Charlotte Mecklenburg Thing #16

First of all, and I have to get this off my chest, I think it is hilarious that the podcast for this "thing" talks about how easy it is to edit wikis and that they don't have a complex markup language. This is false. Wikis do have a complex markup language - it's just that one can avoid it if they don't want to do anything more than type in content.

For example, I'm a member of a collaborative-writing/role-play group that draws its material from the television show Heroes; however, String Theory is set in an alternate universe where the antagonist in the first season was not defeated. Like most online roleplaying communities these days, String Theory has a wiki to organize information on plots, characters, and individual "scenes." String Theory uses Wikidot, and I have yet to see a game that uses another wiki service (such as Wikispaces or Pbwiki). Anyway, this is all just to preface the sorts of things that can be done with a single page on a wiki using the syntax. Wikidot really phrases it well when they say, "master this and you can do magic ;-)" on their help page.

As an example of what I've been able to do with wiki syntax and time, I'm linking the character page for Matt Parkman, a "feature character" (or character from the television show's canon) I play on String Theory. Matt's page has a variety of examples of what can be done with wiki syntax. There are collapsible fields, tabbed fields, pictures, tables, embedded videos from Youtube, and edited links to other pages.

I have used PBwiki for a smaller collaborative writing project, but it did not seem to me that their interface allowed for much customization via the use of syntax. Wikispaces allows for the use of a "text editor" versus a "visual" one where raw syntax can be typed in. I would normally prefer it, but since the only time I use Wikispaces is with the DUSEL wiki when editing pre-existing pages, I can't justify fiddling with the code and risking throwing off the established look and feel.

Maybe it's because, back in middle school, I made webpages using raw HTML and nothing else, but I prefer working with raw wiki syntax than grappling with the user-friendly editors in place in some cases. So maybe that's why I like wikidot the best.