Mayday Wiki-fication Many other folks have brought this idea up before, but I think it's time to get a Mayday Wiki up and running proper as the official MM site. It's 2007, it's time to upgrade. Also, at this point I think my reliance on hand-editing and hand-approving everything that comes through is hurting the MM more than it is helping it. On the other hand, you wouldn't believe how much stuff I have to weed through in order to keep the MM submissions lean. If we're going to do this, I want it well thought out before we do, so I'm opening up a request for comments from the MM readers w/ respect to this idea. -bhance 01.12.2007 p.s. WanderingScribble has set his own example Wiki up here: http://www.wanderingscribble.com/mayday/pmwiki/ ... but I would ask that you don't start hammering it and filling that one in just yet, as it's more proof-of-concept :) -- snip -- Mr. Hance, I've been following the Mayday Mystery updates, but I haven't had any input to offer since the last Mayday. However, I've been thinking about the site. Whenever I read through the clues and the summary and other information, I've had problems cross-referencing, and it seems like there's plenty of information that applies to more than one ad that is never cross-linked and so gets repeated. Have you ever considered creating a wiki for the Mayday Mystery, rather than using plain HTML? If you used the correct wiki software, you could lock down editing to prevent vandalization, but allow people to propose suggested changes that you could view and approve. The advantage of a wiki would be that cross-references, searches, and structuring would be much easier and user-friendly. I understand you may not always have a lot of time on your hands, so if you want, I could set up a test version on one of my sites to see what it would look like. I'll understand if you don't want to do the wiki idea, too, just a suggestion. Happy holidays and best wishes, WS (later) I've taken the liberty of test-running a wiki (using the PmWiki software, which is flatfile PHP and doesn't use a database). You can see it here: http://www.wanderingscribble.com/mayday/pmwiki/ The information and texts that I've entered so far are mostly from your site and from the summary document made by Craig, but I think the wiki shows the potential that it offers in terms of usability and research improvements. -- snip -- I've been mulling the same thing for a while now. I'm working something like six days a week these days, so I'm not spending a whole lot of time maintaining the MM and that's a bad thing. My concerns with this idea were/are 1) Conversion from HTML to wiki, time and effort needed to convert 2) Exactly what you described re: approval and vandalism. The other sites I manage are always in an arms race with spammers, and I wouldn't want the MM wiki to undergo the same horrible fate. 3) Hosting, but this is no longer an issue. I've got my own stable of hardware going, so I would be managing the hosts. -- snip --
01.29.2007 From W.S. Two more thoughts regarding the Mayday Wiki. 1. For the software, look for something that will allow you to create article titles that are separate from the page link, and also allow for weird words with punctuation or spaces. For example, on Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schrodinger links to an article titled "Erwin Schrodinger". 2. Instead of deciding whether you are going to allow the public to edit the wiki from the get-go, you could try this: Allow everybody to edit the wiki first, asking for help especially in converting the HTML site completely to wiki format, but tell everybody that once the conversion is done, you will password-protect the wiki. This way, you can get a whole bunch of people to help out at first while limiting the long-term vandalism. Another thing you could do is not make an automated login. You could require people to have submitted at least one unique clue before allowing them to register. This would take care of the problem of bots and spamming, and I'm sure it would cut down the amount of vandalism by a huge amount because few idiots would be dedicated enough to spend time thinking about the mystery to get a few cheap kicks out of wiping a page. In addition, the whole of the site up until now has revolved around people submitting clues, so it's not out of line to ask them to do so or have done so now.
02.04.2007 from S.K. Overall, pretty good idea and one that will no doubt relieve some of your workload. I started out thinking that a wiki would be great because anyone could add whatever was relevant. But I've changed my thinking slightly. Even with the current system there are a lot of clues submitted by new readers who are clearly well-meaning but who haven't actually taken the time to see what they're sending in has already been sent by several other people on the same page, as well as unrelated thoughts about the mystery as a whole and so on.. So with that in mind, I would suggest the approach used by wikipedia rather than a free-for-all. That is, have the wiki pages for what is known, plus a 'discussion' page where thoughts and ramblings can be discussed and added to until they form something concrete. In addition, people could have their own pages for specific theories spanning multiple ads or other things they're thinking of that aren't specific to any other page. You could restrict editing certain pages to certain users but it's probably best (in my opinion) to, again, use the wikipedia approach of just having guidelines of use. I'm using mediawiki (the wiki created for wikipedia) at work to document resources and information, and it's pretty straightforward to set up and use.