Utility: Official release of the unofficial Dominions 3 Wiki

[lch]

So, lots of people have their futile attempts at being productive for this community and providing something which is inherently good, let me show you mine: I hereby announce that you are welcome to visit and use the Dominions 3 Wiki at

http://dom3.servegame.com/wiki/

A lot of people already know about this and some are even already fellow contributors, for the rest here's a brief introduction:

What is this?

You probably should know Wikipedia, which is an online encyclopedia that anyone can edit and contribute to. This is a Dominions-centered Wikipedia. The Dom3Wiki is meant to be collaborative community tool to track and document everything that you can think of regarding the Dominions game series. As far as I'm concerned, it is a culmination of over one year of work.

What is it for?

The aim is to provide structured, accurate and thorough information to you. Since this is impossible, it is a work in progress and never going to be finished. You're welcome to try and help to make it better, though. There's even a highscore table as an incentive. I dare you to try and beat my score.

How should I use it?

If you have a question about Dominions, you can go there and look if you can find an answer there. In case you found it, good. In case you can't find it but managed to get an answer by some other means, you could document it and add it where you didn't find it on the Wiki to help the next person who is looking for answers.

What is it not?

The Wiki isn't meant to be for discussion other than discussions about the articles on their talk pages. It's meant to be a place for facts and for answers, not questions. Although it could be one, it's not supposed to be a pure filesharing service for the community either. Uploads of images to help illustrate an article are very welcome, uploads of e.g. map and mod archive files unfortunately not (yet!).

Wait a minute, this doesn't look right...

Then please, by all means, fix it. All you need to edit the Wiki is to sign up. If you're smart enough to write an email or write a forum post, then you're smart enough to edit the Wiki, too. It's mostly just text and there's an "edit" button to everything. If you found a lapse somewhere, a slip of the pen, then you can correct it in an instant. No special education is required, just try it. If you found something grave, I have set up a bug tracker where you can report things. Please be aware that my time is limited and I'll probably ignore requests that take a sophisticated effort for an indefinite time.

Thanks

Thanks go to Illwinter for the Dominions game series, Shrapnel Games for publishing it and all the people that directly or indirectly contributed to the Wiki. Which for the latter is the whole Dom3 community. Further thanks go to the Wikimedia Foundation for MediaWiki and to OntoWeb for their work on Semantic MediaWiki which comes the closest to realizing one of my pipe dreams when I started the Wiki. Hopefully one day it'll be possible for me to harness the full power and potential that it offers. From the people that already directly contributed on the Wiki, I especially want to thank two of them: moderation for pushing me over the edge and getting me to start the Wiki when I half-jokingly said I'll do it if you ask me on the IRC channel. He said that he at least would be going to use it as a user and a contributor on a regular basis - lying, of course, because he is smarter than I am, but he was there and provided a lot of input in the crucial early steps. The Wiki's current main page for example is derived from his work. Then there was matryx with a lot of very constructive work, on the technical side with lots of Templates that are still in use at the Wiki right now and on the creative side with his awesome Dominions 3 AAR which can be found there and only there by now. That alone is justification enough for the existence of the Wiki. I'd like to write a short sentence about all the other people that helped as well, but then this paragraph would never finish. In case you feel that you should be mentioned, I hope you don't mind if your name didn't show here. Whatever you did to help should hopefully speak for itself.

Closing

You may now attempt to use the Wiki. I have a devil-may-care attitude about it: Don't be afraid of breaking anything. Please attempt to break the Wiki! If you found any kind of meaning in this post for yourself, you're free to keep it. Cheers!