TorqueWiki.com Launched!
by Michael \"Evic\" Wales · in Torque Game Engine · 03/27/2005 (6:32 pm) · 14 replies
As I previously discussed today in another topic, I have been working on getting a Torque Wiki launched for some time now. Well, today is the day! Unfortunately, a lot of my database backups didn't quite make the transfer so much of the content I had been working on isn't in there yet.
As we all know, the nature of a Wiki is everyone is allowed to edit and create content. I'm confident this community is mature enough to handle this responsibly and help make TorqueWiki a very powerful resource.
I will be up most of the night continuing to add content to the wiki, although much of it will be marked as a stub. I don't want to spend to much time getting the content perfect myself, I'd like to get some groundwork laid out, and let you guys flesh the content portions out.
So, hit up www.TorqueWiki.com and check it out. Also, let me know how the server is running. I am getting some slow connections myself, but I am on an unfamiliar connection as I vacation here in Florida and I am unsure whether it is a problem on my end or the web servers. Anonymous users have the same access as registered users, but I encourage all of you to register and help me out.
A wiki is only as good as the community makes it. Also, I will be paying careful attention to the quality of the work put into TorqueWiki by the community members. That work, and the work of those members here in the forums, will give me a list of names of whom I will invite to become TorqueWiki Moderation Board members.
As I always, I welcome comments, suggestions, etc.
As we all know, the nature of a Wiki is everyone is allowed to edit and create content. I'm confident this community is mature enough to handle this responsibly and help make TorqueWiki a very powerful resource.
I will be up most of the night continuing to add content to the wiki, although much of it will be marked as a stub. I don't want to spend to much time getting the content perfect myself, I'd like to get some groundwork laid out, and let you guys flesh the content portions out.
So, hit up www.TorqueWiki.com and check it out. Also, let me know how the server is running. I am getting some slow connections myself, but I am on an unfamiliar connection as I vacation here in Florida and I am unsure whether it is a problem on my end or the web servers. Anonymous users have the same access as registered users, but I encourage all of you to register and help me out.
A wiki is only as good as the community makes it. Also, I will be paying careful attention to the quality of the work put into TorqueWiki by the community members. That work, and the work of those members here in the forums, will give me a list of names of whom I will invite to become TorqueWiki Moderation Board members.
As I always, I welcome comments, suggestions, etc.
About the author
#2
03/27/2005 (6:44 pm)
Cool! I hope once i got proficient enough i can contribute in torquewiki. BTW the site is a bit slow from my connection.
#3
03/27/2005 (6:48 pm)
A wiki is a web page that theoretically anyone can modify.
#4
03/27/2005 (6:57 pm)
Excellent stuff! Will add stuff once I know what the hell I am doing with Torque, hehehe. What are you planning on covering?
#6
The Torque Developers Network is going to be up and running in the near future as talked about in Ben Garneys Plan www.garagegames.com/blogs/8863/7393
03/27/2005 (7:02 pm)
How is this going to handle all the Private stuff that should only be shown to TGE, TSE and T2D SDK owners?The Torque Developers Network is going to be up and running in the near future as talked about in Ben Garneys Plan www.garagegames.com/blogs/8863/7393
#7
To expound a bit more: a Wiki is pretty much the definition of open information, it doesn't get much more open than this. Any person can come by at anytime, and read, edit, create content. By content we are referring to "web pages" for lack of a better term. Text, images, etc - information basically.
Now, when you first think of this it seems like a bad idea. You know you're going to have some knuckleheads jump in and post picture of penises and what-not. Well, the beauty of a wiki is, the community creates the content. Everyone has their hand in making the wiki the best source of information there is. This means, the entire community gets "offended," if you will, if you go messing up their stuff. The content is generally reverted back to a previous, and correct version, within minutes on popular wikis (and the history of articles is saved, to make this very easy).
An excellent example of a wiki that serves an excellent purpose is wikipedia.org. A guy named Wales (no relation) launched this website basically as an experiment to see if the Internet community could come together and write an encyclopedia. Instead of having 30 Einstein's in a room working on an encyclopedia, like Brittanicca does, what if you were to have 3 million+ average people writing articles?
The results are astonishing. Wikipedia has 500,000 articles, which is more than any other encyclopedia out there today. The community is formed by a group of people who enjoy doing that sort of work, educating one another. I know for myself, I spend an hour or two a day on Wikipedia writing military articles, or correcting the small mistakes, or adding new information to prexisting articles, everyday. When you have a large number of people doing these small steps all day long, every day, all over the world, the end result is an astonishingly accurate source of information in a very quick amount of time.
You really ought to check out Wired.com's most recent issue - they have an excellent article on wiki's in it. Actually, I just google'd it: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.03/wiki.html
Anyways, my goal with TorqueWiki is to provide a place where all Torque users can come and work on sections of an ultimately larger project together. Where one user doesn't know the answer, or gets it slightly wrong, another can come in and correct them. These forums here have acted as such for quite a long time, and have done a fine job of it. But, the information is still scattered at best. When you do track something down reading and understanding the "whole story" spans multiple topics and possible multiple forums.
Wouldn't it be great if you could simply visit one website, type 'AI Algorithms' into the search box and you are presented with one article containing everything you need to know to use AI within Torque. I know this is a bit outlandish and in actuality an article of AI would consist of a main Table of Contents page, and then various narrower topics involving AI below that - but you get the picture.
Anyways, I think I've went on and on long enough - lol.
03/27/2005 (7:07 pm)
Thanks Neil, hit it on the head pretty much.To expound a bit more: a Wiki is pretty much the definition of open information, it doesn't get much more open than this. Any person can come by at anytime, and read, edit, create content. By content we are referring to "web pages" for lack of a better term. Text, images, etc - information basically.
Now, when you first think of this it seems like a bad idea. You know you're going to have some knuckleheads jump in and post picture of penises and what-not. Well, the beauty of a wiki is, the community creates the content. Everyone has their hand in making the wiki the best source of information there is. This means, the entire community gets "offended," if you will, if you go messing up their stuff. The content is generally reverted back to a previous, and correct version, within minutes on popular wikis (and the history of articles is saved, to make this very easy).
An excellent example of a wiki that serves an excellent purpose is wikipedia.org. A guy named Wales (no relation) launched this website basically as an experiment to see if the Internet community could come together and write an encyclopedia. Instead of having 30 Einstein's in a room working on an encyclopedia, like Brittanicca does, what if you were to have 3 million+ average people writing articles?
The results are astonishing. Wikipedia has 500,000 articles, which is more than any other encyclopedia out there today. The community is formed by a group of people who enjoy doing that sort of work, educating one another. I know for myself, I spend an hour or two a day on Wikipedia writing military articles, or correcting the small mistakes, or adding new information to prexisting articles, everyday. When you have a large number of people doing these small steps all day long, every day, all over the world, the end result is an astonishingly accurate source of information in a very quick amount of time.
You really ought to check out Wired.com's most recent issue - they have an excellent article on wiki's in it. Actually, I just google'd it: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.03/wiki.html
Anyways, my goal with TorqueWiki is to provide a place where all Torque users can come and work on sections of an ultimately larger project together. Where one user doesn't know the answer, or gets it slightly wrong, another can come in and correct them. These forums here have acted as such for quite a long time, and have done a fine job of it. But, the information is still scattered at best. When you do track something down reading and understanding the "whole story" spans multiple topics and possible multiple forums.
Wouldn't it be great if you could simply visit one website, type 'AI Algorithms' into the search box and you are presented with one article containing everything you need to know to use AI within Torque. I know this is a bit outlandish and in actuality an article of AI would consist of a main Table of Contents page, and then various narrower topics involving AI below that - but you get the picture.
Anyways, I think I've went on and on long enough - lol.
#8
I haven't necessarily decided on this factor yet. I have a few ideas, but I am curious as to exactly what would need to be considered private and what would not. I logged out of GG earlier today, and I saw many resources with source code I could view. So, c++ source code isn't the line to be drawn because GG themselves are sharing it publicly.
My belief is as long as no one jumps in there and posts the entire source, pretty much anything is good. Of course, once the Moderation Board is up and running they will assist me in determining what is appropriate and what is not. And I am more than happy to work with the GG Staff to determine where the line needs to be drawn, because honestly I don't know.
At the moment, I envision TorqueWiki as a more efficiently organized GG Reference/Forums rolled into one nice little package. But, as mentioned above - it depends on where the community takes it. If it progresses into something much larger than that I'm more than happy to stick to it and ensure it's success.
03/27/2005 (7:14 pm)
Quote:
How is this going to handle all the Private stuff that should only be shown to TGE, TSE and T2D SDK owners?
I haven't necessarily decided on this factor yet. I have a few ideas, but I am curious as to exactly what would need to be considered private and what would not. I logged out of GG earlier today, and I saw many resources with source code I could view. So, c++ source code isn't the line to be drawn because GG themselves are sharing it publicly.
My belief is as long as no one jumps in there and posts the entire source, pretty much anything is good. Of course, once the Moderation Board is up and running they will assist me in determining what is appropriate and what is not. And I am more than happy to work with the GG Staff to determine where the line needs to be drawn, because honestly I don't know.
At the moment, I envision TorqueWiki as a more efficiently organized GG Reference/Forums rolled into one nice little package. But, as mentioned above - it depends on where the community takes it. If it progresses into something much larger than that I'm more than happy to stick to it and ensure it's success.
#9
Im suprised that some resources with source code is being shown to the public.
I just loged out too and took a peek.
03/27/2005 (7:24 pm)
I do like the idea.Im suprised that some resources with source code is being shown to the public.
I just loged out too and took a peek.
#10
03/27/2005 (10:25 pm)
When the TDN goes live there will more than likely be a resource audit. 
#11
03/28/2005 (7:35 am)
They've been reorganizing resources lately, so there's been some source resources that have been more open than they should be. 
#12
First up, this is a very cool idea. It's great to see people not only being enthusiastic about documentation, but trying to do something about helping to get more done. Excellent.
For this particular idea though, there are lots of issues to consider. First, you do need to think very carefully about the license and sharing of code. Just because we make some source available doesn't mean that it's okay for others to do that. Quite the opposite... it's absolutely not okay to post any engine source outside of GG.
Not trying to be harsh here, I just want to make sure you don't get yourself in trouble. :)
Also, we have the "Torque Developer Network" coming soon. This is exactly the same thing you're working on-- a Torque Wiki. :) Rather than splitting up the community and wiki resources between the two sites, we'd much rather work with you on this. If you are interested, please get in touch with Ben Garney and I. We are actively looking for folks who are interested in this sort of thing to help us get TDN off the ground. It's already coming along and now is the time to get in on it... you can help form it.
Working together like this would be much better than working separately. First, TDN will be the official wiki site, so I imagine it will be the most popular / active. And activity is what makes a wiki successful. Likewise, working together on this, you'd save yourself the site admin hassle. And you'd save yourself the very important hassle of dealing w/ license issues. TDN handles user authentication from our site here, so no worries there.
Let me know what you think! Again, this is a very cool idea, and that's why we jumped on it a couple months ago. We've been progressing on this project nicely, and we'd love to have people like you onboard early to help get it off the ground. Again, please get in touch with Ben and I.
Thanks, and look forward to working with ya on this. :)
03/28/2005 (10:06 am)
Michael,First up, this is a very cool idea. It's great to see people not only being enthusiastic about documentation, but trying to do something about helping to get more done. Excellent.
For this particular idea though, there are lots of issues to consider. First, you do need to think very carefully about the license and sharing of code. Just because we make some source available doesn't mean that it's okay for others to do that. Quite the opposite... it's absolutely not okay to post any engine source outside of GG.
Not trying to be harsh here, I just want to make sure you don't get yourself in trouble. :)
Also, we have the "Torque Developer Network" coming soon. This is exactly the same thing you're working on-- a Torque Wiki. :) Rather than splitting up the community and wiki resources between the two sites, we'd much rather work with you on this. If you are interested, please get in touch with Ben Garney and I. We are actively looking for folks who are interested in this sort of thing to help us get TDN off the ground. It's already coming along and now is the time to get in on it... you can help form it.
Working together like this would be much better than working separately. First, TDN will be the official wiki site, so I imagine it will be the most popular / active. And activity is what makes a wiki successful. Likewise, working together on this, you'd save yourself the site admin hassle. And you'd save yourself the very important hassle of dealing w/ license issues. TDN handles user authentication from our site here, so no worries there.
Let me know what you think! Again, this is a very cool idea, and that's why we jumped on it a couple months ago. We've been progressing on this project nicely, and we'd love to have people like you onboard early to help get it off the ground. Again, please get in touch with Ben and I.
Thanks, and look forward to working with ya on this. :)
#13
I have a couple of WIKI sites up myself for various purposes, tho they are closed communities. So far, so good :)
Oh and :) just right now www.torquewiki.com is a dead link :)
04/01/2005 (8:20 am)
Ironically, there was an article in the paper that said that Wiki sites suffer LESS vandalism and problems than other sites that get hacked. They said, I believe, that the the amount of people on the board passing over pages means that the instant anything is vandalized or bad content is put up, somebody else fixes it fast.I have a couple of WIKI sites up myself for various purposes, tho they are closed communities. So far, so good :)
Oh and :) just right now www.torquewiki.com is a dead link :)
#14
Eek!
Who knows, though...
04/02/2005 (1:43 pm)
I think this might be a sign of Big Things Coming.Eek!
Who knows, though...
Torque Owner Matt Van Gorkom
- Matt VG