a thought today - the ideal finished product I have in mind is not that far off the HP Lexicon in content. But if I get as out of hand as the Lexicon has been in recent months, someone please take my internets away. (Although I suspect that publishing this hypothetical wiki - if one could transform it to book format - would be much less legally problematic than publishing the Lexicon. But I digress.))

Someone once told me that there are two types of people when it comes to projects. One prefers to start and figure out the details later, one wants to get all the details straight from the get-go. Clearly, I am the latter.

Okay, disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm doing. That doesn't mean I'm not going to try to make it happen - I'm well familiar with blind fumbling in the dark, but if you do know something, feel free to chime in. Most of this is based on research and not actual experience. Also, it's mostly me thinking out loud, so please tell me where my thinking is going wrong. This got more epic than I expected - feel free to comment on as much or as little as you want.


Technical Details

Format

MediaWiki is what runs wikipedia (also the fan history wiki, the F_W wiki, etc.) I think its popularity means more people are going to be familiar with how to edit it, etc. I know I found editing MediaWiki sites very easy to learn, but I'm not sure if that's universally true. I have a deep hatred of WYSIWYG editing - I prefer to stay closer to the code, which is one reason I like the way MediaWiki sites are edited. Will that be off-putting for newcomers to wikis?

My personal preference would be to use a wiki that runs MediaWiki.

Hosting

Someone else

There are sites that are dedicated to hosting wikis (called 'wiki farms'), often for free or supported by ads. A list can be found here. A comparison of features is here.

Browsing through and looking at offered features, I like wikilot, wiki-site, scribblewiki. (ETA: Wikispace has been pointed out in comments, and I'm adding it to the list of options worth considering.) Maybe wikia. I have no experience with any of these sites, and I don't know how long they've been around/will stay around. Thoughts?

Commerical Hosting

Wikipedia is about 3GBs, according to LifeHacker. Presumably, anything we build would be orders of magnitude smaller than that, which I think is a very workable size with just about any commercial webhosting. With the amount of statistics put out by the FanHistory wiki people, I should be able to find details on size/traffic, but two minutes on google doesn't turn anything up.

The choice of commercial hosting would probably mean we'd have to install MediaWiki (or another wiki software) ourselves. The instructions looks doable, but not trivial, but I have no experience to base this on.

DreamHost provides instructions on how to install MediaWiki on a site hosted with them. A number of other hosting sites advertise one-click installation of a wiki, although not all of them are MediaWiki.

I am not familiar with the pros and cons of various hosting services, and I don't know where to start looking. I also don't know if I have missed an option.

My thoughts are that at this point, free hosting on a wikifarm is preferable over the other option. My only concern is reliability/long term viability. Agree? Disagree?


Content

Things I Want:
1. Band Bios!
2. Band Member Bios!
3. Lyrics! (the principle is 'why the fuck not?')
4. Media Indices! (I suspect that hosting video/scans/whatever may be beyond at least the initial stages, but something like 'link to such and such interview on youtube, in which these things happen and the band touches on these topics' would be kind of neat.)
5. Tour dates!
6. Citations! Seriously. Citations are awesome.

Things I Don't Want:
1. Fic/Art/fanmade media. Just not the place for it.
2. History of fandom. First, this is an impossible topic; second, there are other places already working on it.
3. Wildly unsourced rumors.
4. Wank. Because, really, who does?

Yes? No?

I suspect that the wiki will require a small team of moderators (along with an owner) to ensure that pages remain reasonable. Some pages may also need to have editing privileges restricted, depending on vandalism.


Setup and Organization

Clearly, at startup we have huge backlogs of info that needs to be added. Suggestions for ways to make this as easy as possible for users? One way would be to have a small group of users create a massive amount of stubs, which then could be filled in later by the general public - sort of creating an outline for the eventual document.

I don't know how it would be best to organize the pages. I suspect this is something it would be nice to get mostly right from the beginning, because re-organization is always a pain in the ass. Suggestions?


Social Organization

Another thing I have no experience in! Things I am thinking about:

-Do we need an LJ comm?
-Should I post to BSM about this? Tangentially, feel free to pimp this to your flists/comms/wherever - I'd like as many opinions as possible so that the final product is as useful to as many people as possible.
-How should mods be chosen?
-How to avoid stepping on toes - what toes should I be worried about stepping on? bandfandom_ref? bandom_primers? Something I don't know about?


What am I forgetting? Any other thoughts or suggestions you have?

Comments

[go-gentle.livejournal.com]

That all sounds awesome. I'll keep those folks in mind when things start going up, or feel free to point them over here.