Polycount Wiki
admin
A little bird told me that we may finally have a fully-functioning wiki here after a little while. I think it'd be awesome to have a central resource for all those recurring answers, and it'd be a great place to learn a thing or two.
I'd prefer MediaWiki rather than some of the other setups, if something hasn't been installed already. Used by wikipedia, etc., so there's a lot of support. PMWiki for example wasn't very capable when I tried it.
Anyhow, I wanted to get a sense of how polycounters would feel about having some of their posts whittled down into wiki sections.
We got into it awhile back, people seemed to not like the idea of their info being added to a wiki on a member's personal site. Does that change if it's a Polycount-hosted wiki?
For me, I consider anything that I post, on any forum, to be completely freeware, tossed to the wind for anyone to use. How may invisible lurkers are watching RIGHT NOW? :poly106: Anyhow, info has a habit of being edited and remixed, and the original author's attribution is often lost in the process. I'm cool with that, but I realize others may not be.
I'm totally interested in adding a ton of my own content to a polycount wiki, especially upgrading that sad old glossary on my site. The process of posting to a wiki always makes me learn, that's one of the things I really dig about the whole process.
Admins, is the wiki a possibility? Members, would you contribute if it was there? Would you want others to quote your posts verbatim and attributed? Or would you be cool with merciless editing and no attribution? I think the latter is the easiest way to go, in the end. But a wiki is ultimately a community construction.
What say you?
I'd prefer MediaWiki rather than some of the other setups, if something hasn't been installed already. Used by wikipedia, etc., so there's a lot of support. PMWiki for example wasn't very capable when I tried it.
Anyhow, I wanted to get a sense of how polycounters would feel about having some of their posts whittled down into wiki sections.
We got into it awhile back, people seemed to not like the idea of their info being added to a wiki on a member's personal site. Does that change if it's a Polycount-hosted wiki?
For me, I consider anything that I post, on any forum, to be completely freeware, tossed to the wind for anyone to use. How may invisible lurkers are watching RIGHT NOW? :poly106: Anyhow, info has a habit of being edited and remixed, and the original author's attribution is often lost in the process. I'm cool with that, but I realize others may not be.
I'm totally interested in adding a ton of my own content to a polycount wiki, especially upgrading that sad old glossary on my site. The process of posting to a wiki always makes me learn, that's one of the things I really dig about the whole process.
Admins, is the wiki a possibility? Members, would you contribute if it was there? Would you want others to quote your posts verbatim and attributed? Or would you be cool with merciless editing and no attribution? I think the latter is the easiest way to go, in the end. But a wiki is ultimately a community construction.
What say you?
Replies
I agree there's no point being attatched to text you fling out onto the net.. well we're not writers so
only exeption: you´r a programmer from birth..
but i like the idear that all the technikal stuff is stored in some KIND OF wiki
that would be awesome!
so a good search funktion AND a good navigation tree are essential
edit: i think about two article versions .. a full article about something (like "how to...") and a short description with a link to (a) thread(s)
so with the time, the short description can grow to a full article, but you can also just go to the linked thread(s)
good ? bad?
The one thing I don't like about Wiki is that everyone has their own way of writing articles, different ways of organising headers or bullet points etc., so it's easy to end up with a bunch of pages that just seem thrown together and inconsistent. Some sort of vetting process or a few people who have time to check over articles and "unify" everything would really help I think - like with Wikipedia it ends up fairly self-regulating, it just takes a few days for pages to become compliant with the standards.
I've got a fair bit of experience with Wiki editing, so I'd be up for adding/auditing stuff.
HA HA HA! POOP! HA HA HA HA HA!
. . . ok maybe my words aren't all that valuable. . .
That problem would be sorted with a wiki i guess and would be welcome to me and many students hanging around here. And in the end we are all students.
So: yey!
I've been using MediaWiki a lot at work, and it's helped me to make a help page with the most commonly-used bits of markup, like how to insert images, links, tables, etc. Like MoP says, pretty easy once you get get the hang of it. Organization will happen in time, but I wouldn't want it to get in the way at the start.
I have a lot of content I want to add (& refine). The server for the CGTalk wiki is sooo sloooooow.
oh snap!!!
http://wiki.polycount.net/RecentChanges
Maybe just set admin approval for new accounts?
http://wiki.polycount.net/Texturing_Primer
I know I'm getting a bit ahead of things here Adam, but besides the spam problem Polycount should look into allowing image and file uploads. I can link to external images from my own site (or others') but external images disappear or move away (or leech bandwidth!).
we were really never sure on what we were going to do with the wiki... but we obviously are in agreement that we felt that a wiki would be a good addition to the site.
I see us needing two things...
1: a skin that some how reflects the new design here, but not too busy. it's a wiki and design elements of wackiness are not needed.
2: A organizational chart... which needs to start with, what kind of infos do we expect to see here? which is what i throw out to you guys... what do you want to see in this wiki... what do you not want to see. any comments on q2 models will be dealt with harshly.
But lets keep in mind that this is not a feature we're looking to explore fully right now. getting the boards working and all our expected features implemented is our focus. after that we can spend more time on wiki.
The Polycount wiki was supposed to be the answer to that. I saved and started putting all the old Polycount content there, and we put out some quiet feelers to get people helping out doing the updates and clean-ups, but the interest didn't seem to be there, and the wiki went fallow.
If you'd truly like to help out, I've cleaned out all the spam, reset most of the user accounts and disabled public new account creation. PM me if your account was lost (sorry about that) or if you'd like a new one made.
The TOC for all the old site content is here:
http://wiki.polycount.net/PolycountOldTOC
It's already been tagged with priority 1 (highest) to 3 (lowest), and lots of content is there already, ready to be cleaned up with proper, nice wiki formatting.
If you want to work on something specific (say, No One Lives Forever tutorials), let me know and I'll give you access to the backups so you can convert it.
The main list of all the pages currently on the wiki is here:
http://wiki.polycount.net/TitleIndex
This wiki software is fully featured. It has a WYSIWYG editor that's pretty good about letting you cut-and-paste into it. Once you create a page, you can add attachments to it, including images. Saying, "I'd rather this be MediaWiki" feels to me like saying, "I won't do modeling if I can't use SoftImage" or some such.
I look forward to your PMs.
Help could be arranged better methinks, like the help for Category isn't very good, but overall it's pretty good. When I understand the syntax better I'll see what I can add there to make it better.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki
but in a nutshell it's just plain easier for a bunch of people to work on at the same time.
btw i'm all for the polycount wiki. just wish i had the time and/or skill needed to help
http://wiki.polycount.net/Page_Template
Comments?
I kind of expanded on what Rick/Vito already had on the Wiki Formatting page, but that's more for the most commonly-used tags. It think for the template it would be good to get the major kinks ironed out before people start adding pages.
http://wiki.polycount.net/Diffusely_Convolved_Cube_Map
EarthQuake also added some things, good AO example, how to map metal, etc.
http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?t=48305&page=11&p=778553
ohnein, dunno. If you have a wiki account, you can hit Subscribe on a page, but I don't think it actually sends you an email, just tried it and I haven't gotten any email.
You can also just check in on the "recent changes" page to see what people are working on: http://wiki.polycount.net/RecentChanges
Started a new section, would like some feedback.
http://wiki.polycount.net/Normal_Map#WorkingWithCages
Anything glaringly wrong or difficult to understand? Still working on it.