I'm actually contemplating whether getting rid of all the member pages, fads and events would be worth doing. I have no intention of waiting for Minus World to slowly copy stuff over because if they were desperate it would have been done by now, and as it stands this wiki is clogged up with people just talking about themselves. It's almost like a mini facebook and as great as some of these guys are, they've no intention of returning and many of them haven't really contributed anything at all to MFGG.
I figure all this sort of stuff would be better suited to some sort of forum/site mod in which the user has x amount of space in which to describe themselves and what they've done. And then they'd be secure from vandalism or whatever too.
Yes we all like team wars but it's completely irrelevant to everyone these days. I took part and I don't care. It doesn't really matter all that much to me that we had some silly forums once upon a time five years ago either, so to have it eternally documented for all the newbies to learn from seems really stupid. I mean it's not like it can be repeated, or if the majority of people active then are active now. It's better off left spread across forum archives. Some of these wiki pages are asking for people to update them with content that's three or four years old - it's not going to happen.
My vision for the wiki, despite it being hard to get people on board with this idea, is that it's a big fat reference place, hosting everything useful to MFGG that isn't appropriate for the main site or forums. Big detailed guides about various fangame-related or programming-related things. I'd like to hope that maybe when MFGG3 rolls around that can take care of extensive fangame documentation (so for example, most of the information
here would end up
here).
I think one of its rolls should be to educate. You go there if you need to look up something meaningful, but aren't presented with complicated walls of text, wikipedia style, or vague comments on half-assed game maker message boards who haven't got any idea of what they're actually talking about
example
I, for some reason, hunt out a copy of Multimedia Fusion Express, and I have no skill in using it whatsoever. The actual manuals are non-existent or crap.
"eep what is this. What does that button labeled "P" do? What's a .cca file? How do I get things to move? Why am I using MMFE?"
and you'd travel to the wiki for answers to these basic questions. Though granted there's not a huge amount of demand for MMFE... but there is for things like Game Maker or MMF2 or whatever. I don't see much point in hanging on to things that nobody will be able to relate to in five to ten years time, like out of date fads or out of date members.
what this would require, however, is people who are willing to devote the time and effort into writing lots and lots of stuff. Make templates, organise things, and maintain the wiki. And I admit, at the moment I'm not one of those guys. I work at
Sega Retro because I know a lot about Sega, and there's a lot of stuff out there that's easy to bring together under one roof. This wiki is a bit more tricky, because there really isn't anything out there for fangamers in terms of proper resources. There's stuff for "real" programming languages, but it's of mixed quality and not always relevant. Everything will need doing from scratch. But we'd be pioneers if it were done.
but that's what I think.
I'm actually contemplating whether getting rid of all the member pages, fads and events would be worth doing. I have no intention of waiting for Minus World to slowly copy stuff over because if they were desperate it would have been done by now, and as it stands this wiki is clogged up with people just talking about themselves. It's almost like a mini facebook and as great as some of these guys are, they've no intention of returning and many of them haven't really contributed anything at all to MFGG.
I figure all this sort of stuff would be better suited to some sort of forum/site mod in which the user has x amount of space in which to describe themselves and what they've done. And then they'd be secure from vandalism or whatever too.
Yes we all like team wars but it's completely irrelevant to everyone these days. I took part and I don't care. It doesn't really matter all that much to me that we had some silly forums once upon a time five years ago either, so to have it eternally documented for all the newbies to learn from seems really stupid. I mean it's not like it can be repeated, or if the majority of people active then are active now. It's better off left spread across forum archives. Some of these wiki pages are asking for people to update them with content that's three or four years old - it's not going to happen.
My vision for the wiki, despite it being hard to get people on board with this idea, is that it's a big fat reference place, hosting everything useful to MFGG that isn't appropriate for the main site or forums. Big detailed guides about various fangame-related or programming-related things. I'd like to hope that maybe when MFGG3 rolls around that can take care of extensive fangame documentation (so for example, most of the information [url=http://wiki.mfgg.net/wiki/index.php/Toad_Strikes_Back]here[/url] would end up [url=http://www.mfgg.net/index.php?act=resdb¶m=02&c=2&id=12431]here[/url]).
I think one of its rolls should be to educate. You go there if you need to look up something meaningful, but aren't presented with complicated walls of text, wikipedia style, or vague comments on half-assed game maker message boards who haven't got any idea of what they're actually talking about
example
I, for some reason, hunt out a copy of Multimedia Fusion Express, and I have no skill in using it whatsoever. The actual manuals are non-existent or crap.
[img]http://img259.imageshack.us/img259/4949/mmfe.png[/img]
"eep what is this. What does that button labeled "P" do? What's a .cca file? How do I get things to move? Why am I using MMFE?"
and you'd travel to the wiki for answers to these basic questions. Though granted there's not a huge amount of demand for MMFE... but there is for things like Game Maker or MMF2 or whatever. I don't see much point in hanging on to things that nobody will be able to relate to in five to ten years time, like out of date fads or out of date members.
what this would require, however, is people who are willing to devote the time and effort into writing lots and lots of stuff. Make templates, organise things, and maintain the wiki. And I admit, at the moment I'm not one of those guys. I work at [url=http://segaretro.org/Main_Page]Sega Retro[/url] because I know a lot about Sega, and there's a lot of stuff out there that's easy to bring together under one roof. This wiki is a bit more tricky, because there really isn't anything out there for fangamers in terms of proper resources. There's stuff for "real" programming languages, but it's of mixed quality and not always relevant. Everything will need doing from scratch. But we'd be pioneers if it were done.
but that's what I think.