A wild idea - Wikipedia'ing your books/worlds

[Vintage Season]

Originally Posted by HarryT

I should perhaps add that I'm not there either .

Oh, really?

- M.

[jaxx6166]

Years ago, I had been involved in a gaming project. We were trying to create a Final Fantasy VI style game for the PC, it went nowhere and we've all since moved on with our lives. However, during that time frame we did use our own wiki page. It was a bit of a pain in the ass to manage. But I must have logged somewhere around 20k words just in world building for the wiki. It had everything from the history of the world to a good four or five page history of each character. It was pretty neat, but time consuming.

It wasn't actually hosted ON wikipedia, but it was one of those CC/Open source programs LIKE the real wikipedia. But, it was hosted on our own internal server.

But, in Steve's defense, I have seen a couple of self pub'd authors on Wiki.

I found this guy when I was seeing if my pen name existed on teh interwebs (it does)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Alexander_(author)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Robinson

Wonder if I should change my name, don't want to be associated with that guy. :/

[jaxx6166]

Steven,

I'd second the guy that suggested you just create an in depth web page. If you make it pretty and professional looking, it can almost be another marketing tool for you.

[ATDrake]

Originally Posted by jaxx6166

But, in Steve's defense, I have seen a couple of self pub'd authors on Wiki.

I found this guy when I was seeing if my pen name existed on teh interwebs (it does)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Alexander_(author)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Robinson

Wonder if I should change my name, don't want to be associated with that guy. :/

From the looks of the history, it looks like both those guys put up their own entries.

The first one keeps editing it under new and ever-changing usernames, who only ever seem to edit just the one article. I'm wondering if his old identities are getting banned and this is his way to keep building up his article, or he just thinks that if it looks like the contribs are coming from different users it'll look totally unlike sockpuppet performance art.

Second guy started up his own article too, and promptly edited a bunch of other popular ones to push his book (and kept misspelling "culture" and "references"), which have since been reverted. He now seems to have caught on to editing anonymously from behind a bare IP address, but the comments on his article's discussion page and in the history will haunt him for life. Or at least until some editor decides to delete him for non-notability.

Whichever one of them shares your name, my condolences.

Incidentally, the official guidelines: Wikipedia is not a soapbox or means of promotion; points 4 & 5 address self-promotion and advertising specifically.

[Steven Lake]

Originally Posted by jaxx6166

Steven,

I'd second the guy that suggested you just create an in depth web page. If you make it pretty and professional looking, it can almost be another marketing tool for you.

Yeah, I'm actually considering that. I've got a spare domain I can use (I grabbed it years ago just in case I might have a use for it like this, and to stop domain campers from grabbing it once the books were released) for just such a thing. It should be a nice little addition to an already planned tech manual/inductee guide I'll be releasing in the future.

Either way, it resolves part of the reason for even considering a wikipedia article.

[crich70]

You could also use Tiddlywiki to create your entries for your own use. It's good for organizing things for writing projects.

[Logseman]

I favor Wikidpad myself, as an offline wiki for you to develop your character constellation. Tomboy's fine too, and you can get an Ubuntu One account and share the Tomboy notes with others if I remember correctly.

[Enchantlee]

I tried this once for a production company I was starting. Not as an attempt to get more clicks, but as an honest attempt to make it a page..

it got removed.
>.<

[Steven Lake]

HA! It's funny you guys should revive this thread. Per the recommendation of several people I've actually started my own Wiki for the Earthfleet universe, and wow has it been fun! It's not complete yet (I've still got artwork and things like that to add, and a few entries that need fleshing out more) but I'd say it's about 95% done or so. Well, 95% of what I'm going to release currently. The rest is waiting for each of the remaining books to be released before I update those parts so as not to spoil people.

You guys can check out the wiki here: http://www.earthfleet.net/wiki/

Those who have read the books are also welcome to contribute to the wiki as well, as I know people would appreciate your insight into the world as well.

[M T McGuire]

This is very interesting. It also explains something. Until last week, my imaginary world was called Yarth. I'd checked it months ago (along with all my other made up names) on the UK trade marks site and googled it but found very little, only a couple of references that suggested it was part of some new age religion.

Last week I did a final sanity check with the google and trade marks thing before pushing the "print" and "upload" buttons... This time there was a wiki page which explained that Yarth was actually a part of dungeons and dragons. The world is now K'Barth.

I can appreciate that Wiki don't want their pages to become barely disguised advertising but I have to say that their page on Yarth saved me from making a howler of monster proportions... not to mention my arse if my itellectual property lawyer friend is to be believed "don't cross Americans, they will sue you about anything".

I have a website so I suspect the way to go is to add a section to that, as you guys have done but thanks for raising this!

Cheers

MTM

[mjhudston]

if it's good enough for the likes of Orson Scott Card and the enderverse, why cannot other authors big and small do it? Are we seriously considering that Wikipedia is now going to sensor what information about authors is allows?

[ATDrake]

Originally Posted by mjhudston

if it's good enough for the likes of Orson Scott Card and the enderverse, why cannot other authors big and small do it? Are we seriously considering that Wikipedia is now going to sensor what information about authors is allows?

Because Wikipedia is a privately owned website and they can allow or not allow on said website whatever they please, according to their own guidelines which disallow self-promotion upon it.

Besides, OSC didn't put up all those articles on his works himself. Other people who recognized that he was considered a major writer with a majorly influential book did.

[Joseph Mitchell]

I thought of creating an entry for my novel there, to post maps and lists of characters and such, but after reading the guidelines, I saw that this is something they expect fans to do, not authors. So I'm looking forward to seeing it someday, hopefully before I die, then my life will be validated in Wikipedia form, like Naven Johnson getting his name printed in the phonebook, I would be somebody.

[Steven Lake]

Yeah, I agree. The original idea to get on Wikipedia sounded like a great idea to me, but the idea that you "earn" your place on the site seems a far better honor than simply going up to the site and pimping yourself. Also, putting up my own Wiki has actually been more beneficial to me as a writer than a simple Wikipedia entry. It's forced me to solidify and flesh out ideas and characters and places that were only concepts before, and were happy being so. Thus I also recommend to others that, if you're a writer, start your own wiki and build out your own worlds and books there. It's really a great tool.

[Logseman]

Wikis are esentially interconnected ressource pools. Thus, they're beneficial for many kinds of enterprises which use that: be it writing books, learning a topic on your own or developing software. I'm very convinced that the widespread use of wikis is much of the future of learning.