Birthright wiki

[Arjan]

Hi all,
I am tossing with the idea to make a wiki site of BR.net. that way everyone can add/edit stuff to the site as you can do with the wikipedia sites.

what do you all think of this idea?

If no or other, pls tell us why or what

[Arjan]

added little info on whats a wiki

"A Wiki or wiki (pronounced "wicky" or "weekee") is a website (or other hypertext document collection) that allows a user to add content, as on an Internet forum, but also allows that content to be edited by any other user." -- from Wikipedia.

So why a Birthright Wiki? As you're going through looking for information, if you see something that's incorrect, you can correct it. If you see any information that's missing, you can add it. This way, the information here should be as up to date as possible, instead of having to wait for a small group to update the information as the game changes. The more people who use the Wiki, the more up to date the information will be.

[geeman2000]

I love the idea of some sort of wiki.birthright site. I don't personally know much about how that software works or website design stuff in general for that matter, but for such a project I'd be happy to learn, so if there's a need for volunteers I'm the kid going, "ooh! ooh!" in the front row.

Gary

[Satchkep45]

I also like the idea, but don't know how we would go about doing it, a look at my birthright website (http://www.geocities.com/satchkep45/satchkep.html) shows that I'm not really a programming expert. However, I would be more than willing to help add stuff to it and fix it up.

[Danip]

Great idea.

As an example of a wiki check out Wikipedia's entry for the BR setting,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthri...ign_setting%29 This entry itself could use more additions.

[akalars]

I think having a wiki for birthright would be very nice. It would make it easier to find the information as well as to contribute.

Configuring and seting up the wiki in it self is not a very difficult task, neither is learning how to use one. There is also the question of which wiki software to use. I think moinmoin is a good choice. I have used it for simelar projects with great success. It has good search functionality, RSS feed for recentchanges, access controll on page level as well as default acl.


For a br wiki to function at its best we would have to add all the stuff that has been made so far to the wiki, that would require a significant amount of time. Alot can be cut and pasted, but tables and so forth might have to be recreated.

[irdeggman]

After reading the wiki entry for BR something crossed my mind. . .

Birthright is not OGC so any use of campaign specific terminology is not "technically" allowed. Things like Anureans, Brechts, etc., are campaign specific and "copyright protected" material. Which is why the SRD doesn't contain things like FR deities or the proper names of many spells (BIgby for instance).


We, as the "Official fansite", have more leeway on this. I don't think that WotC will have trouble with wiki stuff as long as not tto much material from 2nd ed is not posted thus rendereing their copyright material pretty much void.

Just being "anal" this morning.

[ausrick]

Usually, it seems game developers get more bent out of shape about the game play related details (holding levels, specific rules, etc), or straight out rips of their information being shared, then they do about discussions on characters, history, fluff, etc. Thats just what I've noticed, and the SRD actually functions opposite to that normal assumption. Irdeggman is right to advise caution.

However, I think a Wiki would be a great thing to have. The amount of information that would be available and the ease of its use would be indespensible to DM's.

I have always wondered about Wiki's, though, how they always seem to contain such good information being that any one can seem to edit them. I just don't have that positive of an outlook on the community orientedness of mankind, mixed with the anonimity of the internet. If anyone who has had experience with wiki's would want to enlighten me on this seeming anomaly I would much appreciate it.

[Arjan]

Although we have quite some freedom, we have to be carefull indeed on how we set it up too. clear seperation between fan created and published material. And foremost leave the original info intact (ie not killing the gorgon and tuarhievel cleaned brechtur of any humans etc..)
WotC does encourage fans to create their own stuff to simply keep the setting alive.

This poll was just to see how the community stands towards the idea of an wiki before i go into implementation details at all.
But so far the results are beyond my expectations

[Sorontar]

I am one of the moderators for a wiki primarily related to a medieval club at http://cunnan.sca.org.au/wiki/Main_Page. The bulk of what I need to do (other than normal editing) is removal of vandalism (i.e. rubbish edits) and spam (i.e urls being added to unrelated pages). Most of the time this is no problem, but sometimes it can take a while to cleanup the pages. Yesterday, I removed one piece of vandalism and undid one piece of editing which I believed to be incorrect.

One of the key things that we find need to be done for this wiki is identifying globalisation and localisation. For the medieval club, our problem is the international nature of the club, which means that terms and practices aren't quiet universal. I think this will also be an issue for a BR wiki. By globalisation, I mean entries that are good for everyone, e.g. a new awnshegh, new shadow spells, new magical items/relics. By localisation, I mean entries that only work because they are tailored to your campaign, e.g. new rules, redefining an existing NPC, redefining anything in the BRCS. For a BR wiki, we will have to make sure that editors don't take the view that "what works for me, must certainly work for everyone-else". Otherwise, it may be a very confusing wiki.

Likewise, a basic set of rules and expectations should be set down in the early stages. For instance, can private campaigns write their own pages? Should any pages relating to these campaigns be marked or categorised in some way? If anything is quoted from the BRCS, should it have a certain format? Are certain pages locked so that only moderators can edit them? Should all BRCS-related pages be locked? How will we differentiate AD&D entries vs D&D3.5 entries?

Does anyone know of any large scale wikis for any other campaign setting?

Sorontar.