So, while the game it's still in development I think it would be helpfull if we had already established a basic organized wiki in time. Problem is, where will it be hosted? We could always resort to Wikia (not really great but in abscene of anything else...) or a user hosted wikia with mediawiki installed (Dota 2, TF2). http://planetaryannihilation.shoutwiki. ... /Main_Page (mediawiki wiki, just an example) http://planetaryannihilation.wikia.com/ ... ation_Wiki (wikia, not the best option)
For me, starting one now is relatively pointless, to me a Wiki like this has the purpose of informing people about the game, often in great detail that might be otherwise hard to figure out. Thing is that right now we don't really have a game yet. For me the earliest I would start one is early Beta. Alpha will be too early as I'm sure many 'fundamental' features will be in a state of flux for the entire alpha and even possibly extending into Beta and it won't really be until the Beta anyways that we're really working to nail down finer details like balance, where the Wiki/Unit Database type untilities really come into play. That being said, we can certainly start now, so long as we realize that there will be a lot of "wasted" work going into updating things that will be in a state of constant flux for quite some time and the fact that we have very little concrete info about the game right now. Mike
I think you meant 'wiki' that second time. Wikia - as you correctly mention - is a for-profit service. And you cannot free your delicious content afterwards! They've asked us numerous times whether we want to join, we've turned them down each time. I am no fan of their policies. So if anyone wants to host a wiki, I wouldn't mind providing some advice.
I honestly am not a fan of wikia's policy either, I also dislike how small the space is for the articles making everything look so badly. @OrangeKnight: I though of that too, though I think we should already have a central wiki instead of ending up with multiple wikis and maybe some basic templates and such already done.
What to write in a dev wiki? Simple, just take this page as an example: http://planetaryannihilation.shoutwiki.com/wiki/Shields It's less about documenting stuff which has already been decided, bur rather documenting the various options for the different aspects of the game in an objective manner while showing out pros and cons for the different approaches. After all people tend to forget that we don't make decisions here in the forum. It's the devs who make the decisions and all we can / should do is presenting them a rather large set of options in a form which is easy to comprehend. But it's not only important for the devs, also for the communitiy. There are a bunch of themes which get discussed over an over again at it appears like most people remember only a single aspect from the previous discussion. The forum lacks a structure which enables new users to comprehend the content of previous discussions or to even find previous discussions. So much for "why" and "what", but i highly doubt that the wiki will ever be used in anappropriate way. The current members of the community simply lack the disciples to document their viewpoints in a clean, objective way, instead they rather insult each other and push their ego on behalf of other peoples ideas.
If someone could get a team together, and discussion of it could be kept here, then it might be possible. Though you'd have to restrict editing quite a bit, obviously.
http://smnc.lennardf1989.com/Wiki/index.php/Main_Page (for super mnc but the pa one would be more awesome) git it
Dev-wiki is good if it's primary point for new suggestions/ideas, so they are systematized from beginning. Otherwise it will require someone to collect and reformat all suggestions from forums, which is not going to work. Just as with "Confirmed features ans suggestions" thread up here, only what was pinged to author or what he liked himself is going into this list. And there is better to have no list at all than have an incomplete list. But it would be really nice to have a crawler collecting posts from forum, allowing to rate and pindown them to one or more suggestions, thus forming a suggestions list with references. With hive mind of community it would be more maintainable and manageable. That's the problem, yes.
