Chess Wiki
You may or may not have heard that I am starting a Wiki for Chess-- meaning, like Wikipedia or TV Tropes, a collection of articles about things related to Chess that anyone can edit. The wiki is running PmWiki, which is the same type of wiki TVTropes runs on.
Currently I'm on what may be the most difficult part of the process, especially since I've never tried to run a Wiki before, which is figuring out how to organize these pages. I'm attempting to find a good compromise between keeping everything sorted and easy to find for reading, but also not so full of rules to follow that it becomes intimidating to edit (which I recognize is often a problem with sites like this that I create and a problem with a lot of wikis in general). Here's my current idea for the hierarchy of things (pages in the lowest level are just examples of the sort of things that would fit in that section):
You may already be seeing some of the challenges that are going to come up here, specifically in naming things. For one, us fans are not always consistent in how we refer to things, and the show itself is even worse. There are some things we can do to mitigate this. For example, it's easy to set a title for a page that is different than its URL, so the page can be /Productions/1988NewYork but the page title and listing of productions shows it as "1988 Broadway Production". We can also easily set up redirects, like the page "Freddy Trumper" can automatically send someone to "Frederick Trumper."
But I figure we need to set down some ground rules for consistency. I've already started setting up pages for productions and concerts in the format of YearCity. So, as previously mentioned, the page for the Broadway production is located at /Productions/1988NewYork. The Royal Albert Hall concert is located at /Productions/2008London. Then we can bicker about what the individual production pages should actually be titled, but at least we know where to find them.
As for songs and characters, this is particularly tricky. My instinct is to name one version to use as the standard. The obvious choice being the Royal Albert Hall concert, since it's probably the most well-known among active fans of the show right now, and Tim Rice considers it the official version, and we can use the IMDB page as the standard for character names and song names. This still leaves the question of how we address songs and characters that aren't in that version. Oldest source available?
I'm not too concerned at this point about the actual content of pages and I don't plan to be very strict about that.
Obviously I am open to suggestions on these things and anything else related to the wiki.
Currently I'm on what may be the most difficult part of the process, especially since I've never tried to run a Wiki before, which is figuring out how to organize these pages. I'm attempting to find a good compromise between keeping everything sorted and easy to find for reading, but also not so full of rules to follow that it becomes intimidating to edit (which I recognize is often a problem with sites like this that I create and a problem with a lot of wikis in general). Here's my current idea for the hierarchy of things (pages in the lowest level are just examples of the sort of things that would fit in that section):
- Productions and Concerts
- 1986 West End Production
- 2008 Royal Albert Hall Concert
- 2010 Signature Theatre Production
- Songs
- Merano
- Anthem
- Characters
- Anatoly Sergievsky
- Florence Vassy
- Merchandise
- 1984 Concept Album
- 2008 Royal Albert Hall Concert Video
- 1988 Broadway Souvenir Program
- Miscellanea
- 1956 Budapest Uprising
- Tim Rice
- Bobby Fischer
- Bangkok
You may already be seeing some of the challenges that are going to come up here, specifically in naming things. For one, us fans are not always consistent in how we refer to things, and the show itself is even worse. There are some things we can do to mitigate this. For example, it's easy to set a title for a page that is different than its URL, so the page can be /Productions/1988NewYork but the page title and listing of productions shows it as "1988 Broadway Production". We can also easily set up redirects, like the page "Freddy Trumper" can automatically send someone to "Frederick Trumper."
But I figure we need to set down some ground rules for consistency. I've already started setting up pages for productions and concerts in the format of YearCity. So, as previously mentioned, the page for the Broadway production is located at /Productions/1988NewYork. The Royal Albert Hall concert is located at /Productions/2008London. Then we can bicker about what the individual production pages should actually be titled, but at least we know where to find them.
As for songs and characters, this is particularly tricky. My instinct is to name one version to use as the standard. The obvious choice being the Royal Albert Hall concert, since it's probably the most well-known among active fans of the show right now, and Tim Rice considers it the official version, and we can use the IMDB page as the standard for character names and song names. This still leaves the question of how we address songs and characters that aren't in that version. Oldest source available?
I'm not too concerned at this point about the actual content of pages and I don't plan to be very strict about that.
Obviously I am open to suggestions on these things and anything else related to the wiki.