How would you like your lore?

[Malice]

Wiki's are perhaps the best way of finding and retrieving / cross-referencing information quickly and easily, however with something as dynamic as an ongoing (multiple) storyline and characters coming/going all the time, it means the wiki is a neverending maintenance task that increases in complexity as time goes on, rather than something that would get easier as more information is dealt with. This maintenance,, when placed into the hands of the playerbase introduces inaccuracies, misinformation and omissions along with non-standardised formatting which makes finding the information harder and it can look awful too. That's not even including 'wilful' vandalism or stupidity which just makes more work and longerr time to sort out the mess. The obvious solution to this is to then ensure the staff either maintain the while thing alone, or preside over it, this unfortunately proves to be a grand workload, since numerous changes can be made in each day, everyday, whilst staff don't necessarily have that time to devote to DC at all, let alone just the forums/wiki.

Whilst the majority of the community here seem respoonsible and dedicated, and there's polenty of techy-minded folks with the know-how to sort out problems and help with formatting/linking etc., overall, the SoH wiki shows that it's just not workable for DC.

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The only real downside to using forums instead, is that they can take time to read through to find specific details, and may also become 'polluted'/'diluted' with spam which makes it possible for information to be lost amongst the detritus.
However, with the important info kept in locked, sticky threads with clear titles and organisation, it should be possible to collate all the most necessary info.

[belthesar]

Even if you don't open the wiki's lore section to community editing, it still serves as a better system to post the lore in vs. a forum.

I put on my robe and wizard h-- erhmm... *puts on his geek hat*

Forums (SMF, phpBB, etc) are designed as message board, not archives of information, and as such they aren't designed with features that are amicable towards ease of access, reference, and don't do well for future-proofing.  With a forum, the content you post is referenced by a couple of IDs typically.  A thread ID, and a message ID.  Both of these are numbers.  So, if there's detailed information about Avera's Hope posted, the URL would be http://dragoncoast.org/dohforums/index.php?topic=10102&msg=144599.  Not very friendly to remember.  It's also useless if for whatever reason either of those IDs change, which can happen due to a software update.  Now, Sen's pretty good at making sure bad things like that don't happen, and the forums and its accompanying database have backups, so that shouldn't be a permanent problem, but it can, especially if a software version upgrade forces the changing of these ID numbers.

Now, with a wiki (specifically a MediaWiki wiki, since that's what I have the most experience with and what DC has installed in the past), your URLs are human readable.  When you want to link to information about Avera's Hope, the URL looks something like:  http://dragoncoast.org/donwiki/Averas_Hope.  And since that's using what is called an Alias, which means you have a friendly shortcut to the wiki entry's actual ID, which could be anything, if there is a database update, the update only has to make sure that the alias points to the right entry ID. 

Now, Malice mentioned that a community-edited lore section, wherever it's at, is a pain at best.  It requires maintenance, and work, and nothing fun.  And he's absolutely right if you implement a wiki in the traditional sense.  You don't have to give every forum member contribute access to the Wiki, that can be reserved specifically for the staff.  If you want community revisions to be available, the permission structure to require approval for edit of specific entries also exists within MediaWiki (although it might require a plugin.  Not sure.) but you don't have to turn that on if it's just going to be more work than its worth. 

It takes FAR too much time to cross link a forum for a lore section than it does to properly implement a good wiki.  It just may not be able to be Wikipedia.  And that, my fellows, is not necessarily a bad thing.

[Grebs]

I see no problem at all in how the stickied information is done atm, FAQ area, PrC details, spell modifications, setting information etc. Provided you have ahlf a brain cell and can read..so we are fine there...sorry Zenny 

[Norseman]

Eh, I never used the wiki myself so I'd just prefer to have it on the forum. I'm a forum junkie anyway, though.

[Andy]

I personally loved the wiki myself and made extensive use of it in keeping my character profile and Soros based information updated.

That's just me though.