Alla and WIKI styleFollow

was wondering if it would be possible to have some server space for a WIKI?

you know where we all can contribute? this forumbased approach surely has its pro's and cons. for some areas (like guides i.e.) I think though that a wiki would work better and could potentially save the admins here some time...

what do you think?

for the people not knowing what a wiki is:

from wiki.org

There is simply no functionality a wiki would offer that is not somehow available already. Anyone who has something to contribute has several means to do so through the forums, by submitting guides, by sending info to the appropriate admin, etc.

The official content here is partially automated, user guides or posts can be maintained by the user if they wish, the forums are nearly self-moderated... The admins have it good here.

This could be marginally useful in the case where someone has submitted a guide that becomes out-of-date and the OP has since quit visiting the sire, but even that only saves the admins a few clicks on the delete button.

It would simply be too much work to fully convert most parts of the site to a wiki format, and asking for a simple addition is asking for duplication of data.

There is a very good FFXI wiki at http://wiki.teamavengers.org/, check us out!

Wikis are nice, but different.

It would be nice to tweak little things you see, but my guess is that more people would use it for harm than good.

In the case of staring at the inside of your spellbook, why not just add a comment? Or reauthor it and ask an admin to replace it with your updated version?


A wiki simply does not add anything to the site.

Ok that's not true, it will add more work for the admins in the creation, maintenance, and moderation of nine separate wikis. It would also add the need for additional server space and bandwidth, neither of which come cheap.

Why would any admin feel that any aspect of maintaining their site properly is trivial. A quality site is what provides them with paychecks. If any company's web admin feels bugged by keeping their site up to date, they are probably due a career change.

Sure. It's your wiki, you can do whatever you want. Most wikis are only text and links, with formatting for headers and bullets and pretty much what's available here for posting on the forums. Behind the scenes the only real design difference between a wiki and a forum is that when something is edited in a wiki, both the original and edited copies are saved.

As far as managing content review, it might work if submissions required the approval of either an admin or some number of users. i.e. anyone visiting the site can see submissions pending and vote to verify the edit or addition. Once ten users verify it, it could take effect without admin attention. Similarly users could vote to deny the submission, just as we can rate posts subdefault, making it more self moderating.


Maybe the admins have already given it some thought, maybe not. Maybe they should. Maybe, scaled down to a replacement for the guides sections unintegrated with the content databases, it could be a small and manageable project. It might further improve forum quality, and I get the feeling a wiki section would be used far more than the guides section. Maybe some of the programming admins would like something a little different to work on for a while.

They should feel lucky they didn't lose a bunch of money on their bad ideas before figuring it out themselves.