Wiki General Thread

Null

Null

Ooperator
kiwifarms.net
Joined
Nov 14, 2012
After discovering a wiki was being made for SammyClassicSonicFan, and it had a CWCki Forum esque board for it, I figured it was time to try and reboot ths.

Basically, DeagleDad wanted a second shot at hosting the Jace wiki because GamerFood had all but stopped working on theirs and it was shit anyways.

Right now, only staff can access this board. If you want a wiki account, post here. I'll hook you up.

It's hard to start talking about the wiki and what I want to do with it. At the moment, it seems like every time someone gets a little noise going in the Lolcow board, one of the people from the forum start a wikia.com wiki for them. These boards are often rushed, poorly put together, and die within a month anyways. There's a lot of effort, energy, and even a little passion going into something that ultimately won't matter and will be forgotten.


EncyclopediaDramatica has lost its value as an encylcopedia because people are allowed to write anything they want into it. There's no quality control, no oversight, and the current administrator uses his position to threatens people with dox like he's some sort of Internet God. It's pathetic and it saddens me to see something so core to my young experiences on the Internet be overrun by newfags.

KnowYourMeme and other encyclopedias are lacking because they give an overview of someone. The CWCki is unique in how it dedicates itself to details, and it does a pretty OK job with setting up conventions and using templates to clearly display information.

However, the CWCki's focus is too narrow and the wiki itself has deteriorated. It was written in a time where chronicling insane people was a novel thing, and it didn't understand how big and widely used it would become.

With these lessons learned, I think the next logical step for the forum is its own wiki. Something with the objective focus of a standard wiki, but with the in-depth and organization of the CWCki.

A lot of work would need to go into accomplishing what I have in mind. I could spend hours just coming up with meta and conventions. It'll take time and the assistance of more than a few people. I need help to build something cool.
 
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Just a straightforward info wiki would be invaluable. There's so few places to go for an overview of cows, and the forum is a miserable place to hunt for information.
 
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I think it will be important to encompass a good number of cows under the same wiki. It is true that the biggest two(Chris and Jace) have more than enough background to fill up an entire wiki on their own. And they have in the past.

However those very specific wiki sites can run out of fuel and support for updates. By having our wiki cover multiple people and communities discussed here, I think we can avoid that common pithole since there is bound to be someone active and worth updating about. The hurdle is just going to be having that level of depth that specific wikis often achieve since they only have one person to cover.

As far as my own contribution goes, I think I could write a decent amount for some Jace pages in addition to many of the community-related lolcow topics.
Just thinking about a Wizardchan page gets me all tingly.
 
I have no problem with this idea, but I think this might work better after we do rebranding (however that turns out) or we start with a rebranded wiki. Otherwise a wiki based on a forum based on a wiki is sorta odd. Like making a completely different board game based on a movie based on a board game.

I can see the merit of making an alternative ED, though in the past attempts at making lolcow specific wikis usually don't pan out but that might be because you didn't have people who really knew how to run a wiki or what to look for in a wiki. It was pure chance I got involved with the CWCki - I had suggested the name (the previous wiki just went by "CWC Wiki") and suggested a wiki for Chris and when I realized I was the first registered user, after cogs, I kinda thought "Wow, I can set everything up" and I spent like weeks just writing up the base of pages, mostly retweaking stuff from ED and setting up stubs. ED had issues and it was mostly my effort to make it more like Wikipedia - there would be standards, claims would be cited, etc. The CWCki is partially where it is because I was such a huge sperg that I was willing to spend hours a day (then again, I was unemployed at the time) doing shit.

OhInternet or whatever ED became officially more or less was inspired by the CWCki, or so a mod I knew from the original ED said - it was supposed to be a less biased source of "drama" without the "nigger nigger nigger" that was rife on the original ED and have higher standards.

I think the only thing is that for Chris, it was sorta obvious a wiki was needed - Chris tends to take a lot for granted from the reader or viewer of his works. Most of Sonichu will make no sense unless you know that he's referring to things in his life that the casual reader wouldn't know about him. Chris will reference things in his videos which again, assume that people have memorized all his comics, his entire life story, his entire corpus of previous videos, etc. For example, there's a video where Chris said how BlueSpike died and that left some trolls completely clueless how he inferred that. Thanks to the CWCki, people realized that Clyde made an offhand remark where he does a horrible job pretending to strangle BlueSpike and Chris took that very seriously. A wiki makes sense for Chris because so much is interconnected with other things in his life.

I'm not sure if there's that much depth or necessity other lolcows having their own wiki or at least warranting a wiki that will allow for depth as they do. I think with a lot of lolcows, a simple article usually conveys the gist of them. The CWCki is so popular that people think that their own lolcow has to have a wiki to prove legitimacy when it might not really make sense.

That said, I don't see the harm of providing an alternative to ED that's more factual, but more in depth to Know Your Meme as a bad thing.
 
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I'm pretty much overwhelmed with ideas and what I want to do. It's very difficult to have so little time in a day. I've never really understood that concept until now. Basically, I'm going going to organize a hierarchy, both for the forums and the wiki. I also need to get more organized with life in general. I waste a lot of time.

When the forums first started I could read every post. I can't do that anymore. I don't even read 10% of posts these days. There's just too much going on. I'm going to designate and delegate specific people to specific obligations. A huge problem with the staff right now is I've yet to tell people what the fuck they should be doing and why. People go off on a limb all the time and then get discouraged when I confront them. A clear set of guidelines and the ability to quickly determine what is something they can handle would help everyone.

Likewise, with the wiki, there is a huge set of meta I need to develop. I don't know who has strengths in these categories. I know Alan Pardew is extremely good at keeping things up, but I don't know if he's got what it takes to help me flesh out an overarching understanding of what we need to do to achieve a full fledged encyclopedia. Likewise, Jaimas has volunteered, and apparently runs several wikis, but I don't know how sane or reliable this person is. He seems a good candidate, though.
 
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Null said:
I'm pretty much overwhelmed with ideas and what I want to do. It's very difficult to have so little time in a day. I've never really understood that concept until now. Basically, I'm going going to organize a hierarchy, both for the forums and the wiki. I also need to get more organized with life in general. I waste a lot of time.

When the forums first started I could read every post. I can't do that anymore. I don't even read 10% of posts these days. There's just too much going on. I'm going to designate and delegate specific people to specific obligations. A huge problem with the staff right now is I've yet to tell people what the fuck they should be doing and why. People go off on a limb all the time and then get discouraged when I confront them. A clear set of guidelines and the ability to quickly determine what is something they can handle would help everyone.

Likewise, with the wiki, there is a huge set of meta I need to develop. I don't know who has strengths in these categories. I know Alan Pardew is extremely good at keeping things up, but I don't know if he's got what it takes to help me flesh out an overarching understanding of what we need to do to achieve a full fledged encyclopedia. Likewise, Jaimas has volunteered, and apparently runs several wikis, but I don't know how sane or reliable this person is. He seems a good candidate, though.
Click to expand...

Jaimas did a pretty good job establishing the original Golden Knight wiki before it was taken down. I'd say he's a pretty good choice for the wiki.
 
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The beauty of the wiki system is that you can take things from other wikis (well, usually, it's usually all Creative Commons) and tweak to fit your needs.

A lot of the stuff on the CWCki is basic guidelines from Wikipedia with some minor variations, mostly cutting out a lot of the bureaucracy. For example, original research - this is actually sorta okay on the CWCki, provided you can source your claims. This is sorta a bad idea on Wikipedia but on the CWCki, it's not awful because there's not some sort of peer reviewed institution of Chris related studies. My view was sorta the admin served as a judge - create a basic, establish code of law, so to speak, then cite based on precedent. If I'm not sure how to do something, I look at how other wikis might do it and use that to determine a precedent. Point is, you don't need to completely go at it from scratch - a lot of it is already freely available. Don't reinvent the wheel.

It's great you want to grow the forum and expand to other areas, but don't bite off more than you can chew, Null. I don't think delegating is a bad idea, but if doing these sorts of things are going to drive you insane with stress, then it's okay to step back a bit.
 
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Does the wiki have a plugin that lets you embed mp3s? I'm currently adding Tiberius Rising in its entirety, but I also want to put Jace's audiobooks alongside it.

Also, should I be keeping it all in the Tiberius Rising article, or should there be a seperate article for each chapter with stuff like trivia and flyawayn0w's critique videos to flesh them out?
 
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