Quote:
Originally Posted by gblake
LOLz about game communities doing the game developers' work for them.
Folks my age find it hilarious that game vendors have trained their players to document how to play their games instead of those vendors paying their own staffs to write and distribute decent manuals with the games.
I know the typical wikia can contain discussions, strategies, hints, and other info that might not go into a vendor's game manual, but what current players let vendors get away with is sometimes just absurd.
Maybe writing the wikia info is part of the fun???
Regardless, back to FIRST, two thoughts come to mind.
1) You said communities create/write wikias. So, shouldn't the part of the community that wants one (you?) (I don't think I need one, so don't look at me) be beavering away at developing one? Does HQ maybe need to kick things off by renting a server computer and moderating what gets put into it?
2) What info do you want to see in this wikia, that isn't already in the annual game manual, or in CD, or in the TBA site, or in ...? Will all of those voluntarily merge into the wikia, or will large sections of the wikia mostly contain lots of links to outside sources? Remember that FIRST's games and other activities are messy real-world things with unpredictable, chaotic influences, evolution, and outcomes. That is very different from the closed, highly-constrained worlds of computer games. Beyond the game manual info, and a limited amount of info about standard parts, and red tape, you move from facts to highly-subjective opinions very fast in FRC, FVC, and the FLLs. |
1.While I cannot say at all this is a hard "need" it would have to have the end goal of being a quality of life improvement for those who need information otherwise it would be pointless. With something of this caliber if done correctly it would be helpful for everyone. No flak against CD but the white paper section of the site, is a little gross to wade through. There is in my opinion just too much information and it isn't constrained in a meaningful way. Think of how many times you have seen someone post a question on chief delphi and someone responds with "that was already talked about in this thread." That's dumb and its a waste of time, if that information was easier to access instead of creating more empty threads people would get the answers they need and move on and thats just on chief delphi I don't delve into the FRC reddit or whatever other third party sites exist. I do agree that having a manger for this project is important, with something of this scope you need someone on point. However I would hope all parties who are interested in contributing to this would be mature enough that they wouldn't doof up a website with bad info. Moderation wouldn't be as necessary because all those involved in content writing would want to do it for the right reason. In all honesty I'd be happy to help with content management for a wikia if I had the time. I also know though that this scale of a job most people wouldn't take without a paycheck regardless of if they had the time to do so or not.
I'd love to look at how wikias get up and running so quickly because it is an interesting phenomenon to me (a bunch of nerds go into unpaid hive mind mode and all of a sudden they create the community standard for information distribution in the form of a wiki and yet I see businesses open up where they can't get a website with a decent color scheme in a year).
2. I used a wikia as an example because of how they often provide only factual information, and a center for "official" information distribution. All while not necessarily being a part of the games developers. A wikia is a great way to aggregate a lot of information in a clean way. As opposed to chief delphi or the reddit where its a lot of digging. The point isn't to create helpful information (I mean don't get me wrong helpful information is good) its just to make all the information easier to access or even just accessible to begin with. If someone gets frustrated trying to find information before they find it they are less likely to find it. Currently I find it frustrating that I find myself digging through a 3rd party forum (chief delphi) to find information about FIRST, and I'm sure yet other people find it frustrating when they ask a question on Q&A because they want official feedback and they get a bounce back. If there was a website out there with the hard standards of a wikia where the information was unbiased, and factual, as well as endorsed partially by FIRST it would be a help a lot of teams more then a weekly blog.
"Remember that FIRST's games and other activities are messy real-world things with unpredictable, chaotic influences, evolution, and outcomes. That is very different from the closed, highly-constrained worlds of computer games."
I would disagree that it differs from computer games when they have games where while they don't release a new one every year they patch the game and change game play every other week. A lot of games out there are just kinda sitting in an endless "build season" where players are learning how to master the game. While developers push out new updates and then gamers have to adapt to that.