Jack Wiki
So I've spent the last few days researching and mulling over the idea of doing a Jackcentric fic index, wiki style. Since my brain works in obsessive spurts, that means I've spent about 12 to 16 hours a day on this idea since I thought of it. At this point, I really want to do it and am forcing myself to hold back until I hear from others. I've started too many projects that fell through because not enough people were interested, and I don't want this to be one of them. On the other hand, one of the benefits of a wiki is that it wouldn't need a groundswell of support right away, but would be happy growing slowly over time.
What I'm envisioning is a wiki where the bulk of the entries are story listings, giving the title, author, summary, etc. and linking to the places where the story could be found. It would be easy to list multiple URLs for a story and could even include cover art (with the artist's permission, of course). Categories and keywords would allow you to browse for certain types of stories, and the search function would let you look for specific stories. And if we wanted to expand the scope of the project later, it wouldn't require changing software.
Why is this needed? Well, Fanwork Finder is broken. The GenreFinder communities are great but rely on someone sharing your tastes who happens to be reading that day AND happens to have their bookmarks handy. The various fic archives can only search their own archives and not each other. And Jack's fans are scattered across the different corners of two large (well, one large and one HUMONGOUS) fandoms, and I at least haven't found any central hub for us to share information where we're not drowned out by fans of other characters. Delicious bookmarks only serve to highlight that fragmentation, since everyone uses different tagging systems and there's no easy way to help each other.
A wiki would let us share information with a shared tagging system without depending on any one person (or even a small group of people) to do all the work, and it could be our own space, focusing on Jack for himself and not just as someone else's lover. And one of the best things about a wiki is that it doesn't require anyone to learn more or do more than exactly what they have the time and motivation for at that moment. If you mess something up, someone else will come along and fix it. If you leave something half-finished, someone else will come along and finish it. No harm, no foul, just a constantly evolving, constantly improving collaborative space.
So I really want to do this. But that means some decisions need to be made. The first and most important: where to host it.
I've been looking into the free wiki farms and have narrowed it down to two options: Wikia and EditThis. Both have distinctive strengths and weaknesses.
In Wikia's favor:
Wikia is big and well-known, with several active fandom wikis there already, including the TARDIS Index File and two other Whovian wikis. Wikia wikis are cross-promoted and Jack's would get noticed there a lot sooner. EditThis is smaller and quieter; it's hard to find other wikis on the same site, and we'd be on our own for promoting the wiki. So we'd probably get more community involvement sooner on Wikia.
Wikia is run by the same people who run Wikipedia, which means it has a well-known, publicly stated philosophy that I've supported for years. EditThis is run by one guy that I don't know much about, except that he's had trouble keeping an active happy community of admins on the central site.
Wikia runs on the latest MediaWiki software, with all sorts of bells and whistles. EditThis runs an older version of MediaWiki -- perfectly functional, but without a lot of extra features that we might see at other wikis.
Wikia has a paid support staff to help with technical problems. The EditThis support, as far as I can tell, is pretty much nonexistent.
In EditThis's favor:
Wikia's policy is not to host link farms. Jack's wiki wouldn't be a link farm by my understanding of the term, but their policy defines it very broadly and loosely. I did check with Wikia support and was told this sort of link index would be fine, but we all know that what support says doesn't always represent what the decision-makers are going to do. I'm not eager about the idea of having to answer constant questions about whether we're TOS-sable or not, much less having the official stance actually change. EditThis, on the other hand, doesn't have any such content restrictions.
Wikia's policy also forbids pornography. While the wiki as I'm imagining it wouldn't host fic (adult or otherwise), we would be indexing adult material, and to do that successfully -- to provide functionally useful categories and story summaries -- we'd have to use some dirty words. Again, the one person at Wikia support I talked to said we'd be fine, but I don't want to waste time worrying about when some other person higher up the food chain will decide otherwise or arguing with anyone over what is and is not acceptable. EditThis allows adult content, full stop, no arguments.
Wikia wikis are under the Creative Commons Share Alike (CC-SA) license. This is a good license that I generally approve of, but for a wiki about fanworks, it's problematic. EditThis is much more flexible; we can choose our own license or combination of licenses. So we could, for instance, say that anything in the main body of the wiki was under the Noncommercial CC-SA but that the content on userpages or other sections was under a different license or no distribution license at all.
Wikia offers only the two main groups of users and admins, with nothing in between. There's no way to protect a page so that only a trusted group of non-admin users could edit it, and in fact Wikia strongly discourages protecting pages at all. That's a point of wiki philosophy I generally agree with, but it would be less helpful for a fic index. I think to be functional, we'd need to have some protected pages to maintain a consistent taxonomy, so we don't end up like Delicious where you never know whether a story will be tagged with jack-harkness or jack.harkness or jackharkness or char:jack or what have you.
Combined, what the license and protection policies mean is that on EditThis, writers would be free to use their userspace to collaborate with their betas or coauthors without having to email files back and forth. We would also be free, if we chose, to host fanworks not hosted elsewhere. In general, I wouldn't want it to host fic, but it might be helpful for things like fanmixes or icon collections that the major archives don't accomodate. And it might be nice to host microfics, so that people don't have to spend longer following links and waiting for new pages to load than it takes to read the fic itself. None of this would be possible at Wikia, since the license and protection systems mean the content creator would lose all control over how their work was changed and redistributed.
I'm leaning toward EditThis, but since wikis are meant to be collaborative, I'd really like to hear others' opinions before I steam ahead.
What I'm envisioning is a wiki where the bulk of the entries are story listings, giving the title, author, summary, etc. and linking to the places where the story could be found. It would be easy to list multiple URLs for a story and could even include cover art (with the artist's permission, of course). Categories and keywords would allow you to browse for certain types of stories, and the search function would let you look for specific stories. And if we wanted to expand the scope of the project later, it wouldn't require changing software.
Why is this needed? Well, Fanwork Finder is broken. The GenreFinder communities are great but rely on someone sharing your tastes who happens to be reading that day AND happens to have their bookmarks handy. The various fic archives can only search their own archives and not each other. And Jack's fans are scattered across the different corners of two large (well, one large and one HUMONGOUS) fandoms, and I at least haven't found any central hub for us to share information where we're not drowned out by fans of other characters. Delicious bookmarks only serve to highlight that fragmentation, since everyone uses different tagging systems and there's no easy way to help each other.
A wiki would let us share information with a shared tagging system without depending on any one person (or even a small group of people) to do all the work, and it could be our own space, focusing on Jack for himself and not just as someone else's lover. And one of the best things about a wiki is that it doesn't require anyone to learn more or do more than exactly what they have the time and motivation for at that moment. If you mess something up, someone else will come along and fix it. If you leave something half-finished, someone else will come along and finish it. No harm, no foul, just a constantly evolving, constantly improving collaborative space.
So I really want to do this. But that means some decisions need to be made. The first and most important: where to host it.
I've been looking into the free wiki farms and have narrowed it down to two options: Wikia and EditThis. Both have distinctive strengths and weaknesses.
In Wikia's favor:
In EditThis's favor:
I'm leaning toward EditThis, but since wikis are meant to be collaborative, I'd really like to hear others' opinions before I steam ahead.