Hi everyone. After some thought, I’ve decided to convert the Panzer Dragoon Legacy encyclopaedia into a wiki. This is mainly because I don’t have time to maintain all the articles myself (as new Panzer Dragoon content comes out, this is becoming increasingly apparent). The wiki format allows everyone in the community to contribute incrementally. I believe this gives us a better chance of the encyclopaedia being maintained going forward.
Currently the wiki set up so that you must request access to make changes.
Some changes from the encyclopaedia:
Information boxes are replaced by a “Details” section within the article.
The Wiki.js software currently doesn’t support references. There weren’t many references throughout the encyclopaedia, so I am converting the references to hyperlinks.
I’ve added a “See Also” section to the bottom of each page, containing a link to the related tag on the Panzer Dragoon Legacy main site.
To bring the Wiki more in line with other wikis (such as Wikipedia), there will be fewer images brought across.
In the process of moving the content across, I am adding tags to every entry.
In the long run it would be good to clean up some of the entries so that they’re more to the point (again, like Wikipedia). But the current goal is to just port the existing encyclopaedia over.
Because Wiki.js new and modern wiki software it isn’t as feature-rich as MediaWiki. There is currently no theme support; this is apparently a planned feature.
The wiki is in very early stages. Please take a look and let me know if you’re interested in helping me move the remainder of the content over, or have any other feedback. I’d like to make this a community project, with as many people maintaining the wiki as possible.
Wiki.js currently allows us to make some small modifications to the presentation of the wiki, such as changing the logo. There’s also a Dark Mode which makes the background black, but it has some accessibility issues, so I’ve left it using the default Light Mode (white background). Ideally I’d like to make the colour scheme match the main site and forum with blacks, browns, and greys; this is something we can review once Wiki.js supports custom themes, but I don’t think this is a blocker for launching the wiki.
So far I have moved the Games, Game Versions, Books, and Soundtracks categories over from the old encyclopaedia. Currently working on Demo/Promo Discs. @Draikin has reserved Merchandise. The bulk of the work will be in moving the longer categories such as Characters and Factions, so I think it will be a while before we’re ready to take down the existing encyclopaedia.
I have abandoned the wiki project. The reason is because I did not receive any support from the community. Let me know if you have any questions.
We (the Panzer Dragoon Legacy admins) will continue to run the existing non-wiki encyclopaedia as best we can. I will also look at taking some of the lessons learned from the Wiki experiment and applying them to the encyclopaedia, for example, organising the encyclopaedia category pages more (e.g. grouped by game).
Hey solo, just FYI I too started a Sonic Adventure Chao Wiki - it’s hugely dependent on the community chipping in, mostly a year or two of just me sorting out templates and adding articles. Only recently is it at the stage where community members are jumping on board and helping out, so it’s a really big task (especially for legacy niche games like ours).
Also to note is that MediaWiki is an absolute bitch to install and configure properly. A complete nightmare. I still don’t have a mobile theme yet and trying to integrate it to my main site is terrible lol. Not to mention the old school nature of using templates etc, but I went with it because it was the software which everything else seems to use. I didn’t want to make a new style wiki or custom wiki, only to have someone else make a Chao MediaWiki which everyone felt more comfortable with.
If you go down the MediaWiki route I’ll be happy to share my pain any time. But I haven’t found a MediaWiki expert at all yet so I can’t say I recommend it!! I’m stressed out just thinking about it haha
That’s great that your wiki is doing well @Scott. The technical issues are not so much of an issue for me; like so many IT issues, I’ve come to see this as a human issue. Unlike the Sonic community, the Panzer Dragoon community doesn’t appear to be large enough to have the interest in maintaining a wiki.
Note, there is already a Panzer Dragoon wiki on Fandom called Panzer Dragoon Wikia (which is powered by a modified MediaWiki instance I believe). It hasn’t gained much traction even though I copied a bunch of articles over from Panzer Dragoon Legacy’s encyclopaedia in the past. I would be happy for the whole thing to be copied over if that’s what the community wants. But there’s a lack of evidence that others have an interest in maintaining a Panzer Dragoon wiki.
Hi everyone, the wiki on Fandom has been adopted by Multibrawlr, an admin of The Wiki of the Dead. As such, we’ve been able to clean up all of the spam and rename it to Panzer Dragoon Wiki. I have decided to move the existing encyclopaedia over to the Fandom wiki so that the community can focus on improving a single wiki.
We have made good progress moving over the content from Panzer Dragoon Legacy’s encyclopaedia, so that will soon be discontinued in favour of Panzer Dragoon Wiki.
We’ve come full circle with this, and the wiki is now run by the Panzer Dragoon Legacy organisation, but hosted on Fandom, where it’s most visible. There’s some great work going on (coordinated on Discord), so if you’re interested in helping out, please do join us there.
We’ve also made some improvements to the design, thanks especially to @000 for creating the logo and colour scheme.
