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

[magdalyna.livejournal.com]

This is a great start!

[fallingfortruth.livejournal.com]

Another worry is the wank that will inevitably crop up over interpretation, especially on member bios and any sort of 'X means Y' thing that isn't a direct quote. It's an interesting idea, I just can't see it possibly ending well. :/

[xanphibian.livejournal.com]

I'm not helpful at all, I just think you're made of awesome.

♥♥♥

[quettaser.livejournal.com]

This is such an awesome idea! And one I was maybe trying to do with my big media post before I was just inundated with new material and not enough time to code it all.

[impertinence.livejournal.com]

I think a free wiki might be the best way to go - getting money involved would give wankers legitimacy when they whined about people writing articles with biases, or whatever. I don't think an LJ comm is really needed, and might actually detract from the wiki itself - maybe you could make a central post for planning and just link it back on various comms?

The only toes I'd worry about are Fanhistory.com toes, and those...are not well-balanced toes. Put mildly.

Since it's your idea, I'd say you could choose mods as you saw fit.

[belladonnalin.livejournal.com]

I'm gonna get on board with imp here - wikispaces is a pretty painless thing to set up and it's free.

As for this: Will that be off-putting for newcomers to wikis?
Yeah, very. I've set up wikis for a couple of groups of people who aren't very familiar with wikis and editing and coding and they absolutely NEED the WYSIWYG format. Unfortunately, because I hate them, too.

[riadsala.livejournal.com]

This is an impressive undertaking! I'm not sure I have any useful contributions to add, but I'll give my encouragement wherever it's needed!

[olivia-circe.livejournal.com]

I have nothing useful to add on the hosting/editing/kind of wiki front, but everything you are saying makes sense to me. The WYSIWYG editing thing might not be an issue if there are people and/or guidelines available to help the more coding-illiterate among us.

Content and Organization:

4. Media Indices!
Or, in my language, annotated bibliographies! Including videos, interviews, pictures, etc., yes? I am 100% behind annotated bibliographies. For that matter, everything you mention in terms of content sounds good to me, both the wants and not-wants. I would also add comprehensive timelines, which might be easier to assemble once we fill in everything else. Because what we're essentially trying to do here is create a canon encyclopedia, right?

I think the annotated bibliographies, the citations, and avoiding unsourced rumors all go together, and could potentially be handled by a team of citation-tracking and fact-checking mods who keep tabs on whether or not the information people submit is, in fact, substantiated, cited, and linked in the annotated bibliographies/indicies.

Probably starting out by creating a bunch of well-organized stubs and then letting people slowly fill in the information is the way to go. As people start filling in information, however, I imagine you'll needs mods checking their citations and checking their code - the researchers and the techs, if you will.

(The citation-checking process probably goes like this: x submits a bunch of tour dates without a citation, mod says "hey, x, do you have a citation for this information?" x says, "oh, whoops, here it is" or "I got it from here, where someone posted it but didn't cite it," in which case the mod gets to do detective work. If the dates can't be substantiated by the mod team and posters, they get taken off the wiki. Or something, I don't know, we'd have to work on the rules.)

I guess this is all a roundabout way of saying that, should it be deemed a good idea, I volunteer to be on the citation/fact-checking mod team. All the reference librarians in bandom should also be on this team. :)

Social Organization

Ideally nobody's toes get stepped on, because we are all working on it together! Um. Wishful thinking? Okay. But I don't know, I mean, I imagine the bandfandom_ref and bandom_primers people could potentially want to help out, since our shared goal is more canon for everyone. That's just me, though, and I know nothing about the politics.

I think an LJ comm might not be a bad idea, if only as a place to gather people who want to help out/submit information/talk about how this will work. Of course, doing that in your LJ is fun, too...

[janet-carter.livejournal.com]

I think this is a great idea, and the media indexing in particular would be an awesome resource.

Thoughts to consider - scope: what bands to include (although it's easy enough to start small and add more if there are volunteers interested in doing the work for them); how detailed bios can get (i.e., it's not that hard to find home addresses, info on non-famous girlfriends and siblings, etc., online) - stick with things that can be cited to interviews? Which, like quettaser said, should help keep the wank down.

Outlining with stubs sounds like a good idea. For organizing media, I'm not sure if it would be useful to break it down by date, or source, or something; or just have a big, searchable annotated bibliography?

Oh, and there's also bandom_timeline - the comm's not really active, but probably worth checking to see if they have more compiled/future plans?

[fictionalfaerie.livejournal.com]

rainbowsyay is working on an extensive and incredibly in depth Ryland Blackinton primer- I'm sure I can convince her to turn it into an article as well, if you want. She's got a ton of info, with backing sites and such, on him.

And inawonderland is awesome at Lucent Dossier info, who connect up to quite a few bandom bands.

[mandy-croyance.livejournal.com]

sinuous_curve and I were actually discussing creating a bandom wiki late last year and we actually did some research ourselves but it never really got off the ground. I can see you've done your own research but if you want to IM me on AIM my s/n is LvCrync.

There are a lot of things outside of what you've mentioned that could seriously warrant their own pages too. Like, for example, entries on Albums. Side projects. The blogs that band members have maintained or currently maintain. Brief summaries on people like Brian and Dirty and Zach. Short descriptions of wives and girlfriends (as yes, they are relevant to bandom and fic whether or not everyone likes them, lol). Other business ventures (i.e. Clandestine).

There is just so, SO much content out there. I really can't wait!

[warmingweather.livejournal.com]

This sounds awesome! I have nothing particularly helpful to add, but it would be a really great resource and as soon as it gets set up, I will definitely contribute. :)

[x--kes--x.livejournal.com]

This sounds like a really cool idea. I'm gonna stick around and see where you go with it if that's cool.

[turnyourankle.livejournal.com]

that's a really good idea. i'm one of those people who need to research as much as possible before diving into writing a band, so this would be really awesome.

(also, i might be able to help with the used because i'm in the process of primer-ing them and i'm such a stickler for details and footnotes it's actually turning into somewhat of a wiki article :|)

[phineasjones.livejournal.com]

i'm seriously loving this idea. in my dream world, this would include a canon timeline - like the lotrips one (http://versaphile.com/lrcanon/time/index.asp). not a schedule of past tours, but a timeline of all sorts of things - when did gerard get sober, when did ryan's dad die, where were they at the time, stuff like that. i know that's a lot to take on, it's jut my dream. :)