@Lotherio said in Wiki and You:
I think, for me at least, wikis are a tool that can help others find RP, or share stories and help the creative process of the shared environment.
This is my take on it also. I wouldn't call folks who are wiki-averse also change-averse, though, but there's a reason for that.
Like any other 'new thing being tried', some people hate the very idea of people trying it. Sometimes it's because something similar has been done badly. Sometimes it's because they like the old way a lot. Sometimes it's a misconception about how things work, or an assumption that things will be a certain way -- they can't see a positive way it could work, or one that would be seamless from their end re: what they're used to.
I saw enough of this in the other thread that I just didn't really bother responding beyond where I left it; I can either fumble around trying to explain shit that's above my paygrade to explain but can be done, or I can get on with doing it. (I'm better at showing than telling is the best way to sum this up.)
A lot of explaining was required to even get there, because what I've managed to get done was not done without help.
Explaining why doesn't always come across. I probably couldn't explain why now to most people who would have the capability to help me get there, because those people have vastly different skillsets, and a fairly large chunk of the principle behind it is 'make it easier on people who don't have those skillsets'. 'Develop that skillset' is not the best answer; for instance: what we have now is an advanced skillset (MUX/MUSH/MUD/etc. code), it takes a great deal of time to learn, documentation is often not written in plain or easily digestible language for a novice or requires understanding of concepts that the documentation assumes the reader already knows (when often they do not and it's not always explained elsewhere), and even as someone with reasonable intelligence who has poked at things a little from time to time, I have difficulty making sense of it at times, so I can't imagine how hard someone who is relatively new to this on the whole.
If there are alternative approaches that can reduce this specific barrier to entry in game play, and especially in game creation, I think it is wise to explore them.
The tl;dr of this: pretty much anybody can fill out a web form without needing any prior education in MU code -- using or writing it.
While explaining 'if we had this one thing... ' took a while before someone was willing to bite, a few discussions of what that one thing could do have (I think? I hope?) made some of its potential clear, at least to the folks who helped make it happen. (And that's just what I could envision doing with it in a short span of time, not 'the whole community throws in ideas'.)
What I know is this: with what's essentially one tweak to an existing tool, as a hopeless novice MU coder, I'm now able to take a piece of data from the wiki and format it for the MUX. +finger? Populate it from the same data that's on the wiki, and both remain consistent. Chargen? Fill out a form. Click a link. It takes the information you entered and creates the basics of your character page -- which you never need to touch or fiddle with again after that if you don't want to; a second link of the same kind for staff sets up your sheet on the wiki, which is in a staff-only editable namespace, preventing tampering and automatically providing a log of all changes to that page viewable to everyone for full transparency. And so on.
Wiki cross-references better than a MUX in a variety of ways. With one single change to a drop-down menu, faction maintenance, wanted concept listings, sphere/group membership, 'who lives in this region', etc. can all be maintained at once without further changes. If that information is also being piped to the game, again, you have one change that requires no formal code primer or cheat sheet for even the newest staffer on the team to keep things current without running through half a dozen MUX commands to accomplish the same thing. Again, these changes are visible on the wiki and the game after the few seconds it takes SQL to update. In regard to the amount of time this saves in terms of game maintenance (and everything staying properly updated across the board instead of something getting missed), it would be hard for someone to convince me this is in any way a bad thing, or is not useful, and that's without even considering how much faster and easier it is.
For instance, we're looking at something like this: Need a statted NPC or creature? Like creating a +temproom, make a +tempnpc. Just set the name of its wiki page when you create it, and it automatically populates its sheet, stats, and powers, for immediate reference without requiring notes, making it easier to run things on the fly. (This is 100% doable, it's just a matter of the doing.) Want to set up a Creature, Generic Thug, or other NPC like that that doesn't exist? Create it from drop down menus and save the page in minutes, tops -- and then it's a resource that the whole game can potentially use when/if needed just as easily as indicated above going forward; you've just added a valuable resource for the game and lowered the barrier to entry for scene runners by providing them with a helpful quickstart for a pickup scene to run on the fly or an NPC they can use when creating their plots.
