As I was beginning to put together the Frontier Wikipedia I came upon the realization that it was becoming an extremely valuable editing tool. Normally as I do revisions it is simply write and rewrite. As I am putting the Wiki together however I find it constantly forcing me to look at what write while doing the page redirects to see if I have missed anything. Is it a something important enough to put in the book, and if so how much space does it deserve? Each new page is bringing a new question. Now I can see if this may become an endless cycle of more and more, but seeing where I already know the end to be it is becoming very valuable in finding that valuable filler information.

Has anyone else out there had this experience with a wiki or other similar thing?

Jason

Yep, I find that Wiki rocks for precisely the reasons you cite. I find that the interlinking drives me to work on things that I had forgotten need to be worked on.

On the other hand, I'm into one Wiki right now that's so big that it's hard to check all the "tails" that it has. So that's possibly also problematic as well. Even with pages just for reference, it's getting hard to keep track of it all.

What I'm really interested in doing is selling the Wiki as a product itself. That is, the complete product is already linked up in an excellent way, and I think has real value.

Mike

It sounds like my experiences putting an index in my books. As I noted page numbers I had to put them in mulitple listings. It began to show the relationship between ideas that was not as easy to see when just reading.

Wikipedia is a great resource for building text based game worlds. Sure can wrok well for Matrix Games.

Chris Engle
Hamster Press = Engle Matrix Games

I have experience maintaining a wiki, although it's for a band, not an RPG. wikis work great for material that can expand in all directions, but which has a lot of internal linking between concepts. they don't work so well for something that needs to be presented linearly. RPG rules definitely fit into the first category, but a text teaching RPG rules is generally a little more linear.

what I might recommend is using a wiki to develop the rules portion of an RPG, feed the completed rules text into a word processor, then develop the final text in a more traditional manner.

of course, if you sell an RPG as a data disc containing a wiki, that's a different approach. the problem with this is that most wikis only run from a web server. the only one I can think of is a javascript-based wiki called TiddlyWiki.

That might work, John (the TiddlyWiki idea), but what I'm thinking of is selling an online subscription, really.

Mike

Wikis are great.

I am using a Wiki/app in Mac OS X to begin compiling and linking notes, especially crazy ideas and system ideas and things. Sort of like a notepad. But I can interlink things and generally build on ideas in a more top down fashion. It will let me export the stuff as html later, with pictures and everything, so I am digging on the possibilities.

It's a free app by the way, if you have a Mac -- called Voodoo Pad:
http://www.flyingmeat.com/

Spiffy. That's really cool.

Mike