A Dynamic KMA / Three Kingdoms Encyclopedia

[robbyjo]

Split from SGYY Events? “In a Plum Garden, Cao Cao Discusses Heroes”

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James,

I was thinking that you can provide some sort of "Encyclopedia of the Three Kingdoms". Where you can put all sort of things you want to know about that era: Both novel and historical. Indexed by characters, events, novel chapters, etc. I know that this is a huge undertaking, but if we start now, I believe that this could be done.

The events are nice. You did it very well. I actually prefer to have it like that -- chunks per chunks -- given that we link to the chapters, to the bios and other contexts. Now, given the interreferenced articles, wouldn't it be natural to "upgrade" this to some sort of encyclopedia?

Certainly, everybody here in the SoSZ are expected to chip in. I would suggest Wiki concept as the sandbox. If you're familiar enough with Wikipedia -- the encyclopedia written by all people across the internet, you'd probably want to give it a shot. If you're afraid of someone spamming or what not, let's require users to login and have mods / others to police that Wiki. How's that sound?

I'd be willing to help once my exams are done.

-- Rob

[Kong Wen]

I'm writing something like that right now, Rob. I'd shy away from the Wiki idea just because it'd be nearly impossible to maintain consistency of presentation, style, and content. If the people can wait long enough, I'll have something relatively thorough and comprehensive done by the time I finish reading the novel again.

[Iain]

I saw a nightmare one night when some bright spark edited the Gan Ning history at Wikipedia to include Darth Vader and other Star Wars characters and situations, it would be a lot of extra work to supervise something similar to that.

[robbyjo]

True enough, Kong.

The problem is that if you want to get large enough participation, you need to enable that somehow and Wiki does facilitate that. Heck, even big books nowadays are pretty much like anthologies -- authored by bazillions of people. The style is rather incoherrent, but we can appoint some team to fix that later.

Also, if we treat the wiki as a sandbox system, we can pretty much "discard" the wiki and recompose the contents by copying and pasting from the wiki contents. I think that would help a lot -- at least we don't need to write from scratch....

-- Rob

[Kong Wen]

The problem is that if you want to get large enough participation, you need to enable that somehow and Wiki does facilitate that.

Well, I don't think a large participation in the actual creation of the project is as important as a large audience or group of users for the finished product.

This is kind of side-tracking the conversation from James's event bios, so let's continue via ICQ.

[James]

@Robbyjo & Mr. Wen

You’ve stumbled in part across something I have been very seriously considering for some time now. Once I started learning PHP it opened many doors at KMA. From the time I wrote that goofy little dice roller I’ve gone on to all but master the language, and now I could write basically anything I could visualize—heck, I could duplicate the Wikipedia given enough time and a dash of insanity. This combined with MySQL has led to me thinking about major changes at the site.

I was already considering a sort of encyclopedia, and with the addition of a database maintaining it actually became realistic. When Kong Wen told me about his own encyclopedia I started thinking about even more. All the common information behind Kongming’s Archives could be moved to a large database which stored all the tidbits for easy retrieval. For example, instead of including the style name of an officer everywhere, I could actually just fetch it from a universal entry in the database. I could dynamically generate the biography listings using database entries for each officer as well. The potential really has no limits, other than the stress it places on said database, and the costs of said tasks (PHP and MySQL are obviously more expensive in terms of processor power and bandwidth than static pages).

At the center of all of this comes to play my real hope for the future, a sort of encyclopedia for Romance of the Three Kingdoms that anyone could update (though in reality it will probably be login/password based, and it may store backups of records in case people pull something funny). For any given officer or event you might have dozens of possible entries, such as DoB (SGYY/History), Name(s), Styles, Chapter Appearances, Biographies, and more. I would update it myself as I went along as it would be the hub of data for the site, but by letting other people update it as well it can grow into a very useful resource that requires almost no involvement from me—giving it infinite growth potential.

That’s a very large pill to swallow though, and I’m not going to get ahead of myself. For now I’m working on cleaning KMA up and making things much more automated than before (for example, the biography pages are now almost entirely dynamically generated—entering a new biography takes me a matter of five or so minutes). Once that is done, I’ll look at other areas of the site that could benefit from similar activities. If the first roots of this encyclopedia idea are to be born, they’ll be working with Kong Wen with the absolutely wonderful reference he is already creating. At that point the first roots of said encyclopedia may appear on the site for closed testing, and they will just be basic officer details.

So in summary, all the chaos that has been floating about does have a vision holding it all together. There’s order where chaos seems to abound. KMA could have a long and bright future ahead of it.

[robbyjo]

James,

Rather than programming / reprogramming that, why don't you want to reuse Wiki? http://wiki.org/

Also, to reply to Akroma / Iain, we probably do want to require user to login and police the whole wiki. If someone misuse the previlege, we can ban him/her. Well, misuse is bound to happen. But so far, Wikipedia survived albeit they cater a larger userbase and interest.

I'm most impressed with Wikipedia's entry for The Three Kingdoms. So far, there's only little noise. If you check the history page, you'll see how many people are participating. I think that the overall result is good enough that it warrant the risk.

-- Rob

[James]

And to clear up a few questions:

No, I have no plans to make KMA an actual Wiki at any point in the upcoming future. Biographies there will continue to be written and contributed by authors. I did once experiment with an idea of some sort of SGZ translation project, but that didn’t work out.

The ‘encyclopedia’ idea for KMA would be nothing more than a public interface for a database that I’m already planning to build for the site down the road. It would include common officer facts and, if I did make it publicly accessible, it would also include one line summaries of who an officer is (for inclusion in things like the Hanzi project—which is painfully managed by hand at present), and perhaps a small one paragraph biography of each officer as submitted by people who work with it. There could be a large collection of one paragraph biographies waiting for use at SimRTK as it stands right now.

This is independent of Kong Wen’s Encyclopedia, or might worth together with it in ways, though I’ll let him explain and give details of as he sees fit. IN summary, if I handled all the common information elements of KMA through a central database, I’d want to build an interface for that database. If you’re going to build one, why not put a little extra effort into making it searchable by the public, and updatable by the trusted I give accounts to?

(And here’s another example of planning ahead: the accounts people got for the Quiz are set up so they can be used across the site down the road when/if things like this are done, and I can govern what they can and can’t do with permissions much like moderators, admins, and members here at SoSZ).

[Kong Wen]

Before I go to meet the Duke of Zhou, I thought I would post my thoughts on the idea of an open Wiki KMA.

As it stands, KMA has people who are interested in writing bios writing bios, and people who are interested in translating bios translating bios. These people are good at what they do, and are accepted because they are good at what they do. In my opinion, if we are going to be policing the WiKMA so thoroughly, how does it differ from the current way of doing things? Without a doubt, the quality content would be coming from the same people who provide quality content to KMA. The only difference would be that WiKMA would require a lot more time and effort to the effect of weeding out the stuff we don't want. The WiKMA won't make the proliferation of 3K content on the site happen any more quickly than it is happening right now under the vision of able biography writers and translators.

[robbyjo]

James,

If you want, you can make the wiki as a sandbox system -- apart from KMA. Why didn't it work? Lack of publicity or too much noise? I believe that for SGZ translation project, it's because only a few select can do so. If we're talking SGYY along with its paraphernalia, it would cater much larger interest. So far a good section in Wikipedia that I linked in the above post shows that this endeavor would work.

-- Rob