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The intent is to host support material for d20 Malhavoc publications(since this is a Malhavoc community), or d20 material Monte's worked on. If (for example) you're using some Open Content magic system from say Green Ronin in your Iron Heroes campaign & want to post it on the wiki, that's cool. If you're wanting to host some houserules for your Shadowrun campaign, that's not-so-cool.

So - Open Content material for/based on/directly compatible with d20 Malhavoc, RttToEE, DMG, Ghostwalk, or CoC = good.

Material that violates Intellectual Property rights (whether you agree with them or not) = bad. Non-d20 = bad. d20 that has nothing to do with Malhavoc Press or Monte Cook* = bad.

*But really, how hard is it to tie d20 material together?

Anyone have any good ideas on a name? So far we've come up with The Akashic Record & The Eldritch Web.

It helps that .org domains are available for both.

But we're open to other ideas.

Oh, & we need a commitee (so far it's just myself & Staun AFAIK) in case anyone's interested. We're not sure how big of a commitee ATM, but I personally lean towards five. Staun says wiki-fu would be helpful, but not a requirement (otherwise I'd be SOL).

Party on like a monkey rockstar.

Below are some of the cool things I learned from Staun the wiki could do. But remember - community participation will be vital! It doesn't matter what the wiki can do if no one participates to make it happen. I'm posting these in a Q&A format because that's literally how the conversation went.

Didn't you say it was possible to code an article so that it can actually be an amalgam of several articles?

Yes, there's actually wiki markup that will pull an article & insert it within another article. To fully utilize the possibilities, we recommend each 'piece' of new material be it's own article. For example, a homebrew race writeup may include roleplaying notes, racial traits, racial levels, evolved levels, new weapons, new magic items, new spells, & new feats. Each of these should be a separate article (including each feat, spell, etc., separated into individual articles) - thus allowing one to construct an article purely of roleplaying notes on all races, a compiled article of spells, or an article on everything necessary to add just that single homebrew race to their game - all made with modular articles.

So essentially the wiki would be made of two types of articles - the modular pieces (like individual lego building blocks) & the compiled articles (the assembled model)?

Ideally, yes. So don't be surprised if a wiki admin asks you if you'd mind them breaking your article down into modular parts, then reconstruct the original article from the modular pieces.

Does an article have to be broken down into pieces?

Well, no. If the OP of the article doesn't want it broken down, the admins won't do it.

How small do we want these pieces to get? Does Roleplaying Race X need to be further broken down to allow people to compile articles compiled solely of the Personality or Languages headers?

Well, it's a judgment call. If something sounds like it could stand alone or work in different types of compiled articles people would actually want, I'd say break it down. In the case of the example given, I wouldn't break Roleplaying Race X down any smaller.

But I'd keep it separate from Racial Traits.

Can search results 'auto-tailor' a custom article?

Yes, & it'd even be possible to filter whether you want only modular articles, only compiled articles, or both. Mediawiki supports something called "Namespaces". It's an abstract collection of articles under a common denominator. For, example, on wikipedia they have the "Help" namespace which contains all the Help articles. When you search you select which namespaces you want to search by default. If you'd want to include only the compiled articles you add the Compiled articles namespace to the default searchable articles.

This would mean that default searches would never include bits and pieces but always the compiled. It would require an advanced search by the users where they checked the "Modular Pieces: [X]" namespace to be included.

(Prince's Note: This almost sounds too good to be true, but it's what I was told. Personally, I thought searches would only bring back links to relevant results.)

There's already a bunch of wikis out in the OYT community. What If someone wants/doesn't mind their wiki articles being in a consolidated community wiki, but they don't want to actually go to the trouble of doing all that markup again?

Then we'd be happy to do it for them.

What about the fear of someone coming in & messing up a contributor's article?

You'll have the ability to lock the article (& even watermark it) to keep people from editing your work. From the wiki admins, you might get some fine-tuning of the markup & the occasional fixing of a misspelled word. We aren't going to mess with your locked content.

If you so choose.

If you don't lock your article, edits from the community are assumed to be welcomed. Note that admins are community members too, & may wish to chime in on unlocked articles as such.

As for layout - can there be a way for AE articles to get the AE style the expanded magister has, but for IH articles to have a more IH color scheme?

Even better. Each table can be marked an AE or IH table f.ex, which would shade it blue or red accordingly f.ex. The overall wiki theme can be set per user basis, so someone with a IH interest would see a site which is overall IH themed with an occasional AE table where appropriate. It should be able to work and quite impressively as well.

The site would have a default (non IH, non AE) theme, and then the user would be able to select AE theme or IH theme. The sections with IH and AE stuff would always look mostly IH and AE.

We can use Namespaces to distinguish "AE:Classes/Expanded Magister".