StrategyWiki talk:Community Portal/Vision

I opened discussion for what will likely be a large section of the community portal to here. This is to give the discussion the space it needs to develop. Hope this will keep the discussion running smoothly and still make the Community Portal readable for other topics. -- Mason11987 ^{(Talk - Contributions)} 08:27, 26 February 2007 (CST)

I offer SW a Vision

Apologies ahead of time if I sound arrogant. I usually don't notice I offend people until I see their reactions (no matter how much I pay attention to how I word things). Even if you get offended, I humbly ask that you at least read the last 2 paragraphs, to see what my main point is. The intermediate paragraphs can be summarized as:

1. Why compete against GuildWiki?
2. If GameFAQs ever goes wiki (and I'm surprised that they haven't), how can you compete against them?

Consider the game Guild Wars. There exists a wiki, GuildWiki (part of the gamewikis network), that is unquestionably the current best resource for Guild Wars. It has the following advantages:

• The wiki format of GuildWiki allows for multiple editors
• One game, one guide
• GuildWiki ensures that the guides remain open
• There are no more "plaintext" guides

So, why is StrategyWiki trying to create its own walkthrough for Guild Wars? With GuildWiki already having an overwhelming headstart, everyone who is anyone in the guild wars community is going to pay attention, and contribute, to GuildWiki. There is no way StrategyWiki's walkthrough on Guild Wars can catch up to be 10% as good as Guild Wiki, unless Gravewit (the guy behind the gamewikis network) gets killed in a car accident and the contracts expire so that two years of contributions by thousands of people vaporizes.

Even if GuildWiki were licensed under GFDL (it's not, it's under the CC-BY-NC license), and StrategyWiki manages to get a hold of a dump of the entire GuildWiki (minus personal user information), importing all that information into StrategyWiki will still make the guide on StrategyWiki inferior, in a sense, to GuildWiki.

You see, the very fact that the walkthroughs for every single game on StrategyWiki shares the same wiki-space, puts limitations and flexibility on what it can do. The fact that the game Guild Wars gets its own independent wiki-space on the gamewikis network gives it room to be better than any walkthrough that can be hosted on the current form of StrategyWiki.

Even if you ported all GuildWiki articles over (which you can't), and add necessary (Guild Wars) disambiguation (or put them under Guild Wars/), so that you have 100% identical information as GuildWiki has, when an avid fan of Guild Wars thinks about whether he should contribute to StrategyWiki or GuildWiki, I bet the bigger Guild Wars fans will choose GuildWiki, simply because it's themed, and is dedicated to Guild Wars, and they won't have to include the extra words "Guild Wars" in the names of 99% of the articles. Most of them won't know (or care) the difference between GFDL or CC-BY-NC, or your bigger visions.

Any set of articles for the game Guild Wars, hosted on StrategyWiki under its current structure, is going to be intrinsically inferior to GuildWiki.

Here is how I, an outsider, sees StrategyWiki as: I see it as a site that wants to become a GameFAQs.com that has only one guide for each game, uses pictures and richtext, and is open for collabrative editing. If I want help with a random game and I don't know where to begin, I would probably go to GameFAQs first, and your vision is to replace the role of GameFAQs by providing guides of higher quality (GameFAQs' current structure makes it intrinsically inferior to StrategyWiki). A noble vision, but limits the guides and prevent some of them to become the best guides that could exist for some of the games. Additionally, if GameFAQs ever decide to go wiki (with a copyleft license), you will be almost instantly defeated because they are already better known and have developed a bigger user base. StrategyWiki will no longer be different.

That is pretty much as we are. Although GameFAQs can't switch licenses, as they can't change the license of already submitted info without the creator's permission. That being said, many GameFAQs writers don't want their guides under a copy-left license (I've asked dozens of them to put their guides here). So if they did switch licenses, they would have to remove pretty much all their content, and I believe we would win out, because at least we would have some content. Because we started with a copy-left and all our content is a copy-left, then barring any large mishap, we will overtake GameFAQs in terms of content, we already have in terms of quality. Simply because of the fact that they can't change to be like us. -- Mason11987 ^{(Talk - Contributions)} 08:52, 26 February 2007 (CST)

Last 2 paragraphs starts here

I offer SW a vision: Become a hub, a portal, a place where everyone goes to find where the best open guide for any game is located at (which may or maynot be on SW). The game Guild Wars has GuildWiki, so you just point everyone who come here to look for a walkthrough for Guild Wars to Guild Wiki, and never worry about making one hosted on SW. The game Foo Bar has several extensive guides on the internet, but none of them are in an open (wiki with copyleft licensing) format, so StrategyWiki developes its own at http://strategywiki.org/w/Foo_Bar. Later say Foo Bar come out with a total of 3 sequals, all highly connected, and the world view and lore has become greatly enriched, and you create a "sub-wiki" at http://foobar.strategywiki.org for the entire Foo Bar game series. You will still have wiki walkthroughs for games, and you can win over Foo Bar fans as contributors (against other encompassing walkthrough sites that also decide to go wiki) because there is a dedicated Foo Bar sub-wiki hosted at strategywiki.

Hack the mediawiki software to allow displaying of "local recent changes" (say, on Foo Bar Wiki only) and "global recent changes" (across ALL sub-wikis and the central wiki on the strategywiki network). Attract community of gamer fans by giving the games they love enough space to call home (by having themed sub-wikis for games that are connected and have more freedom in article creation/naming), not hotel rooms. With that, issues 3~5 regarding the merger offer for AliceSoftWiki can all be resolved by having a http://alicesoft.strategywiki.org. I offer the vision to you freely, and hope that if things work out I might have some subliminal advantages when negeociating about issue 2 regarding AliceSoftWiki. d-: -Afker 06:04, 26 February 2007 (CST)

First, noone should be offended, we greatly thank you for your discussions here and for bringing up this idea. I hope I didn't offend by moving your topic to a place where it can have more space to be discuss fully.

Now... this is all plausible, the only thing is we would have to be able to of course carry user log-ins across subdomains (wp is working on this now, so it's clearly possible). We would also have to be able to possibly have different servers or specially designated server space for each big name series. Other then that, I don't see this having may hiccups. I believe something like this DOES have potentially huge benefits. At the moment, I'm one of two people running SporeWiki, I don't know if this would fall within the bounds of even this newly broadened sets of goals (as it has A LOT of user created "fan-creatures") but it would sure come closer, and we do have a fairly large following, and really idiotic management of server space apparently as the link is down... eh, show you later, and we're also GFDL. So come closer to launch I could see that coming over, maybe.

The key reason why we have put limitations on what we can do is because if we broaden our goals too wide, too early on, we may lose focus (even wikipedia has limits on content) and create a broader, but lower quality, site. That being said, I think this is something we should look into, each subdomain wiki could be accessed via interwiki links, (such as the Guild Wars guide going to [[guildwars:Guild Wars]]) and we can have all the main pages and information mages on the sub-wiki's redirect to the main one. It would be best if this could all go under one mediawiki installation, but having subdomain wiki's might make that impossible, and so upgrades would be even more difficult.

There are certainly some pro's, but there are large con's, and this is potentially a significant change to the site. All in all, I Support the concept and the basic workings of the idea. Interestingly enough, even though it is a large change to the physical workings of strategywiki, it would be relatively minor to get going compared to some of our other large scale changes we're tried (the re-licensing project...). This is because no articles would actually have to be moved at first, although I imagine we'll start this off with the alicesoft stuff if that goes through, then likely set up a Final Fantasy one (which I would love to get connected and working if this goes through). I don't know the actual difficulties in getting something like this going from echelon's end, but if it's feasible and not very difficult, and there aren't any major reasons to not do this which I haven't brought up already, I think this could be very useful and beneficial to strategywiki. -- Mason11987 ^{(Talk - Contributions)} 08:52, 26 February 2007 (CST)

The idea of making branches of the strategywiki site for games would work quite well in my opinion. However, it'd have to have requirements on a game for it to work well. There's no point of giving the game super mario brothers it's own section of strategywiki other than the existing page. The entirety of the game can be summed up easily (and already is) in one page. Unless you were going to make pages on all of it's different variations, glitches, tricks, baddies, backgrounds, and styles of playing, it's simply not big enough for the section to have it's own search engine. But if we were working on a game like Guild wars or Pardus, we'd need a way to sub-categorize it so we can search for a page in it and so we don't have to make pages with names likeGuild wars/Combat/Application of skills/Elementalist#Control storm. If the game had it's own subsection, we could put a Guild Wars symbol before every page and shorten the page to [[/GW/]]Application of Skills/Elementalist#Control storm. That way, it'd still be classified as part of the guide and shorten the page name. Another idea that could work is putting a search bar into the guide although that wouldn't be as useful.--Navy White 10:21, 26 February 2007 (CST)

While I agree with Mason that there is some merit to your suggestions, and may be feasible later on in SW's lifetime after it has become a little more established, the two enumerated points that you make at the top of logically flawed.

Why compete against GuildWiki? Why does any site compete with any site? This is the basis for content on the web. It's a bit of digital Darwinism, survival of the fittest. After wikipedia gained popularity, tons of wiki sites began to pop up. How many of those are still active today? And tons more will start in the future, but the likelihood that they will have an appreciable inpact on the web, or even stick around very long, is unlikely unless they are a top quality site like SW. More than likely, a spin-off wiki site will live or die by the dedication and vibrancy of it's supporting community. So you are more than likely correct that we will never match GuildWiki, or for another example, FFXIcyclopedia. But that is no reason why we shouldn't at least attempt to provide basic information. If they voluntarily offered to join StrategyWiki as you have, that would be wonderful. But until that voluntarily happens, there's no reason to change SW's strategy in to a Borg-like assimilation of multiple web-sites. SW is subject to the same forces of survival or withering that other wiki sites are subject to. And I believe we are proving to be quite a force to reckon with.

If GameFAQs ever goes wiki, how can you compete against them? A) GameFAQs will never go wiki. At least not unless CJayC is willing to sacrifice the model that he has spent the past ten years developing and promoting. What would happen to all of the files currently stored on the site? They certainly wouldn't be regarded as archaic overnight, there are some brilliant pieces of work over there. B) Wikis will never replace FAQs. The two formats may compete on some level, but both are going to coexist for quite a long time. Some authors of video game guides will always choose to work alone rather than in tandem with a community of writers. And while the visitors of SW prefer to community approach, GameFAQs will have considerable amounts of contributions from lone authors for the foreseeable future. It's all a question of taste, on both the writers' part and the readers' part.

As far as subdomains go, I think it's a great idea if, and only if, a site voluntarily offers their content to SW. Perhaps http://alicesoft.strategywiki.org could become the first test bed for this approach, and if it is proven successful, it can serve as a model of possibilities to attract other sites. I guess my point is, I believe SW should keep doing exactly as it's doing, and hopefully grow influential enough to attract wiki talent on its own, rather going out and offering it's services to other sites. Procyon 10:27, 26 February 2007 (CST)