The POLL you see here has a LOT of options, and you can select multiple responses!! The POLL is public, so I can see who to reach on different topics.

PLEASE READ THIS INFORMATION BEFORE VOTING IN THE POLL.

I'm in the process of researching (and experimenting) with a WIKI for the PaxLair Community, and possibly for the Chesapeake Community.

I think as a community, we need a place to document a lot of things easily -- and allow everyone to add, edit, and maintain information.

What is a WIKI? What does it look like? I've put some information about PaxLair and community pages in other WIKIs - take a look!

• Worldwide Wikipedia - PaxLair Entry.
• UO Stuff
  • PaxLair Entry
  • Player Town Entry
  • Player Town List
    • See Chesapeake on this list and see our PaxLair Cities pages

OK, so if UO Stuff and UO Guide are already created as WIKIs, why not just use them?

That is an EXCELLENT question!! Maybe we should! But will they be around forever? What happens if the owner takes them offline (we lose all our hard work and information). Do their WIKIs have the necessary tools and features installed for us as a COLLABORATIVE community? Do they have restricted content areas, and protected pages? (there are many different WIKI engines with different capabilities -- I'm not even sure what kind they use.)

This DOES NOT replace WIKIs for UO that have UO game mechanics information or basic information about UO Communities and links, like www.uostuff.com or www.uoguide.com .

This DOES NOT replace UOForums as our PaxLair Forums and Private Messaging capabilities. I don't want to set up new forums or Calendars. (there may be some specific calendar features put into the WIKI to allow small groups to work together)

This DOES NOT replace UO Stratics as a primary News Source. We still need to reach a wide audience in UO through publishing news articles on UO Stratics Chesapeake.

Our www.paxlair.com site is good, but is very manpower intensive to even load basic news, biographies, city pages, and information. That's because the Joomla CMS we use (while very flexible) is not set up well for multiple people to add content unless they have Manager or Administrator access (which gives them access to nearly everything on the site).

My goal is to allow ANYONE to add information to the PaxLair Community site. There can be some Restricted Pages that are only be edited by administrators or selected individuals.

In a WIKI, all changes are logged and some are submitted to Reviewers before the edits go live.

What can this do for you?

• Create your own city pages.
• Create your court pages and file your own court cases.
• Add news yourself.
• Send out alerts.
• Add and edit your own biographies.
• Upload your own images.
• Have a set of pages for your adventures and events.
• Have a private area to create a Play before releasing to the public.
• Document your meeting minutes fast and keep them organized.
• Start a section for Quests with details about each type of Quest.
• Link to other WIKIs with dungeon, monster, and other information.

How easy is it to add information to a WIKI? I don't have time to learn HTML, special coding, and what not.

Good question! WIKIs are almost as easy as posting on a message board. The flexibility of the WIKI though lets you organize your information, link it easily to other articles, and edit other people's articles to add useful information.

There's a LOT of instructions on how to create and edit WIKI pages. We can also create specific videos on how to edit or use our specific PaxLair or Chesapeake WIKI (I have Camtasia 5 to make videos).

Here's basic information on how to edit a WIKI Page.

I want to make this a COMMUNITY PROJECT, not dependent on any one person. I don't like single point failures in our Community. Also, I want this to be designed so if I ever (for whatever terrible reason) must leave PaxLair or UO, all of the WIKI transfers to another individual easily and will be maintained.

• Some people will be administrators of the Domain that we host the WIKI on (I have plenty of space and multiple domain capability).
• Some people will be administrators of the WIKI, but can't access the domain directly (for patches, upgrades, installations, etc.).
• Some people will be reviewers of WIKI content to check things daily, authorize certain information, and monitor changes people make publicly.
• Most people will be contributors to the WIKI. With a little training, skill and discipline, the WIKI can grow immensely!! It is after all an Open Community Effort.

Spam Control - there are advanced ways to limit Spamming on WIKIs and we will install all that is needed to prevent spammers.

Destruction of Content - Since WIKIs by their nature Log everything done on the WIKI, it is really hard to irreversibly destroy content.

What happens to the current www.paxlair.com web site?

I'd like to see it transformed into the WIKI. I'm not sure the WIKI will be called www.paxlair.com though. www.paxlair.com may have some basic information about PaxLair, and then point to the main WIKI page where information is loaded about PaxLair itself.

So the WIKI I propose would probably be on another domain that I create. AND this depends on whether we should do this for all of Chesapeake or just PaxLair.

Personally, I'd like to do this for all of Chesapeake so every city, town, citizen can add something about themselves in one place. Again, it does not replace their own web sites or forums, but gives everyone a place to interact and add information.

What WIKI is best?

I am currently looking at TikiWiki.

• Home Page
• Feature Tour
• Online Documentation
• Community World Map (various users)
• A SourceForge.Net Project
• It's Free, Open Source, and has nearly hourly fixes developed by a large group of developers.

So this POLL is open to everyone to give me feedback and desires. Add your comments please!!

Sincerely,
-- Player behind Winfield

I'd love to see a wiki dedicated to Chesapeake as a whole. Being one of the older shard it has more history than many and a wiki dedicated to the shard would be an excellent place to catalog that history.

I'd also take a look at MediaWiki it's the same platform the Wikipedia uses for their site, and it's open source also.

I voted to not use Wiki unless you Merge it with the PaxLair Website or shut it down.

We spread all our information out all over and its even hard for me to research things. Like I was talking to Scionic trying to remember a female red guard in PaxLair city around 98 99 and I couldnt find it but, I dont want to have to go to Wiki too and still not be able to find it.

Now if you setup Wiki to be on the PaxLair website and it does news feeds like that and it has links on the PaxLair website like (Example)

Lady Katherines Court Logs
(Link directs you to Katherines Wiki)

Then I like that. Just dont make me go to three different sites to find information.

I say make it for what you know best, which is PaxLair. If others have known history from other parts of the shard, then they should also be able to step up to the plate and handle their area of expertise. You should not be responsible for everything, everywhere, although I do admire your dedication.

I admire the desire to have a complete set of knoweldge of all of Chesapeake...we should get to that point... we should get the Wiki up first and then move on with that...but PaxLair.com should be kept, with the historical documents/postings with a redirect into the new Wiki.

That being said, make the Wiki first and foremost about PaxLair and her allies and then the rest will fall into place. Please kleep the old PaxLair.com web site though!!! I'm a sentimental old chap and would be completely lost and deserted without it.

For the record, I voted for the Wiki and also for being a contributor for the Wiki. I've got to support my vote...

I probably should let Winfield post this, but since I've been helping him, with Nexus on the project, I'll only say it has been decided to do individual shards all linked thru a main location. The Chesapeake shard will be one of the first out, soon, it'll be fleshed out a bit to give everyone an idea of what we're looking to include/preserve.
I really do think your going to like it!!
It is also linked to current current wiki's, so no need for us to recreate what UOGuide does, with say a mention of Trammel, clicking on Trammel will link you via Interwiki to the wiki page about Trammel on that wiki site.
Let me just say I think Winfiled's mind is a bottomless pit of information and know how.:-)
Look for the openings of the main site and at least the Chesapeake site early-mid April with an annoucement by Winfield himself.

Thanks Silverfoot. Great information.

We are still designing the core of the Wiki. I'm putting a big focus right now on making the Wiki compatible in features to http://en.wikipedia.org . So if you are a Wikipedian, you'll feel right at home in the UO Community Wiki. Same methods, same templates, mostly the same extensions, etc. etc.

There's another great advantage to following Wikipedia methods. There are hundreds of help files for Wikipedia (and it's base program called MediaWiki), including video tutorials in some places. That means we don't have to create many help files, except those specific to UO Community Wiki ... like how to publish a character biography, find all the uncompleted articles (called Stubs) for establishments and maps, and add your Player Gathering event to the historical timeline and U.S & world map.

I'm shooting to roll out the live main site and Chesapeake site by April 15th, but might be April 30th depending on the "dreaded tax season". Before then, we would like more contributors to get info into the Chesapeake Test site. Rolling out a sparsely populated Chesapeake wiki may not demonstrate the great potential of this system.

Oh, for mayors and citizens of cities ... have some laws to publish? some elections to document? some meeting minutes? some establishment changes? some new district lines? some clomping orders? some wars between alliances? The Wiki will let you or any of your staffs and citizens and friends put this information and images into permanent history in one searchable place (the wiki).

Winfield