first off: if someone could translate this into German, that'd be terrific. My German grammar is terrible but it is quite important to also reach out to the German only speakers in this community.
So as you have probably read in the subject of this thread it is about the revival of Illapedia.
It has been spooking in my mind for quite a while to revive/create an Illarion dedicated wiki.
Thus I have sought out people and Illarion does not mind having fansites, including a wiki.
Of course this cannot be a one man project, thus if you think you could help with this I would like to ask you to help. But let me tell you some more things and answer some of your questions firsts.
Now before we get to the "How are we going to do it?" I'd first like to answer the question "Why are we going to do it?".
There are basically three points for me that made me miss Illapedia or any Illarion dedicated Wiki for this matter:
- Books to read for characters while they are unable to log in to the game
- Lore which should be common knowledge for some characters
- Simple game details for the game aspect
Now of course there is also another answer to my last question: books. I agree with that, but the Wiki could also be the 'offline library'. It is up to you to pass that knowledge over to your characters. Nonetheless there are still topics that shouldn't have to come out of books, if I want to create a character from Gynk I do not wish to first seek out a book about Gynk. Illapedia makes sure you can skip that step.
Last but not least there is obviously OOC info that can be placed on the wiki, about Illarion itself, history, contributors etc. etc.
The Wiki is not meant to be an all encompassing official outlet, but it is meant to give you some kind of a way to read this information. And personally I just love reading lore .
So, "How are we going to do it?".
I installed a MediaWiki on a host. I also used a coupon I still had for a free domain name (You get a few of them if you buy enough domain names ) to get "illapedia.org".
There are still some things that have to be fixed (both English and German articles for instance, but MediaWiki is a bit of a bitch when it comes to being bilingual) but basically it's online.
If there is anything about a specific article you doubt, want to discuss or whatever, without instantly changing it, you can create a Talk Page and discuss it with other users.
Now the previous Wiki had some spam problems, I've taken rather easy steps to counter that: only certain usergroups can edit and create pages.
Thus a bot cannot simply walk in and hand out some spam.
This is also where you come in, a Wiki is a community project. I took a bit of a leap of faith hoping that enough people feel the same like me.
So how can you help out? Any contribution you make to the Wiki is welcome. Write an article, copy an article from the old wiki and update it, copy an in-game book to the wiki. You name it.
The only thing you have to do to help out is create an account on Illapedia and notify me here or in PM that you want to help out and state your Illapedia account name.
I do not require anyone to write articles, you do it because you want it. I give you the tools to do so.
Any suggestions are, of course, welcome too. Just knock on my PM box.
If there are any more questions: do ask them! If you want to overload me with questions: I suppose I'd better move my face to the IRC then.
Hoping that you are just as excited for this project as I am,
~Tinuva
Edit: the actual link is http://illapedia.org. It's rather empty as of yet as I wrote this down before I finished installing the translator.