Wiki Site?

[radiantfracture]

Any recommendations for a Wiki site on which to build a creative project (like, a set of linked worldbuilding pages and story fragments)? Anyone still do that?

Cheers!

Comments

[redbird]

A friend of mine just posted about using Wikia for that, but she's hosting it on her own web space. Are you looking for a host, or just a software recommendation?

[radiantfracture]

Host, I think? Something easy.

Thanks!

[sabotabby]

I just signed up for World Anvil, but I haven't done anything with it yet.

[radiantfracture]

That looks good -- what were you thinking of making?

[sabotabby]

Presently, it'd be for my novel(s). Basically Canada, but in my alternative timeline where magic creeps back into the world for the millennium and comes back with a vengeance around about now. Some events happened roughly the way they did in our timeline and others didn't (the G2O summit in Toronto still happened; COVID-19 didn't), and these have to correspond with when the characters were certain ages, who had kids when, etc., and it's getting to be all too confusing. Not to mention that the timespan of the novels themselves are a pain in the ass—the first one takes place over about a year and a bit, and the second does a time skip, and ugh. I need a reference for when all the things happened.

[radiantfracture]

I need a reference for when all the things happened.

Yeah, exactly. I've never found a good system for world-tracking even on the small scale.

I like your timeline.

[sabotabby]

I'm hoping this will work. I need to mess around with it, but the kind of thinking that allows me to do that is a different kind of thinking that allows me to write.

The timeline is a challenge. I wanted it to be grounded in our world, but with magic, and not in a hidden masquerade urban fantasy type way but in a magic is a known thing and human society responds. Also I started writing it, with a particular apocalypse in mind, well before covid, so "the Chinese government has precogs working for it and actually listened to them" is a decent handwave.

[radiantfracture]

I would read the heck out of that.

[sabotabby]

Hah, well, if you're serious, shoot me a DM with your preferred email. Though of course I woke up today and realized that I had to change a minor plot point early on, so...it's very much a work in progress.

[mdlbear]

The first thing to do is to figure out who you expect the users to be, and what you expect them to be doing. If it's just you taking notes, that looks different from a site that you want your readers to be interacting with.

The second is to figure out how you want to create pages -- a web app? Your favorite text editor on your own laptop? Some of each? How comfortable are you with a command line, or do you do everything in your browser?

The third is to decide whether you want your own domain name. Unless this is purely for yourself, and sometimes even if it is, the answer will almost certainly be "yes". Many hosting services will give you one or more for free. Having your own domain name means that if you outgrow the service you start with, or they go belly-up, or you just want to try a new wiki engine, you can, and none of your users/readers will notice. However, if it's just you, you can start without one and set it up later.

A few other considerations: Using an open-source platform on a generic hosting service will cost you somewhere between $2 and $12/month, but it's worth it if you want your own domain. Try to avoid getting trapped on a service that doesn't make it easy to download your entire collection of pages and take them someplace else.

If possible, get free or trial accounts on several different platforms, and see which one you like best. If you want version control (and you should) take a look at the wikis on GitHub and GitLab.

[radiantfracture]

Thanks for this considered response!

Currently, this project is just for fun with a friend, so I want maximum ease and least fuss. Also not to pay anything. If the project becomes something for profit, that would be way down the line.

[mdlbear]

In that case, you should definitely take a look at GitLab projects and the associated wikis: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/wiki/index.html

Projects can be private (visible only to their members) or public; I haven't looked too carefully at the details. But they have a couple of advantages:

* they take a wide range of markup languages
* pages are just files, which makes them highly portable
* the wiki is a git repository.

git gives you a couple of things:

* you have a complete history of changes. You can undo changes, compare versions of a page, and so on.
* you can clone a copy of the wiki onto your own computer, work on it even without a network connection, and upload the changes later.
* when you're working on your cloned repository, you can use whatever text editor you prefer.

git was originally built for software version control, but it's now used for all sorts of things, including books and websites.

Caveat: git may be confusing. I think it's good for this kind of thing, but I'm a software geek from the days before the web existed, so it's hard for me to tell what other people would think of it.

[radiantfracture]

Hmm, I hadn't thought about git -- I used it like ten years ago (!!) for a conference project.

I'd want easily navigable text, though -- I feel like git might not be so much for that?

[mdlbear]

Git is just the storage layer -- in some wikis (like Wikipedia and other MediaWiki sites) pages are stored in a database. In a GitLab wiki they're stored in files. The files are managed by git under the hood, but what you write is markdown or some other text-based markup language, and what you see in a browser is properly-formatted web pages. So a file called Foo.md (markdown) gets translated into Foo.html on the website. Inside of another page, you use links like [Foo].

There's a rich text editor built in, just like any other wiki, so you never have to look at the actual files if you don't want to. But you can use standard git operations like `git blame` and `git diff` to look at the history of a page, or `git log` to look at the history of the whole site.

I really ought to take a couple of days and write this up as a post.

[radiantfracture]

I really ought to take a couple of days and write this up as a post.

That does sound really useful!