After the Forge? A wiki?

[GB Steve]

Is this a suitable place to ask about future plans for the Forge?

I know it's been said somewhere that it's not going to be around forever as a live forum but I wondered what the timescales might be.

I've also been thinking about what might be a suitable Offspring of Forge.

It's just that over at Places to Go, People to Be, where MJ Young has started his series of theory primers, we've now got some space for a Wiki. This would seem rather suited as a repository for roleplaying theory, although perhaps less so for the cut and thrust of argument.

I realise that there are other repositories of theory, notably John Kim's which lists many other theory sites but I thought I'd float the idea to see whether theory buffs think it has any merit.

We're also considering using the Wiki as a basis for extending Steve Darlington's History of RPGs but these projects seem complimentary rather than disjoint.

[Andy Kitkowski]

I've also been thinking about what might be a suitable Offspring of Forge.

www.20by20room.com

http://www.septemberquestion.org/lumpley/opine.html

-Andy

[GB Steve]

Yes, I've seen those, I get the RSS feeds from one of them*. I'm thinking that Wiki might bring a bit more struture to the theory area, whilst still keeping it an open house.

*Lumpley's RSS seems to have died.

[Vaxalon]

Given that contributions to a wiki are expected to be authoritative, in a post-Forge internet, where would people go to ask questions about Forge theory?

[Shreyas Sampat]

Given that contributions to a wiki are expected to be authoritative, in a post-Forge internet, where would people go to ask questions about Forge theory?

What is it with you and assuming things? Holy burrito.

A wiki community, like any community, is able to (and should) independently define its stanards of contribution. For instance, you could have a rule, "Each edit must be an improvement upon the prior states of the page." This means that a page stub can basically be filled with whatever you want, but successive edits are expected to correct and improve the original text until something useful results.


Anyway, I feel like this proliferation of wikis is not such a good thing. Wiki is a terrible place for discussion, and learning the organisation of each individual wiki is a monumantal task unto itself, once they start to accumulate data.

[Vaxalon]

Everybody assumes things, Shreyas.

[John Kim]

Well, to everyone who doesn't know about it -- there is an excellent wiki in place set up by Doyce Testerman.  I seeded a section of it with a bunch of RPG theory information, but many other people have been adding too.  

http://random.average-bear.com/TheoryTopics/HomePage

[Trevis Martin]

I'll admit it.  I'm a wiki man.  I just plain like them.  See the spot where I'm hosting the Universalis play by Wiki  

I agree that they aren't the best places for discussion in general, though the folks at TWiki.org seem to do it all the time.  Its why I have a phpbb attached to my site.  The downside of that of course is that there are two seperate registrations to go through. There are plugins you can get for TWiki that simulate a forum without some of the bells and whistles of something like phpbb.  Mediawiki also uses talk pages attached to their articles.

Then there are some CMS contenders that have an integrated wiki or wiki like function.  TikiWiki is a CMS with a wiki module that functions throughout.  I've heard people complain about the forum setup in that software, though I'm not sure why.  

I've recently been investigating Drupal.  I have a trial installation of it here that I'm fooling around with if anyone wants to tinker a little.  I only just put it up so it isn't customized or anything.  I'm just playing.  It has something, along with articles, regular pages, and an integrated forum which seems allright to me, called a book.  The principle is very much like wiki, basically a series of articles that are all editable by a group or the whole userbase.  Now it doesn't use anything like regular wikisyntax for the automatic hyperlinking.  But it ain't bad.  You can set up a tree like taxonomy (classification system) that can classify everything from forum posts to book entries, and which aids search.

I've stuck with TWiki so far because for what I'm doing with the Uni game it is the only thing that has the functionality (programmable inline searchs and spreadsheet.)  But I could see something like Drupal being a serious post forge contender.

best

Trevis