help:Welcome  

Introduction

Welcome to our little corner of the Wikiverse! We are very proud of it and hope you will make yourself at home.

Practically everyone today knows what a wiki is, with Wikipedia being the most famous example, but what, exactly, is a Wikibase?

Well, first came the gaming database. Way back in the dawn of time, or at least the dawn of Everquest, Jeff Moyer found the game, made his first character (Allakhazam) and, as he learned, found himself explaining to other new players the same things over and over. So he made a website called Allakhazam's Magical Realm. As it got bigger and harder to control he met Illia (Andy Sharp) and Andy used his programming magic to create a database for all the information Jeff wanted to keep track of. And so the gaming database was born. Sadly, you needed admin status to edit the database so users could only send info to the admins for them to add. This worked pretty well for a long time.

Along came Wikipedia and, through their foresight, Mediawiki. With the release of the free wiki software fans of all kinds of things, including MMOs, began creating fansite wikis. This was a good thing, and allowed all the players to contribute as well as learn, but there was just one drawback. Wiki is designed to store and retrieve words, or pages of words, and is really not very good at handling numbers and large amounts of hard game data. Wiki builders everywhere wished they could have both... a wiki so everyone could help, but with a database to store and handle the vast amounts of game-data.

And so, back in the laboratories of Allakhazam's, the Wikibase was born. A fully-formed wiki with tools to integrate the database you have used and trusted for years and the wiki together into a single platform.

ZAM Network Wikibase™ Help