September 13, 2006 | big idea, small man

I’ve been toying with a major idea for a while now. (Not the quitting-from-Shit-Buy-idea-which-I-can’t-afford-to-do, but another one…) The idea for a major wiki.

For those who don’t know what a wiki is, it’s a website where people can come together and add information to, without knowing how to actually run a website or write up the code to generate a web page. Wikis are typically good for assembling encyclopedias and reference resources because it’s not one person doing the work. For instance, Battlestar Wiki and the venerable Wikipedia are wikis.

The major wiki idea comes from the fact that there isn’t a central place for science fiction/fantasy information. Or a repository for “all things sci-fi” in terms of pictures, information and so forth.

In the event that you didn’t know this, the Internet is one big fucking disorganized mess. It’s a central place people go for decentralized information, which is both a good and bad thing for reasons I don’t really care to list here.

But my idea is to create a major wiki with reliable information on all-that-can-be-known about science fiction.

And I’m sure people thought of trying the same thing, or are attempting something like it (on a generic level), and probably found the task to be the massive beastie that it is.

But like all massive problems, it’s all about breaking it down into smaller, more managable components.

So, for the sake of needing some proper noun, I’m going to call this project “The SF Hub”. It’s a hub because in its center is one wiki, which is the foundation to the hub. Call it the gateway or portal. It’s the foyer to the exhibit, where people can walk in and look around. The “foyer wiki” is basically a place where people can find out general information on a subject and are introduced to the topic. However, the foyer won’t have every single detail about a subject, so that’s where the other exhibits will come in — like a museum.

Each subject, like Battlestar Galactica or Babylon 5 for example, will have a “exhibit wiki”. An exhibit wiki is basically a sub-wiki that has all the detailed information about that one subject.

The beauty of having something like this is that everything can be interlinked. Let’s say an actor has participated in more than one sci-fi show — there’s no need to have duplicate information on three different wikis. Those three wikis can share the same information without one entry on said actor contradicting another entry on said actor on another wiki.

This also addresses another serious problem with the internet. Everything tending to contradict one another or be incomplete. For instance, Wikipedia may have a general article on William Shatner with his achievments and biographical landmarks, yet a Star Trek wiki, like Memory Alpha, may have a more specific article covering Shatner’s Star Trek career. Merge the two together and you have a better, more detailed resource.

If we can take a lesson from Wal-Mart, it’s that (most) people want to go to one place to get everything — the mythical “one-stop shop”. Not only does going to a one-stop shop save time, but it allows people to do other things with the time they didn’t waste on visiting five different places to find that one minor item.

Now, how will this look?

Essentially, you would enter “The SF Hub” by going to its main website, say http://www.sfhub.com

From there, you would find a directory of “exhibits”, sorted by alphabet, time period or what-have-you. Using a bulleted list form, it would look something like this:

• Foyer Wiki — the entrance and directory, from which one may go to:
• Battlestar Wiki (a wiki on Battlestar Galactica)
• SF Persons Wiki (actors, actresses, writers, etc.)
• Literature Wiki (a wiki on SF literature in its varied forms)
• and so on, and so on…

So everything is in one place, but only in different exhibits, very much like a virtual museum-meets-encyclopedia-meets-”all-knowing-reference”.
So that’s my idea. At least in its nascency, beacuse I think the logistics of setting up such a thing are fairly enormous and require a dedicated team of people not just for the bureaucratic bullshit, but to build upon and maintain the content of such a beastie. Oh, and money… we can’t forget about that. Being on the net isn’t cheap, particularly when you’re possibly going to use a whole lot of resources.