Wiki and the GM

(Kinda sounds like a crazy 60s screwball comedy, doesn’t it?)

Doyce has been playing around with Wiki stuff on his site for a while, and I recently got involved in the unofficial Nobilis Lexicon of the Lost 500 Years, which is also on a Wiki.

A Wiki is a web site builder that promotes heavy hyperlinking. As you create a page entry, you can identify certain terms or phrases as “WikiWords” that are automatically crosslinked to the page that further explain them. If a WikiWord page hasn’t been set up, that’s made clear, too, and you can create it by just clicking on the link.

One place this might be handy, for example, would be pages about employees, job types, skill sets, managers, locations, projects, etc. So on my page, it would have a link to my boss’s page, a link to my department’s page, a link to my office’s page, a link to projects I’ve worked on, etc. Wiki’s hyperlinking management makes this sort of thing so easy, you can’t imagine why you didn’t do something like this before.

(Another place it occurs to me that a Wiki would be handy would be as a novel database, keeping track of characters and settings and facts in an organized-yet-flexible fashion.)

Wiki also makes broad-based content creation and editing by users possible, even trivial. That’s not what I’m looking for at the moment, but it’s worth bearing in mind.

Coincidentally, I’ve been using my laptop as my GM kit — notes, maps, die roller, the whole nine yards. I quickly discovered that scrolling up and down in a DOC or PDF to find what I was looking for was less-than-satisfactory.

So I started (re)using a program called AZZ Cardfile, an excellent cardfile-metaphor database. It’s main drawback, though (aside from being inherently single-windowed without really making an effort) is that it lacks internal links, like a Wiki. I can’t tell it to automatically (or even set up manually) a link on a card describing Plot Point A links to pull up cards on Plotter X, Location Y, or Related Plot Point Z. Like I could, say, on a Wiki.

“Dude, you should use a Wiki for that,” Doyce opined. “There’s some stand-alone ones you can run on our own PC.”

Hmmm, thinks I. And as I got into the Lexicon, it occured to me that, yeah, something like this would be just what I’m looking for.

Doyce posted here in the comments a pointer to the Easiest Wiki contest, and I’ve been looking at some of them. Unfortunately, none of them yet represent a solid solution for me.

First off, for the moment at least, it needs to be offline, contained on my PC. I don’t want to have to rely on my wireless network from the basement (or elsewhere), and I plan on putting game scenario stuff up there. Having it on a public Wiki is asking for both copyright and player trouble.

So, while I may eventually set up a Wiki for some gaming effort, using a hosted one isn’t the way for what I need right now.

The other problem with this, though, is that Wiki’s are inherently … um, UNIXy. They have services running behind them, and distro packs, and all sorts of tweaky, geeky, “Ain’t this nuts-and-bolts stuff great?” bits and pieces about them. And if you’re not sure what particular details mean, well, don’t bother asking, because you’re obviously not In the Know enough to bother with. That’s what’s scaring me off of SqueakWiki at the moment.

Then there are Wiki-like applications. I tried Notepad for a few hours, trying out entering stuff in, and was moderately pleased until I found there was no real way to until I discovered I couldn’t (after poking around for another half hour) load or link in graphics — or, in fact, link out to external URLs. Bleah.

The other actual Wiki I spent a fair amount of time playing with was EddiesWiki. It’s a low-featured but still usable Wiki, which uses a WikiServer process running in a DOS Window as the “server.” That’s kind of a clunky implementation, at least in a Windows, and I find it vaguely worrisome. On the other hand, it ends up all browser-based, meaning having multiple pages open is trivial (something important to me, GM-wise).

The biggest complaint I have about EddiesWiki, though, is that its WikiWord implementation is kind of clunky — only single words, and they’re automatically identified by the program, and they have to begin with a capital letter, followed by a lower case letter, with at least one further lower upper case letter somewhere inside. Which sounds okay, but it means that if I want to have an entry for “John Smith,” I have to write it as JohnSmith everywhere. Further, there might be some distinct advantages to my having certain pages IDed by the scenario number in front of them, but a WikiWord can’t start with a number, or have a number as the second byte, either.

The graphic implementation is a little off, too. I have to put any graphics files I want to reference into the program’s directory, flat, rather than referencing them in my file system.

EddiesWiki is about 90% there, all considered. A future release may resolve this — though it’s not clear that there will be a future release.

WikidPad, another Wiki-alike program, looks possibly promising. There’s a lot of screen cruft I don’t care for, it’s not free (though it’s cheap), and it feels very … idiosyncratic at first glance. but it can publish to HTML (a possible future need), and it looks moderately powerful. I may goof around with that a bit, to see if it does what I need.