Will Outsider get a wiki?

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Gudo
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Will Outsider get a wiki?

Post by Gudo »

Are there any plans to make a wiki for Outsider? I'm curious, because I think we could pretty effectively bundle together the comic and and the Outsider Insider into a single fairly seamless site.

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Arioch
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Re: Will Outsider get a wiki?

Post by Arioch »

I don't have any current plans to set up a wiki. Naturally I can't prevent someone else from doing so, but I have reservations about whether that would be a good thing.

First is that the wiki would compete with the Insider. The wiki would probably have a lot of information that wasn't in the Insider, but much of this information would likely be opinion, speculation, outdated, or just plain wrong. I change things in the Insider pretty frequently, so being out of date would be pretty much a constant problem.

Second is that being a control freak, I would feel compelled to police the information in the wiki myself. This would a) probably not be the best use of my time, and b) is likely to piss off the loyal fans who have poured their heart and soul into writing an article only to have me come along and destroy it.

Darth Cloaked Guy
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Re: Will Outsider get a wiki?

Post by Darth Cloaked Guy »

I dunno, I personally would be rather honored to pour my heart and soul into an article and then have Word of God come along in its place.

Maybe I'm weird.

EDIT: Also, Insider is quite awesome, but could certainly stand a bit more cross-reference.

EDIT 2: The wiki should cite its sources.

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Re: Will Outsider get a wiki?

Post by Karst45 »

meh, i feel that the wiki would only be a copy of the insider.

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Re: Will Outsider get a wiki?

Post by Darth Cloaked Guy »

Karst45 wrote:meh, i feel that the wiki would only be a copy of the insider.
Perhaps Insider might be converted into a wiki of sorts? A little cross-referencing would make everything more awesome.

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Sprawl63
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Re: Will Outsider get a wiki?

Post by Sprawl63 »

Karst45 wrote:meh, i feel that the wiki would only be a copy of the insider.
My feelings.

Although, it would be nice to have someplace to categorize and store the tidbits of information that Arioch shares on the forums. Other then that .txt file that happens to float up every once in a while.

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Re: Will Outsider get a wiki?

Post by Mayhem »

Sprawl63 wrote:Although, it would be nice to have someplace to categorize and store the tidbits of information that Arioch shares on the forums. Other then that .txt file that happens to float up every once in a while.
A lot of that ends up in Insider later anyway.

Until someone comes up a good example of content that would make sense as a wiki I see no point in it.

The closest I have come so far is:
  • a "may be of interest" page that lists external web pages that discuss/analyse the kind of science we argue over in these forums (which may as well just be a thread on these forums).
  • a single page with the correct spelling of all species, character names, terms etc so I don't have to track down the correct spelling Soia or Umiak every time I use them (I have managed to learn Loroi).
Other non speculative contributions (as speculation belongs on the forum) are probably best just submitted to Arioch for him to decide if they are useful/accurate.
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flarecde
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Re: Will Outsider get a wiki?

Post by flarecde »

I don't think a Wiki is particularly necessary since the Insider is so well maintained. Although there is the occasional "Arioch said this on the forums but I don't remember where" situation.
Reality is nothing, perception is everything.

AndrejaKo
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Re: Will Outsider get a wiki?

Post by AndrejaKo »

I've been thinking about this in the past and here are some of my thoughts on the subject:

The Insider is fine for a source of official information but one thing that is standard feature of wikis is missing on the Insider. I'd like to see a search function there. When I need to dig up a piece of fluff, I usually don't know in which of (now numerous) articles it is contained.

Next point: On the previous forum, there was large number of discussions related to the fluff and popular tangents. While most of the good fluff threads did end up in the Insider, some of the tangents didn't until recently. For example we've head 43813481393 threads about stealth in space, why space mines aren't a very effective weapon, how would planetary defenses work and so on. The main problem with those threads is their repetitive nature. Basically the story goes: New member appears and claims that tactic X would work because of Y. Then forum members explain that it won't because of Z. Then we have a 20 default page thread discussing that. After couple of weeks another new member appears and again claims that same tactic X would work because of Y and that is refuted by Z, so there's very little or no useful work being done. Now if I remember correctly, on the old forum, threads would get deleted after some time, so this would leave room for repetition. This new forum could solve that because threads would be here and search would find them.

The point now is that we're stepping into new territory: A large number of the tangential discussions (obviously) aren't very related to Outsider itself, so if we use wiki to say list some common arguments, that would turn the wiki into wiki of Outsider community, which is different from Outsider wiki.

Next point would be semi-official information categorization. We all know of the ancient .txt full of quotes from the old forum and character sheets for GURPS, various statistics for armor and weapons and so on. I think I remember a big argument which rose from a deprecated armor chart and new weapon damage chart. If we had a wiki, such problems could be avoided.

The problem with last two points is the implied assumption that the target population will read the wiki in the first place. Some of the problems there could be solved with a few forum stickies, but as we know, nobody reads those.


Another point worth mentioning is: How would wiki impact forums? If we use it in those repetitive discussions, such discussions may improve (and by that I mean, bring some new reasons why X should work which would be countered not by some new counterpoints) or they may disappear and then leave empty space in our forum.

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Gudo
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Re: Will Outsider get a wiki?

Post by Gudo »

AndrejaKo wrote:Tons of great stuff
Exactly. The biggest problem with the Insider and those various other canon information sources is that they're so frustrating to look through and search. There's also virtually no cross-linking. For example, the page on Telepathy doesn't link to the Loroi page, and visa versa. And I don't even think that the .txt file is included in the Insider anyways...
Arioch wrote:First is that the wiki would compete with the Insider. The wiki would probably have a lot of information that wasn't in the Insider, but much of this information would likely be opinion, speculation, outdated, or just plain wrong. I change things in the Insider pretty frequently, so being out of date would be pretty much a constant problem.

Second is that being a control freak, I would feel compelled to police the information in the wiki myself. This would a) probably not be the best use of my time, and b) is likely to piss off the loyal fans who have poured their heart and soul into writing an article only to have me come along and destroy it.
I was figuring that keeping the canon separate from the speculation and keeping all of it up to date would be an issue. My suggestion on this front would be to do one of two things.

1) Make a closed wiki. That is, change user permissions so that only Arioch and maybe a few other editors (who would deal with the cross-linking, making redirects, etc.) could edit. This would give you complete control over the information while presenting it in familiar, easy to search, cross-linked format. Instead of thinking of the wiki as competition for Insider, it would become more of a replacement.

2)Create an alternate namespace for canon material. A namespace like "canon" or "source" again, only editable by Arioch and maybe a few others. The main namespace would still be open to edits by the general public with the understanding that anything not said in the canon namespace is speculation and outdated and probably just wrong. While there's a bit of sacrifice on information control, this approach would still give you complete control over the actual source material. It would also provide the community that easy to search source material and a better place to hammer out those tangential discussions (as per AndrejaKo's post.)

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Imbrooge
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Re: Will Outsider get a wiki?

Post by Imbrooge »

Or we could just set-up a joke wiki and blatantly lie.

But really, I don't really like this idea, personally I find the Wiki to be very slow and ridiculously laggy on pretty much any computer I read it with. I think it would be better to just set up a sticky thread with links to all relevant cannon and other nuances. I mean I can go to the other forum right now and dig through it for a Word of God text file that has everything Arioch has said that is relevant to Outsider on that forum. Infact i'll do that now.

EDIT: Here it is, http://well-of-souls.com/temp/fredgiblet_quotations.txt

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Arioch
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Re: Will Outsider get a wiki?

Post by Arioch »

I added a local search function to the Insider page. It has issues: the ad results are annoying but easy to ignore; the "No Results" text is formatted such that it's hard to read; because it depends on crawlers, the results aren't up to date. But it's not too bad.

As I update and revamp pages I will keep in mind to add more cross-links.

There are two volumes of fredgiblet's compilation, with overlapping content. When I have a chance I'll organize them into some kind of format, and place them under the insider so that the content is searchable.

http://www.well-of-souls.com/temp/fredg ... ations.txt
http://www.well-of-souls.com/temp/fredg ... ns_mk2.txt

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Sprawl63
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Re: Will Outsider get a wiki?

Post by Sprawl63 »

By god, I pasted both of those in libreoffice and the first one is 83 pages and the second is 79.

I have a lot of reading to do.

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Re: Will Outsider get a wiki?

Post by Tash »

I just don't think a wiki is necessary. I've never had a problem with the Insider; it's perfectly satisfactory for finding information.
I don't understand the complaint about finding information in it.

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Grayhome
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Re: Will Outsider get a wiki?

Post by Grayhome »

I say nay to anything that takes Arioch's concentration away from the comic.

Pauses for food, water and sleep negotiable. :twisted:

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Arioch
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Re: Will Outsider get a wiki?

Post by Arioch »

I have posted fredge's compilations in a more accessible html format on the Insider page. I have also figured out how to tell the local Google search mechanism how to re-index on demand (by providing a site map), so the information from the compilations should now be searchable from the box provided on the Insider page. Not all the information is currently showing up via the local Google search, but I suspect that's just because it takes the Google crawler some time to properly index the whole thing.

NOMAD
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Re: Will Outsider get a wiki?

Post by NOMAD »

Grayhome wrote:I say nay to anything that takes Arioch's concentration away from the comic.

Pauses for food, water and sleep negotiable. :twisted:
now why would you say that, what Arioch did by integrating a search function shows how much he appreciates his fans ( and to easy our search for outsider info :mrgreen: )

thank you Arioch

now to get reading :)
I am a wander, going from place to place without a home I am a NOMAD

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Gudo
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Re: Will Outsider get a wiki?

Post by Gudo »

Awesome! I noticed the forum quote compilations were added, but never had time to post my thanks. I wonder, does Google pay for click throughs on the ads they serve with each search? *clicks everything*

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Arioch
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Re: Will Outsider get a wiki?

Post by Arioch »

Any thanks go to fredgiblet... the lion's share of time spend in compiling this information was spent by him.
Gudo wrote:I wonder, does Google pay for click throughs on the ads they serve with each search? *clicks everything*
Nah, the ads make the service free (otherwise you have to pay for it).

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