The Wiki Hits 1000

The Wiki Hits 1000

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My Wiki has recently reached its 1,000th page:

This is counting active pages only, not files or pictures that are attached (which would bring the number up to 1,461).  And many of these pages are contributions created by fellow contributors, Byrhtnoth, SimonTVesper, Jeremiah and Maxwell.  Some of the pages are in depth descriptions of rules, spells, tables and concepts associated with D&D, while others are only placeholders . . . things that need to be written upon but the time just hasn't been taken (and I admit, some of those placeholders have minimum information).

Nevertheless, I consider this a major accomplishment for just five people.  A thousand pages is . . . lots.  Just managing that number, trying to fix the mistakes or make links between them, making plans for upgrading those pages and going way past a thousand (and we know there's enough vista to cover for that to happen) has been a profound exercise.

My own experience has been to work on some corner of the wiki, manage it for a time and then lose interest (temporarily) in order to move onto something else.  Having the wiki, however, I know where I've left off and it's fairly easy to come back to one of those subjects and pick up where I've left off.  I can make a placeholder for later on and track it through the wiki mechanics to find "orphans," files that aren't linked to the rest of the wiki, or "wanted" files that don't exist yet but are represented by a link somewhere.  Those don't count towards the total active pages, by the way, but there are 81 of them.

When I first came to the internet, I would find people putting together webpages of their world or of some other fantasy setting.  These always interested me, I always appreciated when people did the work and I would spend hours looking through the content.  Yet most of the time, I would stumble across the page after the author had quit adding to it.  I would go back again and again, for months, sometimes for years, hoping that there would be something new - and in virtually every case, there would be nothing.

I am extremely proud that I haven't succumbed to this.  People sometimes advise me that blogging is dead, that no one writes blogs any more or reads them (I think that's nonsense, but I hear it all the time).  I'm not worried, however, because if it does happen that this blog ceases to get readers, I know the wiki is going to last and last.  The server I've chosen is one designed for use by University professors and departments (what they think of me and my little project, I can't imagine) - so I think it's going to be here for a long time.  I pay for it - a small monthly $5 stipend.  My storage limit is 2 gigs; I'm currently using only 351.7 MB.  Not bad, though most of the size use is maps.

I hope the reader does frequent the wiki to see what's new.  The stats there tell me I get about 80-90 unique visitors a day, with about 400-1000 page views.  Those are not bad statistics for a free site.

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July 28, 2016 at 03:06PM