Community Wiki ideas

[mikey]

Ummm... here it goes...

In the last few weeks I've been thinking about something that could sort of bring a lot of the things that are going on around here under one roof, as well as help to make things more clear and so on... and I've come up with two things:

Community Yellow Pages:

This would be a page that could serve as a central for this community. Very simple, just links to the relevant parts of the internet, categorized into areas of activity.

For instance, you want to know about the community's games, or you want the community to help you, or you want to know the recent news, or join, the yellow pages point you to the place.

Check it out at http://atp.manga.sk/yellow.htm

I tried to pick only links that best serve the purpose - of course there are more game lists, for instance renpy.com, but I tried to get an exhaustive overview with as little links as possible.

If you like it, I'd like to host it somewhere else than on my page, I was thinking, since it's just a small document, to find a free hosting service without ads. I'd like to put this on a completely address page so that it also keeps its neutral character.

Community Wiki:

This is an enhancement suggestion - it would be a wiki where members of the community could create general pages such as the Resources page that we have now.

I had some ideas that could be good and hopefully helpful, for instance

CW PHONEBOOK:

Here, new teams could put in their webpage address, information and their active projects, as well as the forum thread that's discussing their project, so that we can have a better overview of what's going on. Plus, newcomers could just look at what's happening and maybe choose to contact someone when they like their projects and would like to participate. Also, I could imagine it would be a simple thing for the team to just add itself to the wiki. Of course, it would be voluntary to add your team.


CW PRESS:

This page, I imagined could simply collect links about sites that wrote about our projects. If you find an interesting article relating to this community, just add it - also links to different reviews of specific games could be added.

CW ARTICLES:

This could serve to link valuable in-depth forum threads, as well as have original articles written by the community members. Even though I am inclined to use renaigames.net for well-prepared articles, IMO it has a nice design and also gives the articles more sense of occasion and the community could use it to give it to the reader in a more appealing form, with pictures and so on. Don't know how much time eclipse has though, seems she's rather busy... hmmm.

CW MAIN

Well, the CW should probably have a main page with links to the other pages.

Unfortunately, I don't know a technical solution to the CW, where to host it and so. If this idea came into existence, it would probably have to rest on someone else's shoulders.

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As for my part, I can definitely take care of the Yellow Pages (maintenance should be zero anyway), and I will continue to collect info about in-dev projects for my site's game list (and project list), as well as occasionally contribute to the ren'py wiki, the same goes for some articles whenever something comes to my mind. Though I still consider myself as contributing primarily with games, and that will stay top priority.

So, what do you think?

[monele]

Please, by all means, soften that yellow color @_@... I wanted to read but just couldn't as it is ^^;

I like the CW idea. Just like the Ren'Py wiki but for everything VN. A repository of information editable by anyone from teams to isolated creators and even gamers. Wikis usually allow any registered member to have its own page. It should be enough to put any information (such as skills and links to projects).

[mikey]

Okay, done.

ad CW >> For starters, I'd probably go with only a few selected pages, maybe later on expand it.

[PyTom]

Well, if you want to build something like this on the Ren'Py wiki, feel free. There's also the DSVN wiki, although that is pretty dead.

I guess I could set something new up, but I'd prefer not to, as that would double the work I have to do WRT maintaining the wiki. Maybe I could set it up so that the sidebar and look changes based on the page you're on... that would possibly be easier.

[monele]

Aaah, much better ^.^. Now I'm wondering : how are people supposed to find this page ? Through search engines or through another of our community websites ? Depending on this, its look might need to change, and the content might need to have more details.

[mikey]

Aaah, much better ^.^. Now I'm wondering : how are people supposed to find this page ? Through search engines or through another of our community websites ? Depending on this, its look might need to change, and the content might need to have more details.

Hmmm, I thought of this more like a welcome note. It should just point out where to go to find something. I especially don't really think that a new fully-featured community site is necessary - things worked well managing themselves, basically, and IMO there's no need to have news updates or interviews or other things that usual community central pages have.

So you can use it as an overview of the activities. I guess I think of it as a simple orientational booklet or pamphlet or what you call them. If anything, I'd like it to have even fewer entries. All the real work like collecting links and other things should be left to develop and everyone should be able to contribute. So this minipage should just summarize everything.

When I think of it of course, it could probably be also part of the CW. Although I really liked the idea of a minigiude floating somewhere around the net.

Maybe I could set it up so that the sidebar and look changes based on the page you're on... that would possibly be easier.

That's a good option, even though from the information point of view it probably doesn't matter whether there's a renpy bar or not, but different colors or sidebar could differentiate it from the ren'py wiki.

Again, these are suggestions, so we can maybe talk about about the basic idea where and how future efforts will be channeled, it all started actually with monele's wiki article idea, when I thought we could give it some basic structure, as well as have something that I kind of miss - a big red link that says "Welcome, start here", that is a kind of overview - right now if you want to get access to the Resources page, it's a bit confusing, since it has a ren'py sidebar and then it's actually buried in the Resources thread that isn't even sticky, so when we'll have more content like this - creator lists or general game design articles, there should be a good way of knowing where to find the information.

I think the wiki-ing is working well, particularly as many people are contributing, so I thought we could think a bit about how to make that information easily accessible and even visible in some cases.

[monele]

Hmm, yea... it would be nice to have two zones : one for Ren'Py exclusively, with coding tutorials and such, and another one for VNs in general, with articles ^^. As long as each sidebar links to the other, it should be good ^.^

mikey : The only thing I was concerned about was search engine referencing ^^. If it's a unique page lost on the web, it might never be reached by anyone. As part of something else (like CW as you suggest), it seems more viable.

[Jake]

mikey : The only thing I was concerned about was search engine referencing ^^. If it's a unique page lost on the web, it might never be reached by anyone. As part of something else (like CW as you suggest), it seems more viable.

I'm in complete agreement with this, really. Not even so much for search-engine indexing, just for general visibility - fewer sites with larger hubs of content should probaby make it easier for people to find things like this, to my eye.

As to articles - I do like renaigames.net's visual style, and there are several good articles there already, but... for some reason, something which that site does makes it very slow to render and slow to scroll in my chosen browser (Opera), which makes me reluctant to read stuff there. :/

[mikey]

Well then, so be it, we can make a welcome page in that style on the CW.