[syphon]

(cross-posting from The Phoenix Inn, as it was recommended I post here too)

Hi everyone, I'm a long-time reader, but only a recent poster (as I'm sure you can see ).

I just wanted to tell you all about a project we're working on. Some people from another forum and I have gotten together to create a new Malazan Wiki, based on MediaWiki (the same wiki software that Wikipedia uses):

www.hoodsballs.com - Hood's Balls: The Malazan Wiki of the Fallen

Like I said, Hood's Balls is a Malazan wiki based on MediaWiki. One of our key features is our Spoiler Level system. How it works, is a user selects which books they have read from a drop down on the page. Then, each wiki article is cross-referenced by what book it appears in. For example, if you've only read up to Bonehunters, any piece of information that is revealed in say, Toll The Hounds will be hidden from you (so as to avoid spoiling the death of a favorite character, or significant plot movement).

We also have plans in the works to create a map feature somewhat similar to Google Maps (although to be honest, that's not ready yet).

Anyway, we're just getting started, so we could definitely use help building content. I wanted to post a link here to see what you guys all think. Also, I would definitely like to encourage everyone to contribute if they so chose!

[Imperial Historian]

I like it.

The layouts nice and clean, and the spoiler system is something I wish pbwiki was more laid out for (though it will be a LOT of extra work to make sure no spoilers creep in I'd imagine).

That said content is understandably low for a beginning wiki, and I think your navigator bar at the top of the main page needs to be accessible from anywhere in the wiki, but other than that great job.

[End of Disc One]

I support this because I like the layout and love the spoiler blocking thing. However I don't have the expertise or time to contribute...

[teholbeddict]

I prefer the format of this wiki. It is straight forward, easy to use and lays things out nicely for the user. Good job!

[syphon]

Imperial Historian, on Feb 2 2009, 06:42 PM, said:

I like it.

The layouts nice and clean, and the spoiler system is something I wish pbwiki was more laid out for (though it will be a LOT of extra work to make sure no spoilers creep in I'd imagine).

That said content is understandably low for a beginning wiki, and I think your navigator bar at the top of the main page needs to be accessible from anywhere in the wiki, but other than that great job.

Do you mean this thing, or the entire top section?

 Capture.PNG (3.63K)
Number of downloads: 8

[syphon]

End of Disc One, on Feb 2 2009, 09:31 PM, said:

I support this because I like the layout and love the spoiler blocking thing. However I don't have the expertise or time to contribute...

Nonsense! It's actually really easy (I'd never contributed to Wikipedia, so I was skeptical when I started too).

Once you create an account and log in, all you have to do is click the 'Edit' link at the top of the page. Then you can type whatever you want. Linking other pages is easy... just wrap any word you want linked in [[ ]]. It makes it really easy to make a page that links to lots of other pages (half the fun of browsing wikis is chasing down links for all the stuff you want to read about!). For example... I would type something like this...

[[Whiskeyjack]] was a sergeant of the [[Bridgeburners]], 
a squad in the [[Malazan Empire]] army.
In the books, they served mostly in [[Genabackis]], 
from the [[Siege of Pale]] down through [[Darujhistan]] and 
into [[Coral]].

That was really easy to type up, and each of those words/phrases will be a link to that page on the wiki!

Best of all, the page you link doesn't HAVE to exist. If someone creates a link to a page that doesn't exist, it'll show up as a red link. Then, all someone has to do is click that link to create a page for it!

Overall, I'm really impressed with how easy it is to add content to the wiki.

This post has been edited by syphon: 02 February 2009 - 10:43 PM

[Imperial Historian]

I meant the thing, I've found when using our wiki that being able to navigate quickly back to a base list is very usefu, but I guess thats a matter of taste.l

[D'rek]

syphon, on Feb 2 2009, 05:37 PM, said:

End of Disc One, on Feb 2 2009, 09:31 PM, said:

I support this because I like the layout and love the spoiler blocking thing. However I don't have the expertise or time to contribute...

Nonsense! It's actually really easy (I'd never contributed to Wikipedia, so I was skeptical when I started too).

Once you create an account and log in, all you have to do is click the 'Edit' link at the top of the page. Then you can type whatever you want. Linking other pages is easy... just wrap any word you want linked in [[ ]]. It makes it really easy to make a page that links to lots of other pages (half the fun of browsing wikis is chasing down links for all the stuff you want to read about!). For example... I would type something like this...

[[Whiskeyjack]] was a sergeant of the [[Bridgeburners]], 
a squad in the [[Malazan Empire]] army.
In the books, they served mostly in [[Genabackis]], 
from the [[Siege of Pale]] down through [[Darujhistan]] and 
into [[Coral]].

That was really easy to type up, and each of those words/phrases will be a link to that page on the wiki!

Best of all, the page you link doesn't HAVE to exist. If someone creates a link to a page that doesn't exist, it'll show up as a red link. Then, all someone has to do is click that link to create a page for it!

Overall, I'm really impressed with how easy it is to add content to the wiki.

Apparently the BBs didn't do much before the Siege of Pale...

This post has been edited by D'rek: 03 February 2009 - 06:28 PM

[Aptorian]

Yeah those 10 years went by really fast

[D'rek]

And really, Nathilog, Mott Wood, Blackdog Forest, G'Danisban, Raraku, the Malaz City riots... those are all just, like, footnote stuff.

This post has been edited by D'rek: 03 February 2009 - 07:16 PM

[syphon]

... or stuff that occurred before we first see them (they are first introduced in GoTM at Pale). It even says 'in the books...'.

Any more info should probably be spoilered, but that's up to the discretion of the writer.

EDIT: Also, it was just a quick sample guys! Go easy on me!

This post has been edited by syphon: 03 February 2009 - 09:19 PM

[HoosierDaddy]

D'rek, on Feb 3 2009, 01:28 PM, said:

syphon, on Feb 2 2009, 05:37 PM, said:

End of Disc One, on Feb 2 2009, 09:31 PM, said:

I support this because I like the layout and love the spoiler blocking thing. However I don't have the expertise or time to contribute...

Nonsense! It's actually really easy (I'd never contributed to Wikipedia, so I was skeptical when I started too).

Once you create an account and log in, all you have to do is click the 'Edit' link at the top of the page. Then you can type whatever you want. Linking other pages is easy... just wrap any word you want linked in [[ ]]. It makes it really easy to make a page that links to lots of other pages (half the fun of browsing wikis is chasing down links for all the stuff you want to read about!). For example... I would type something like this...

[[Whiskeyjack]] was a sergeant of the [[Bridgeburners]], 
a squad in the [[Malazan Empire]] army.
In the books, they served mostly in [[Genabackis]], 
from the [[Siege of Pale]] down through [[Darujhistan]] and 
into [[Coral]].

That was really easy to type up, and each of those words/phrases will be a link to that page on the wiki!

Best of all, the page you link doesn't HAVE to exist. If someone creates a link to a page that doesn't exist, it'll show up as a red link. Then, all someone has to do is click that link to create a page for it!

Overall, I'm really impressed with how easy it is to add content to the wiki.

Apparently the BBs didn't do much before the Siege of Pale...

Aptorian, on Feb 3 2009, 01:32 PM, said:

Yeah those 10 years went by really fast

D'rek, on Feb 3 2009, 02:15 PM, said:

And really, Nathilog, Mott Wood, Blackdog Forest, G'Danisban, Raraku, the Malaz City riots... those are all just, like, footnote stuff.

And someone had the audacity to question whether or not we were still snobs.

[Wry]

I believe that's pronounced "dicks"



On topic, i'm waiting for someone to suggest collaboration, surely it's not so difficult to merge our better knowledge with their better layout
Admittedly i don't know how much actual work it involves. Also i neither use or contribute to the Encyclopedia.

Still it seems logical

[D'rek]

Collaboration? Nobody here spends more than like an hour a month on the wiki, it would take half a year just to brainstorm collaborative planning...

And don't worry Syphon, we're just teasing you oppressively!!!

[Imperial Historian]

Personally I have no problem with collaboration, but moving information from the encyclopedia to hoods balls would require a hell of a lot of effort, especially if the spoiler system is in use, the encyclopedia has something over a thousand pages, everyone of which would have to be re-formatted and checked for spoilers relating to each book which would probably take quite some time. I don't see much benefit in that myself, it's just duplicating work.

That said if someone comes up with a suitable system to combine the wiki's onto some other better software I'd be interested, I looked into it before but there wasn't an easy way to do it, if the situations changed let me know!

Anyones free to use the quote bank we've built up to write articles for either wiki though. I'm hoping pbwiki 3.0 improves the features we have so we can redesign the wiki somewhat into something more accessible.

[vanmartin]

Imperial Historian, on Feb 4 2009, 09:10 PM, said:

Personally I have no problem with collaboration, but moving information from the encyclopedia to hoods balls would require a hell of a lot of effort, especially if the spoiler system is in use, the encyclopedia has something over a thousand pages, everyone of which would have to be re-formatted and checked for spoilers relating to each book which would probably take quite some time. I don't see much benefit in that myself, it's just duplicating work.

That said if someone comes up with a suitable system to combine the wiki's onto some other better software I'd be interested, I looked into it before but there wasn't an easy way to do it, if the situations changed let me know!

Anyones free to use the quote bank we've built up to write articles for either wiki though. I'm hoping pbwiki 3.0 improves the features we have so we can redesign the wiki somewhat into something more accessible.

There's probably no automated way to migrate the info from one wiki to another. The best would be to advise contributors to Hoods Balls to check Encyclopedia Malazica when creating or editing pages and copying relevant info into the right sections. While we're on the subject, Wikipedia also contains a decent amount of info. I don't know what their policies on copying/pasting info is, but it would be another good source to check before creating/editing pages on Hood Balls.

On a different subject. Does Werthead post on these forums? I'd like to ask permission to reference his world map on Hood Balls. We want to layer the Malazan maps onto Google Maps. It will provide another (very intuitive) way of accessing wiki info.

[D'rek]

vanmartin, on Feb 6 2009, 03:29 AM, said:

There's probably no automated way to migrate the info from one wiki to another. The best would be to advise contributors to Hoods Balls to check Encyclopedia Malazica when creating or editing pages and copying relevant info into the right sections. While we're on the subject, Wikipedia also contains a decent amount of info. I don't know what their policies on copying/pasting info is, but it would be another good source to check before creating/editing pages on Hood Balls.

On a different subject. Does Werthead post on these forums? I'd like to ask permission to reference his world map on Hood Balls. We want to layer the Malazan maps onto Google Maps. It will provide another (very intuitive) way of accessing wiki info.

Adam/Werthead has an account on these forums but only really hangs out in the Other Fantasy and a couple other sections, so I doubt he'd see this. Try sending him a PM.

While Wikipedia does have some good info, I'd advise not copying from them, or at least reading it over 6 times before you do. They've had some really, really stupid major errors in there before...

This post has been edited by D'rek: 07 February 2009 - 12:15 AM

[HoosierDaddy]

Midnight Tides as a stand-alone FTW!

[Yellow]

syphon, I put this comment in another thread, but you may not have seen it:

Shouldn't the picture of Hood with his balls be classified as a a spoiler? It does make it quite obvious what race he is... perhaps black out the tusks?

Also, I agree with whoever about collaboration - seems obvious to me. You have one effort that looks great (with a format that readers will be very familiar with already), and another that has all the meat. Why go separate ways? There may be a thousand pages to go through, but you can set up scripts for re-formatting, surely? Or even if not, all of you take a chunk of pages and get cracking. It will feel good once you're finished

This post has been edited by Yellow: 07 February 2009 - 10:31 AM

[D'rek]

Yellow, on Feb 7 2009, 05:30 AM, said:

syphon, I put this comment in another thread, but you may not have seen it:

Shouldn't the picture of Hood with his balls be classified as a a spoiler? It does make it quite obvious what race he is... perhaps black out the tusks?

Also, I agree with whoever about collaboration - seems obvious to me. You have one effort that looks great (with a format that readers will be very familiar with already), and another that has all the meat. Why go separate ways? There may be a thousand pages to go through, but you can set up scripts for re-formatting, surely? Or even if not, all of you take a chunk of pages and get cracking. It will feel good once you're finished

We "go seperate ways" precisely because of your first bit. It seems we are a bit more anal about spoilers and referencing than any other wiki that has since tried to come along. While a pretty format is nice, we're not about to sacrifice our professional dependability for visual appeal. Past wiki-attempts have not been diligent enough for this, but maybe hoodsballs is different and it is only the front page image that needs concern us, but it may be too early to tell such matters...