Suggestion for an indie game developers wiki

[Wayward]

There are some impressive wiki's on the Internet, like Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page) and WikiWikiWeb (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiWikiWeb). They made me wonder how the knowledge that accumulates in these forums could be arranged in a wiki format. I imagine an indie game developers wiki would resemble a massive, living FAQ continually refreshed and refined by 500 collaborative authors. Perhaps the wiki could work in concert with these forums.

Does anyone know of any wiki's dedicated to indie game development?
Has anyone considered setting one up?
Would an indie gamedev wiki be useful?

Any thoughts, criticisms, suggestions, takers?

[Reactor]

It sounds like a good idea to me.

[formfarbeminze]

i remember some fellow that in the dexterity's forums... i am not sure what to think about it. on the one hand it could be a nice database with game ideas, lists and reviews of books and other products, essays about various issues such as for example project planning and more. but i realise that most information exchanged on our forum is only worth it for a very short time. for instance, to find out if regnow is a decent service or not, hey, they can change any month for better or worse. so i think a wiki would be a lot of work, what for?

[Applewood]

wtf does wiki actually stand for ? :eek:

[robleong]

I believe "wiki wiki" is the Hawaiian term for super-quick...

[Wayward]

What is a wiki? Their inventor Ward Cunningham describes them as: The simplest online database that could possibly work.

A wiki is a collaboratively-edited website. The distinguishing feature of wikis is that they typically allow all users to edit any page, with full freedom to edit, change and delete the work of previous authors.

For the indie gamedev wiki, imagine taking a thread from these forums and turning it into a web page. The web page could be edited by anyone on these forums. Each topic would be continually refined and updated, unlike forums threads which often become outdated. The wiki would eventually capture the knowledge of all the developers here in an accessible, information-rich, and democratic way. We'd be writing the book on indie game development.

[Applewood]

Thanks guys. All I have to do now is figure out why I didn't get any notice of these posts even though I asked for instant mail verification.

I've seen wikis around of course, just never got the silly title. :)

[Wayward]

Applewood, I realized half-way through replying with 'For those unfamiliar with wikis...' that you weren't asking what a wiki was, but I thought I'd post it anyway for other peoples benefit. Not everyone is familiar with wikis.

[Applewood]

np - too much info is always better than not enough. You did good :)

[ErikH2000]

I think it's a great idea, and because it's so easy to set up, there's no problem trying it out and finding it is not so popular as was hoped for. I was going to set up a Wiki straight away and drop a link here, but then I thought maybe Wayward was keen to do that himself. Anyhow, I am happy to set up and host the Wiki unless somebody else really wants to do it. Also, if another responsible type has an FTP server with spare bandwidth, I would set up a script to connect to it periodically and upload a backup of the Wiki database.

-Erik

[Sillysoft]

I have setup a wiki on my website for my users to play around with. It is at http://sillysoft.net/wiki/

It has served well for some purposes. However it was set up well after I set up forums. The majority of the discussion has remained in the forums, but the wiki has been a good place for a few topics that benefit from slow incremental growth.

My wiki has also seen some abuse. I would highly suggest that any wiki set up require a user account login to add and edit things. Otherwise you will get morons who just replace pages with "you guys are all dumb" and stuff like that.

[ErikH2000]

Okay, here is the... ahem... "Indie Game Developer Wiki". Contribute pages. Discuss here on the forum. Don't let it die!

http://www.caravelgames.net/IndieWiki

-Erik