StrategyWiki:Guide/About

StrategyWiki was founded in December 2005 by former member Brandon Suit with the idea that the existing strategy guides on the internet could be improved. Three years later, in December 2008, Scott Jacobi officially established ABXY LLC for the purpose of owning and operating StrategyWiki as a community. Our vision is to bring free, collaborative video game strategy guides to the masses.

Traditionally, video game walkthroughs have been created as plain text files with no formatting or embellishments other than visual tricks such as ASCII art. In recent years this format has been increasingly criticized for not having evolved along with advances in web design and web content accessibility. With the powerful MediaWiki processing engine at its core, StrategyWiki guides can utilize features such as rich text, tables and inline images – all things that are either impossible or extremely difficult to replicate in a plain text file and can contribute greatly to the impact of a walkthrough.

Why StrategyWiki? What makes it so different?
There are many problems which StrategyWiki seeks to improve upon:

The wiki format of StrategyWiki allows for multiple editors, thus improving the insight and quality each guide receives. With many people able to lend their help and knowledge, guides can quickly gain depth. And with a wide range of editors, secrets are more easily discovered, discussed, and documented. Enforcing the community aspect of guide creation also serves to stifle elitism.

One game, one guide. Unlike other sites, which allow an unlimited number of guides per games, we only allow one: with too many choices, it quickly becomes a confusing task to choose which guide is right for you. Collaboratively working on one central guide for each game ensures a higher quality guide in the end.

StrategyWiki ensures that the guides remain open. With StrategyWiki, content never "dies", and it can be updated by other writers even if original contributors abandon the guide. This is not true with many other sites, which only allow the original author to edit his or her guide; once the author abandons a guide, there will be no more updates, improvements, or corrections. StrategyWiki content is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License, the same license used by Wikipedia, Wikia, and various other wikis. See Copyrights for more information.

The death of plain text. We have real readability. With adventure games, we can even have multiple-page guides that ensure that a user does not stumble upon spoilers. There's also real markup, and images can be attached. Video walkthroughs can even be linked to at sites like YouTube.

Contacting us
If you'd like to interact with the StrategyWiki community, feel free to contact anyone via the information left on our user pages, use the forums at ABXY.org (a sister project to StrategyWiki), or chat with us on IRC using the web interface or your own IRC client. You can talk with an administrator if you need assistance.

More information

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