Anime Studio Wiki please.

Rhoel · Post by **Rhoel** » Mon Dec 11, 2006 12:30 pm

Now that eFrontier is on board with their infrastructure and server systems, is it not time to revisit the question of a dediced Anime Studio Wiki. This is not to replace this forum but to consolidate much of the useful information which is being lost in the labrynth of messages.

There are several good reasons for Wikis:

The information is editable - so the data can be corrected and brought up to date with version changes.
Wikis are indexed, so information can be catagoried and information retreived quickly.
MediaWiki software is open source and licence free.
MediaWiki is relatively Spam resistant.
It will encourage freelance tutorials.

For many people, their familiarity with the excellent Wikipedia means they are more familiar with navigating the interface and finding information faster than with the phpBB forum. The Blender wiki is a very good example of where both wiki and forum can complenment each other.

Is anyone else interested in contributing/collaborating with such a venture if it is set-up - Wikis rely on the volunteers to make or break them.

Just an idea and feedback welcomed.

Rhoel.

DarthFurby · Post by **DarthFurby** » Tue Dec 12, 2006 12:33 am

I wonder why no one thought of this before. I'm sold.

bupaje · Post by **bupaje** » Tue Dec 12, 2006 12:43 am

It is a good idea. One of the other forums I frequent - Conitec's 3D Game Studio - set up a Wiki and it is a useful way to have a constantly updatyed manual/tip/tutorial/faq repository. You can see it here for an example

http://www.coniserver.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Users could start by extracting useful info from this forum, categorizing it and putting it on the Wiki -for example a Tips and Tricks section might have a synopsis of posts related to lighting issues, or to audio issues etc.

Rasheed · Post by **Rasheed** » Tue Dec 12, 2006 12:54 am

DarthFurby wrote:I wonder why no one thought of this before. I'm sold.

I'm way ahead of you, see How about a wiki for Moho?

Unfortunately, no-one seemed to want to contribute, probably because the idea of a wiki was too strange and/or too general. Wikis for special/temporary projects do work, however.

For a better search function than the Forum offers, I use Google with "site:lostmarble.com" in the search term. Seems to work pretty well. Duplicating what's already on this forum is only extra work, but no real benefit, because if you really want, you can find everything on this forum.

I think for using the data in the forum, you would need to scrape and tag the text in the posts, and digest them into readable articles. The scraping can be done with programs, the tagging is purely by human intervention, as is the digestion, I guess.

rylleman · Post by **rylleman** » Tue Dec 12, 2006 1:00 am

A very good suggestion, count my vote for it!

bupaje · Post by **bupaje** » Tue Dec 12, 2006 1:06 am

Unfortunately, no-one seemed to want to contribute, probably because the idea of a wiki was too strange and/or too general.

I got a taste of that when I added a Moho resource section to my site - I though it was a great idea but not many submissions. However a Wiki might work, it did on the other site I mentioned after a slow start.

Post by **Víctor Paredes** » Tue Dec 12, 2006 3:07 am

with tazatriste's people we are creating a page which allows to create own pages with freedom. it's a very beta version, but it could support something as a wiki with a lot of images and comments and everything.

works better in firefox
www.tazatriste.cl/?bubu
www.tazatriste.cl/?grimorum

ok, i'm sure it won't work for the english community, but for spanish it could work.
it is based in css.

Rhoel · Post by **Rhoel** » Tue Dec 12, 2006 4:38 am

Rasheed wrote:
DarthFurby wrote:I wonder why no one thought of this before. I'm sold.
I'm way ahead of you, see How about a wiki for Moho?

Sorry, I missed the post - I second your proposal.

The difference to the your suggestion is that I suggested eFrontier host it - sponsored wikis like this tend to survive because of thier xommercial support.

I'd be interested in Fahim's comments on this idea. If eF wishes to pass on hostign, then we can move forward in looking at hosting on one of the many free wiki sites.

Gut instinct says the wiki will be good for the long term. Once we know the wiki is green-lighted, then we can start putting the backbone together.

Rhoel

Rasheed · Post by **Rasheed** » Tue Dec 12, 2006 9:37 am

Oh, a Wiki by e frontier is fine, provided that they keep an eye on security and spammers.

slowtiger · Post by **slowtiger** » Tue Dec 12, 2006 10:21 am

I think I already saw a Moho wiki somewhere, but with not much content.

I am a Wiki contributor myself, not only in the "official" one but also in smaller, project-dependant. Although I like the idea, I can foresee several problems right now.
- The structure of a Wiki is quite likely to get as chaotic as the forum is right now. Only a strong policy which enforces one defined structure upon all articles and the way they are linked to each other will, over time, yield a useful result.
- Using text from the forum and from the tutorials is unavoidable but will cause unneccessary struggles about copyright.
- Wiki is notoriously lame in integrating pictures within the text.

Rasheed · Post by **Rasheed** » Tue Dec 12, 2006 11:20 am

Although I have no objections against a wiki by e frontier, I rather think that the way to go for preserving and making available to the general public of the thoughts and ideas on this forum is by scraping the forum text, and tagging and digesting it into a easier to read text. You couldn't use the literal text, but ideas are still free and can be used and reproduced ad nauseam in the free world.

I will see if there is some solution to do this, by using one of the closed sections on this forum as a template. I can read all the posts and transfer them to my computer with a program called WebGrabber (I'm on Mac OS X). Now it's only a matter of finding the tools to process unstructured text.

Rhoel · Post by **Rhoel** » Tue Dec 12, 2006 12:07 pm

slowtiger wrote: - The structure of a Wiki is quite likely to get as chaotic as the forum is right now. Only a strong policy which enforces one defined structure upon all articles and the way they are linked to each other will, over time, yield a useful result.

My suggestion would be to set up a wiki dev team who would put together the basic wiki, organise a strong backbone and style. If the backbone is locial and obvious, then it generally makes subsequent house keeping easier. Analyisiing other Wikis would also show the good and the bad.

Once the core work is functional, then it can be made open to the usergroup.

Having a closed topic or a remote forum (I have space on my server) for the wiki core team would be useful in early stages for coordination of the project.

Once the wiki is up, then the topic area can be opened to the open forum at the same time.

Loks like the idea is a goer.

Rhoel.

slowtiger · Post by **slowtiger** » Tue Dec 12, 2006 4:43 pm

As it happens, I just discovered that somebody finally created an AnimeStudio entry into wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anime_Studio

I just cleaned it up a bit, it still needs better description of functions than strraight from efrontiers advertising ...