The Wiki Rule: Difference between revisions

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
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* [http://fictionalcreatures.wikia.com/wiki/Fictional_Creatures_Wiki Fictional Creatures Wiki]: A work in progress wiki documenting every fictional creature that is not an alien.
* [http://fictionalcreatures.wikia.com/wiki/Fictional_Creatures_Wiki Fictional Creatures Wiki]: A work in progress wiki documenting every fictional creature that is not an alien.
* [http://jamesbond.wikia.com/ James Bond Wiki]: The [[James Bond]] franchise.
* [http://jamesbond.wikia.com/ James Bond Wiki]: The [[James Bond]] franchise.
* [http://lolcatbible.com/ LOLCats Bible]: [[The Bible]] if it were written in [[LOL Speak]].
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20090106110458/http://lolcatbible.com/ LOLCats Bible]: [[The Bible]] if it were written in [[LOL Speak]].
* [https://poserdazfreebies.miraheze.org/wiki/Main_Page Poser and Daz Free Resources]: Free content for Poser and DAZ Studio, filling the void left when Poserpedia disappeared. (Also All The Tropes' little brother - it's the second-largest English-language wiki hosted at the same hosting service as ATT, which is the largest.)
* [https://poserdazfreebies.miraheze.org/wiki/Main_Page Poser and Daz Free Resources]: Free content for Poser and DAZ Studio, filling the void left when Poserpedia disappeared. (Also All The Tropes' little brother - it's the second-largest English-language wiki hosted at the same hosting service as ATT, which is the largest.)
* [http://romancewiki.com/ Romance Wiki]: [[Romance Novel]]s.
* [http://romancewiki.com/ Romance Wiki]: [[Romance Novel]]s.

Revision as of 02:31, 20 April 2019

There's a wiki for that.

There is no area of interest, no matter how narrowly defined, where a person cannot put up a wiki for it and attract at least a few editors with similar interests. Increasingly, in fact, there is a chance that someone already has put up a wiki for it. For example, here's one for cacti. The plants.

In the early days of the Internet, there was a similar phenomenon, the "everything has its own home page" rule. Anyone with enough HTML savvy and a powerful enough interest in one particular subject could and often would create a site dedicated to it. This was largely how the early Web was forged, in fact. All the stuff we know and love today—e-commerce, social networking—that came later. Except porn. Porn was there from the beginning.

With the advent of Wikipedia, the playing field changed. Rather than rely on a collection of sites each written by one person with questionable expertise, users could find most of the information they needed in an article written, edited, and fact-checked by an entire userbase of people with questionable expertise, but all on one easy-to-remember site. The interest in hand-crafted "fan sites" waned.

However, a number of factors kept Wikipedia from being a perfect replacement for the old system. A desire for greater detail on the topic than Wikipedia is willing to allow, for one. Schisms or differing schools of thought on the topic was another. Fan-made wikis sprang up to bring back the world of homemade sites with the added benefits of the wiki model.

The "wiki-sphere" is becoming a vast depository of information at all levels of detail. The encyclopedic wikis are collecting a great breadth of topics at an increasingly shallow level of detail, and the topic-intensive wikis are gathering all the details.

Not all Wikis are on the major search engines, though. Corporations use wikis behind firewalls, the American CIA uses one to collate data among agents and analysts, and even publishers of dead-tree books use them to coordinate edits among authors, editors and copy editors.

Fan-made wikis are usually made on wiki farms, such as Wikia, or else are hosted on a preexisting fansite. Recently, organisations such as NIWA have spoken out against the commercialization that takes place on wiki farms, and have encouraged fans to set up their own websites.

Wikis can reach truly huge sizes. To put them up as candidate for a Doorstopper is an understatement. See the list of largest wikis. Note: If you're looking for TV Tropes, they're on the list at the bottom. "All The Tropes" hasn't even been noticed yet. The first list only has MediaWiki wikis.

Examples of The Wiki Rule include:

General

Anime & Manga

Comic Books

Films -- Animated

Films - Live-Action

Literature

Live-Action TV

Music

Newspaper Comics

Tabletop Games

Toys

Video Games

Webcomics

Web Original

Western Animation

Real Life

"It was big and affected almost every nation in the world. Lots of people were poor."

  1. Largely a relocated Hetalia Archives after the creators decided to move in protest of the direction Wikia was taking with its ads.