Hi everyone,
For nearly six years, I've been administering the Amiga Wiki over at
http://www.amigawiki.com – the original intention was to create a resource where the community could collaborate to record everything they wanted to about our favourite platform(s). To be honest, though, the site's never really reached critical mass – apart from removing linkspam from the pages (which recently got so bad an entire page was wiped), I haven't had the time or inclination to change anything much over the last few years, and as a result most articles are lacking in quality and there's nothing relating to more recent developments.
I'm perfectly willing to keep the site ticking over as it is (the hosting is kindly provided by Wayne so it doesn't cost me anything personally except time). That said, I'd be interested to see if there is any demand for a site like this, and if so what could be done to make it more useful. At the moment, I'd say the key things differentiating the Amiga Wiki from Wikipedia and other Amiga sites are:
- Covering more specialist topics than Wikipedia – while it's now true that Wikipedia has far more detailed articles about anything Amiga-related, I suspect that troubleshooting guides/game walkthroughs/tutorials etc would all be rejected as Wikipedia content
- Open-source license means there's no risk of the site and all its content suddenly disappearing. In the event I lost interest in the project, the site is relatively compact and could be re-homed by anyone with a little bit of technical knowledge (it's an extremely basic backend using Perl that is unlikely to become obsolescent anytime soon)
If anyone's got any suggestions for how the site could be made more relevant for the community then I'd love to hear them, and I'm prepared to put a fair amount of work into the site - if it helps bring it to its full potential. A few ideas are:
- Focussing more on tutorials/technical manuals? Or general-purpose “introduction to...” articles? Or editorials anyone can write?
- One idea from the past was to convert the wiki into an AmigaGuide document that could be distributed with emulation environments like AmigaSYS. The coding was done for this (see
http://www.amigawiki.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl/Amiga_Wiki_Offline_Edition) although the site contents is no-where near ready for this
- Technical enhancements (e.g. prettier pages / inline images and diagrams / better search tools etc) are all do-able, although again I'd rather not spend time on these if no-one visits the site...
Let me know your thoughts
