Ok.. I thought it would be best to describe what I would like for the wiki to do. For me, the wiki is the thing that will take this site to the next level. Right now the forums hold all the information, but they are bloated, unstructured and quite frankly unwilling to give up the required information in a timely fashion. That is where the wiki comes in. Basically I would like the forums to be simply a possible staging ground for useful information. When folks post a message, we would either point them to the appropriate wiki page or answer the question and then the wiki would be updated to reflect the new information if possible. Then after a time, I would like to delete all forum messages to keep them clean. Obviously you wouldn't want to delete all forum messages, but in general you wouldn't need to keep all these messages lying around.
I would like to use the wiki to replace the functionality of the following modules:
- Web Resources
- Downloads
- Journals
- FAQs
- and possibly News Stories.
I would like the wiki to be the focal part of the site, with the other main parts of the site being private messages, chat, instant messaging, the forums, voting/polls and news (and again, it's not difficult to do news with a wiki as well).
So basically the wiki would be used to do everything but the communication aspects of the site.
I think the best way for it to work would be that when you hit bgdf.com, it takes you immediately to the wiki. On the first page of the wiki, the news would be displaced. Every page on the wiki should have a quick link in the template that would take you useful wiki pages such as the start (news) page, your wiki home page, the site FAQ, etc. Also on the template, perhaps in vertical menu on the left, you could have the other site functions; private messaging, instant messaging, chat room, discussion forums, etc.
The functions of the wiki would be the obvious game design wiki, the site usage instructions (or site FAQ), and the member home pages.
I think the member home pages would be critical. From there members will be able to create a home wiki page, start journal/blogs (a journal / blog would be basically a specialized wiki page in which comments could be added in a dated manner), upload files/images, *and* collaborate on projects using the wiki. These collaboration pages would be special wiki pages where permissions could be assigned to collaborators . I.E. some members might have read only access, where as some might be able to edit pages, where as some might be able to remove/edit/add, etc. I think it would be nice if these project pages would be 'gateway pages'. I.E. all collaboration rights would be shared from the gateway page to all of it's children *and* you could only access the child pages if you had access to the gateway page.
As for the main pages, they should NOT be like a normal wiki. I believe the best description would be a moderated wiki. Instead of the traditional wiki model of undoing bad page changes, I think instead when members make changes, they actually make proposed changes. Say I want to add something to a page, I would click edit, make the change and then click the 'propose' button. Then the next time a moderator of that page logged onto it, he would get an indicator telling him he had changes to review. When he pulled up the change to review, he could accept the change as is; modify the change and then accept it; or deny the change outright. I think such a review process will go miles towards leaving the wiki in a readable format. This systems to me seems more proactive and less like the damage control that is inherit with most existing wikis.
That's basically my thought in a nutshell. The only thing I don't really have hammered out is the actual logical flow of the wik; I.E. where things should go. That and a good basic page template of how things should look.
Any thoughts?
-Michael
I really don't know the answer to that question. There is a wiki called tiki that Zzzzz and I were toying around with possibly implementing. As a matter of fact, it's at http://www.bgdf.com/tiki/tiki-index.php . Check it out if you have time.
The problem with using tiki is that it would completely replace nuke. With that there are some technical challenges such as migrating users (which Zzzzz has already figured out how to do), posts, journals entries, private messages, etc. I really, really like Tiki. It doesn't have the easy to use WYSIWYG interface like Guiki and WYSIWYGWiki has, but it's fairly easy to learn. The great thing about it is the wiki is integrated fully in the entire site. You can add a wiki page reference in a forum post or private message and the site will take you straight there (I.E. you don't have to know the html link to the page, just it's wiki page name). Also I'm not sure if tiki has a instant message or chat package, which might be a problem.
Well obviously there's Guiki. Nuke also has something available called nukewrapper which allows you to turn any website into a nuke module. It uses i-frames though and it can be kind of ugly. Most of the wikis available (I only ever new of two, and both are no longer being developed) for nuke are severly lacking the functionality department. We (probably just Zzzz unless I started learning PhP) could probably develop Guiki into what we want, but I'm not sure if the time burden on Zzzzz is practical, reasonable, or fair.
Tiki will do it. It has a lot of features so the learning curve may be a bit steep. Again log into the test site and play around with it.
Hope these answers your questions.
-Darke