Presenting: the Alternity wiki

[synecdochic]

Thanks to the master librarian powers of jenett, we've been using a wiki to keep track of everything for the last few years. After one last round of sweeping the cat hair out from under the couch because company's coming over, we're now ready to let y'all see the Alternity "show bible" -- everything we noted down because we knew we'd probably need it later.

jenett will be along in a few hours to give you a rundown of other things you might want to know, but she previously wrote a Guide for alt-fen, explaining the structure of the wiki and what you can find where.

Not everything is in the wiki yet -- we only started putting it together in Y5. (The existing indexing system had been close to collapse for a while, and shortly after I joined the game, the Yahoo mailing list that had been used for game planning started slowly imploding too. Since it's hard to coordinate things semi-realtime when Yahoo randomly decides to delay messages for up to 12 hours, I set up a self-hosted mailing list, and Jen suggested also setting up a MediaWiki install to handle the documenting, thus volunteering herself for endless wiki-elfing (it's like house-elfing) for the next three years.)

You may be tempted to expand the existing documentation as you reread things! In fact, we hope you will. Because MediaWiki installs are a huge-ass spam magnet, you can only edit a page when you're logged in to a wiki account, and you can't create an account on your own -- Jen or I have to create one for you. But we're happy to do so -- just ask. (You can get in touch with Jen on the entry in her journal with screened comments: leave your email address and she'll get back to you.)

One technical caveat: to save on hosting costs, the machine that runs hpalternity.com is a wee bit underpowered, and MediaWiki is a bit of a resource pig. (The story of my last three years: "Fuck, the wiki's fallen over again.") I've done as much as I can to improve performance, but if a bunch of people are trying to load a page, it may very well fall down under load. If that happens, wait five minutes and try again; if that doesn't work, I'll be along when I can to raise it from the dead.

Without further ado: The Alternity Docs Project. Feel free to share the awesome stuff you find.

Comments

[gwendolyngrace]

We really are serious about wanting help to fill in the gaps! Our records began as databases in Yahoo - limited to 10 dbs and 1,000 entries per db. We quickly outgrew capacity and started using a series of Google docs, both spreadsheet and word varieties. Those became too unwieldy. Lucky for us, Jen right around that time had been considering a wiki. She has put in a huge number of hours entering and cross-indexing! Some of us had time to help in fits and starts, but there is still a lot more that could be done.

If you are interested and want to help, please do let Jen or Denise know. We want this beautiful repository to be even more awesome.

[jenett]

I am so delighted you all finally get to look at the wiki! It has been a fascinating project to figure out how to make work (and I will be delighted to discuss decisions that went into the design and structure with anyone interested!)

We are also very serious about wanting your help if you're interested. If you want ideas to get you started, there's a list of projects I didn't get time to finish in the last section of the a guide to alt-fen page with some ideas. If you'd like to collect links, but are nervous about actually editing the wiki, there's a couple of tasks there where the links would be awesome, and incredibly helpful.

As D said, the guide for alt-fen page highlights a bunch of the content to help you find things and explore, including links to a few of the wiki's hidden treasures (backchannel things you haven't seen yet, among them.)

The last thing I'd say is that every link is in the wiki *somewhere*, but it is not always in all the places it should be.

(That's because, given the structure of the wiki, there are often 6-20 places a link for a given post should be, and the realities of time, human brains, the fact I was doing the indexing through several stretches in my life where focus and time were both in really short supply mean that links often didn't make it into every single one of those places.)

Anyway, feel free to discuss here, in other threads on alt-fen, and the link to my journal above is in case you'd like to ask me something or talk about editing but don't want to have the discussion out in public for some reason. Choices!

Finally, many many thanks to D for running the tech side of the wiki for us. I am more or less technically ept enough to do it, but wikis have some non-trivial security and update considerations, and she was always on top of it, and on top of figuring out how to get better performance and other details. Not having to think about technical side was a huge relief for me.

[jenett]

Oh, the other thing I meant to mention were my two basic organizing principles for the wiki:

1) When we want to kill someone, can we find someone of the category we wish to kill reasonably efficiently? (i.e. can we narrow down things like "Student, with parents we've also mentioned" if we want to?)

2) When we get around to actual revolution, can we find the references to how that affects people reasonably efficiently? (i.e. things like the list of who knows what in which camp came out of this.)

Everything else sort of grew out of that.

[longstrider]

First, Thank you Jen! Thank you Thank you Thank You!

As an example of back channel stuff that is available, the full text of Rookwood's infamous post-crucio Word Salad post.

[synecdochic]

I'm fond of our collection of last letters -- because when you're going off to fight a war, you write a letter for the people you're going to be leaving behind you.

[jenett]

I'm very fond of the news stories (the Londinarium one Deb did for Regulus is particularly awesome.

And when I was formatting the play information from Y3 (much of which is Gwen's work, but I didn't transcribe the comments about some of the historical details from other people), I was reminded how hilarious some of it is in hindsight.

[longstrider]

Oh goodness, Dean played Dolohov.

[synecdochic]

ahahahahahahahahaha oh goodness I never realized that

[lucky_guess]

There's also some good stuff if you search "Correspondence", too!

[gwendolyngrace]

Oh, I've got a lot more correspondence, actually (and note, that in the wiki it's misspelled (correspondance)... Jen, what's the best way to get all that in?

[jenett]

I've fixed the spelling.

(I should probably note here: I think every human ever has things they have trouble spelling, I'm usually better at catching my known pitfalls. I will, however, warn everyone that I am notoriously bad at failing to close parentheses and other bracketing marks unless they actually break coding, in which I case I usually do notice them. kiya can attest to this, she's been putting up with it for years and has been known to send me emails with a line of )))))))) in case I have a scarcity.)

Anyway, the speed of indexing required means that there's a lot of that kind of little thing, despite my best efforts. If you find minor corrections like that, email is probably much better for them (or the DW post in my journal: I'm glad to share my email, just not in public). Separate email means I can track them a lot better if I can't fix them immediately, and it helps avoid clutter here.

Players, anyone who's got other stuff they'd like to see in, send it in email, and I'm glad to put it in.

Fen, if you're curious if there's stuff we might have, please ask here. (Sometimes we do, sometimes we don't, but I'm glad to look. In some cases, I know we have it in parts, but I haven't managed to synthesise it out of multiple sources yet.)

[sternel]

I just read through the lot and now I need to go sob. (Oh, Severus.)

[lucky_guess]

I KNOW. Every single time I read his last letter, I need to cry a little.

[sporky_rat]

There are entirely too many damn cut onions in this damn house.

(Good job. I would embed the Orson Welles clapping gif, but Inam on my phone. Oh my gosh, Snape's last letter. Tears. So many tears.)

[synecdochic]

Doesn't he just break your heart?

(I love that he has long since lost his Master's seal, so of course he signed his testimony for Hermione's mastery in his own blood.)

I remain endlessly fascinated that he wound up so much happier, healthier, and well-loved in Alternity than in canon.

[synecdochic]

Also, I will not lie: I SOBBED LIKE A BABY while I was writing it. LIKE A BABY.

I did not expect to wind up loving Snape as much as I wound up loving him, let me tell you, but his friendships and found-family in Alternity were just amazing.

[gwendolyngrace]

OMG, there were so many times I wound up writing things through sobs and tears.... The chats at Grimmauld Place the afternoon before Harry had Draco cast the Curse, Sirius's goodbye letter, JUSTIN'S DEATH SCENE, omg, so many tissues! And of course, from Thursday through Tuesday I was just one massive wreck of a human being.

Yeah. These characters do have a way of becoming real.

[naomikritzer]

Figuring out Harry and Draco's last conversation made me teary. And I don't cry over my own characters very often.

[synecdochic]

I don't usually cry over things! But Snape's last letter? OMG BAWLING.

[ursamajor]

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE I AM SO EXCITED. Thank you!

[stormyhearted]

WOOOO Wiki access!

I am a bit brain-fried at the moment, so I'm just enjoying the Random page function. So far I have found Colin's last letters (which made me weepy) and the Wizarding Repopulation Office's pamphlet "Two for Lunch" about their dating service which surprised me by not making me cringe nearly as much as I expected! Also Arista's page (love the use of house colors!)

I can't wait to explore it in more depth!

[sugarjet03]

Justin's death and funeral pages are heartbreaking. The little bit with Linus at the end killed me.

This is going to be weeks of entertainment for me. Thanks, players!

[pegkerr]

Believe me, it's been endlessly entertaining for us! And phenomenonally helpful.

[jenett]

A couple of quick notes:

If you want to look at recent edits, the Recent wiki changes, now linked from the front page, has a link both to the wiki search for recent changes, and I am pulling out substantial new content as I spot it. (If you are doing edits, feel free to add links yourself, too: I am thinking of the manual list as a way to highlight stuff that has at least a paragraph or two of new content.)

The wiki search allows you to hide your own edits, and to adjust how many changes you see, group them, etc.

Second, I've had two requests for wiki accounts, and if I did things right, you two should have just gotten an email with an account name and an autogenerated password. I'm following up in email, too.

[keshwyn]

Where are the Ipswitch codes defined?

[gwendolyngrace]

They're not. The basics are that anything in New London is NL-blah blah; anything outside of New London is "Ipswich-blahblah." We just took care not to use numbers we hadn't already assigned. Deb (Barty, Lana) was really the player who used them the most.

[keshwyn]

Hah.

Rather like Stardates. "Pick a number between this and this, don't use any of these."

Am I correct in assuming that Ipswitch 666 (number of the beast) is indeed Ireland, though?

[synecdochic]

Yep!