Over the years I have logged into the Spelljammer wiki and updated a page or two and left with virtually none the wiser of my little interlude.
Over the past six months I have been running a D&D RPG set in the Spelljammer Universe. I found it funny that even though I own all the published materials I found myself gravitating to the older online tools to find information on the Spelljamming Universe to run my campaign, including the official Spelljammer web-site and this wiki.
The more I visited both the more frustrated I became in attempting to find the specific information that I wanted. Why was not topic "X" readily available or already defined. Unfortunately, this falls directly into my wheelhouse as it were, I am a Digital Preservation Technologist for the 5th largest research library in the world. It is my job to design and implement systems to allow people to find the needle in the fifth largest haystack in the world, thousands of times a day. My professional world and fantasy universe collided in that instant.
It became apparent that if I wanted to help make this wiki more "useful" I had to answer a few questions. What is the purpose of the wiki and how do you go about implementing that change?
What is the purpose of the wiki?
A wiki is a resource for collaborating and sharing of specific information with a targeted audience. Professional sounding statement if I do say so myself. So how does that apply to this wiki? The Spelljammer wiki on fandom.com is a resource for individuals interested in the Spelljammer Universe for Dungeons & Dragons and other similar Role-Playing Games.
Okay that sounds about right, it is pretty much assigned already, whether it is specifically stated somewhere or not. I should clarify that not everyone that comes here is going to have a background in D&D RPG or RPGs in general, there might be a few fans out there who saw Treasure Planet from Disney Studios and decided they wanted to know more, but the reality is those individuals are few and far between. The core audience will have a basic understanding of how an RPG works and what is being presented in this wiki. The core audience actually gets slightly more specific, it isn’t about players it is about providing resource for both active and prospective Dungeon Masters. They are the individuals who will be seeking out the specific information.
That leaves multiple factors that I would like to focus upon to make this wiki better resource for both perspective and active Dungeon Masters.
1) The lack of information presented in the wiki.
2) The lack of the metadata and linking through out the wiki
3) The difficulty of navigating this wiki
4) The lack of artwork.
At its core, a wiki is only as good as the information that is presented in it. A week ago, there were 596 pages in the wiki. For a wiki on such a vast topic that is dreadfully few pages, especially considering the age of the wiki. To be very clear that is not a knock on the individuals that created the 596 pages, it is a difficult and time-consuming process to create a single page let alone multiple pages. There just needs to be more pages presenting more data. It will take time and effort, and the old saying many hands makes short work is very true.
To help recruit authors I plan to use the two facebook groups “Sages of Spelljammer” and “Spelljammer” to recruit additional contributors and to validate the information presented within these pages.
In my view content belongs in three broad containers: Real World, Fantasy World, and Dungeon Master Guides. Containers is not the best word but attempting to avoid confusion later. Real World information is based upon “physical and digital” objects in our world, books, modules, accessories, anything we could physically hold in our hand. The second is information on things that characters within the fantasy universe might encounter, for example what is the Rock of Bral like. The final container is information used directly by DM to run a game within the Spelljammer Universe, for example the stats of a Brown Scavver.
There is not a whole lot of linking metadata within the wiki. I am talking specifically about the use of categories to help link the pages together. I am spending time organizing the categories and adding multiple categories to pages.
I have updated the main page, created a couple of new pages and began the work of adding more links in between pages, as well as using standard infobox objects on pages. I hope this makes pages easier to read and makes it far easier to navigate through the wiki.
To inspire people, I am hoping to add more artwork to the pages. I am not an artist, so this is a huge challenge for me. I can create a few simple pieces and I know I can use promotional artwork, getting additional artwork is going to take effort. I think that effort is well worth it.