Winfield

"First UO Community Wiki Spirit Meeting - Ideas and more Ideas"

May 14, 2008 - UOCWiki.org
Written by Winfield, Old Man on Chesapeake

The UO Community Wiki held its first "Spirit" meeting in Ventrilo on Wednesday, May 14, 2008 with several people from Chesapeake and Baja Ultima Online shards.

Spirit meetings are designed for general discussion, information, brainstorming, and question & answer regarding UOCWiki. The term "Spirit" is being used because these meetings are for dialogue in the spirit of Community. These meetings are open to the public to attend.

The 90 minute discussion covered four areas of interest:

• Purpose of UOCWiki.org
• Overview of the wiki architecture (e.g., shard subdomains)
• Usefulness for people with a variety of talents (e.g., historians; news reporters; programmers; graphics artists; community leaders; players wanting to document their biographies, events, housing, in-game event standard rules, involvement in quests, player town/guild area maps, etc.)
• Development status and timeline

Some key points from the discussion and a few more ideas offered later were:

• Focus on the player community's interests and desires. If the player community wants to document their information in a certain way, the players can.
• Make UOCWiki a 'permanent' place for players and veteran players to document their UO in-game histories, information, and activities by shard. Make it easy for everyone to use and enjoy. Keep it around for many, many years into the future.
• Each shard has community leaders in UOCWiki to help manage & arrange information content, take information organization burdens off the casual user, select sysops (administrators) for their shard-specific UOCWiki, and be able to backup/download their shard-specific information through their shard sysops.
• Follow the Wikipedia approach for technically and non-technically managing UOCWiki. See: Wikipedia:User access levels - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• Enable in-game activities to help players get information into UOCWiki. An example is a smart graphics person holds an event to "screenshot" many people's paperdolls and load those images into UOCWiki for people wanting to write their biographies. So every player does not need a graphics program. Another example is wandering biographers on a shard can interview in-game characters, then document their story or information on UOCWiki, writing their biographies in a 'standard' format. Later the specific player-character can edit the information easily on UOCWiki.
• Allow for (or connect to) a central hub for player community information that affects multiple shards. For example, common rules for bagball tournaments, how to set up a cross-shard tour, best ways to defeat certain monsters in certain dungeons, catalog information about shard-wide quests, where to find the best UO game content information, etc.
• Design the UOCWiki architecture, policies, backup strategies, and long-term persistence (e.g., survivorship) plans carefully. Carefully test technical aspects and educate people to assist in many ways before asking the community-at-large to spend time entering information about their shards.
• Make this fun, not a job. Allow people who have specific talents and interests to focus on those things. Also help make this a learning experience for all involved. Make things as automated and easy as possible. Keep UOCWiki in the "Spirit" of the player community.
• The Development Status and Timeline. Time is needed to go and grow slowly. Technical tests are needed. Ideas from the player community are needed. Simple, yet robust and legal policies need to be agreed upon. Copyright laws need to be researched. A few months are needed to do these things. Continue to have "spirit" meetings to hear ideas from many players and consultants.
• Expectation Management. Don't over-promise capabilities and timelines. This endeavor takes time, interest, and people willing to help. It is a community effort.

The next UOWiki Spirit Meeting will be held on Wednesday, May 21, 2008, at 9 PM Eastern U.S. time in Ventrilo. To obtain the Ventrilo server information, please reach Winfield by Private Message. UOCWiki is double-checking on publicly announcing a Ventrilo server again with its owner, before announcing it.

Next Agenda Topics will be focused less on mechanics, and more on what players want to do with UOCWiki:

• Q&A on what UOCWiki is or can be.
• Discussion about what the players want to put in UOCWiki (e.g., town histories, biographies, event descriptions, archive tournament results, lore/legends, player book libraries, establishment pages)
• Continued discussion on some policies (e.g., what information to allow and not allow on UOCWiki)
• Starting to survey for people with various talents (programming, information organization, graphics designers, legal consultants, etc.)

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Statehood and Cities of PaxLair (Chesapeake): http://www.paxlair.com

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Nok

News item - 1st UO Community Wiki Meeting.

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Winfield

Nok, I made an error in the message above. May 21 is Wednesday, not Tuesday. (for the next meeting). Sorry about that. Can you correct your news item?

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Statehood and Cities of PaxLair (Chesapeake): http://www.paxlair.com

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Silverfoot

Winfield, you can post the Vent information.

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Nok

Hi Winfield,

No worries, taken care of.

I won't be there on the 21st, it's the day before I leave on vacation.

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