Indie Rpgs faq/guide/timeline?

[Kenway]

I hope I don't sound too pushy or ignorant here:
  Does anyone know of any good faqs/guides to the indie (or otherwise) rpg scene of the past decade?
  Lots of different systems are mentioned on these boards such as Over The Edge, The Window, Risus, etc. that would bewilder a lot of the "newbies."
  The very helpful articles and reviews on The Forge explain most of the concepts discussed in the forums, but are not really organized into a reference document and don't really talk about when the systems came out.

[J B Bell]

OK,

Several people have volunteered to put together a glossary.  I think it's time to go ahead and do this thing.  As suggested by the previous post, a brief history is also in order, as well as a catalog, of sorts, of the indie games that are out there.

I would love to help in this effort too.  Shall we split off a topic, or a fresh bboard (maybe it should go in Site Discussion anyway, really), or do people want to use a different collaborative tool?  I think a wiki might be appropriate, and I believe there are public wiki spaces we could use for it.  I personally can provide a mailing list home if we don't want to clutter up the Forge proper with this work.

Who's with me?

--TQuid

[Clinton R. Nixon]

I'll leave it to TQuid to explain the Wiki concept, but I'd vote for this - it's an excellent collaborative tool. I'll set it up here if you want to go with that.

[J B Bell]

The Wiki is basically a very free-form web-editing setup.  At its most basic, it's a WWW interface that allows anyone to edit a page and add new links to other Wiki documents to said page.

Out of this anarchist-style setup, a great number of traditions have arisen as to semi-formal kinds of Wiki documents (DocumentMode, DiscussionMode, and so on) and how one is supposed to edit them, whether one should sign one's name in one mode or another, and so forth.  Software-wise, there are many kinds of Wikis out there now; some allow the undoing of changes and setting up privileges for different levels of editing.

Most of this would be irrelevant for putting together a simple history, glossary, and faq for the Forge.  A very rich RPG Theory Wiki would be a good possibility, but that's beyond the scale of what I'm contemplating.  For those of you curious about the whole Wiki Thing, check out the mother of all Wikis at http://c2.com/cgi/wiki.  Suffice to say, a Wiki would be a fine way to arrive at a more stable document that would be a good "introduction to the Forge" kind of thing.  Many people could add and edit Glossary entries until we were happy with what we had (or at least not at each other's throats about it!), then that could become just another Article on indie-rpgs.com.

There are other collaborative editing tools out there, but a Wiki is very democratic, usually seems to work well even on somewhat contentious stuff, and is, of course, free.  And Clint is willing to set it up here, a big bonus.  :)

--TQuid