I've been away from the facinating world that is Eclipse Phase for awhile, mainly because my time has been devoured by other projects (work, studying, and completing and publishing my second roleplaying game). However, I was reading Sunward the other night, and I got to thinking about formats. Books are a very particular format; kind of old-fashioned in a sense. They are strictly linear in nature; any hyperlinking (known as "references") are kind of bulky /turning a bunch of pages, finding the right one)...
PDF's are electronic, so at least you can search through them - but they still suffer from the linear book perspective and - as those of us who have attempted to read the pdf's in iPhones or iPod touches have discovered - they are very much set in stone, layout-wise. Reading am multiple-column page meant for printing on a small device just isn't very feasible. There are constant breakage of flow as one needs to reposition the window into the PDF.
So... Since the EP books are CC:ed, there'd be no problems creating a wiki, containing all the info, right? I was mainly thinking of "fluff", not statistics. Think Wikipedia, but for Firewall. Lists of organizations, sorted by system or importance. Important people, places and concepts, hyperlinked and ready to be discovered.
I'd personally love a project like this. Especially when researching something specific, like when writing an adventure about a specific colony and figuring out the connections between different organizations, people etc. I think I'd find something like this immensely useful.
I am aware there's at least one fan-wiki, containing mostly fan-created material, but I'm talking about something focusing on the official texts. Something like the (defunct?) LaTeX-conversion I was a part of a while back.
Has anyone else had the same idea? Is there such a thing already, am I just really bad at google-fu?
I got a server and a few domains I could use for this, though acess time isn't what it could be, I suppose. As a temporary base of operations, it might do. Until the viability of the project has been proven. I'm thinking either Dokuwiki or Mediawiki, registered-user only, and only texts from the official books (canon). The core rulebook, Sunward, Gatechrashing. Possibly official PDF's as well. Focusing on slow growth, good hyperlinking and structure.
(Yah, I know - not very anarchic of me. But I just prefer web projects with clear senses of direction, structure and administration... Call me old-fashioned)
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Warning: Anarchist, postmodernist, socialist, transhumanist, feminist
That image shows the map filtered to show mainly the Game Mechanics chapter of the Core Rulebook. The tree structure matches the structure defined by the book's Table of Contents. Each node matches a line of the Table of Contents. Each node has a Notes block (not shown) which holds the text from the matching section of the Core Rulebook. Different nodes have styles coding their position in the book (Chapter, Subchapter, Table, etc.). Each Node also has attributes (tags) that I use to track their state in the editing workflow, applicability to PCs in the game, etc.
(Filtering Freeplane lets a user see ALL the instances of the target, whatever it might be, in the context of the overall structure. I think this gives an advantage over wikis, even.
E.g., I can filter to show only those nodes tagged with particular attributes such that I can see all the text of all the rules that came in actual play by player character. I can then use C-f to find within that filtered set, or even export the results to PDF, ODT, etc. and give that player a copy of those rules we've actually used in play.)
I can, but I am a little reluctant to do much work on setting up a wiki. I have a campaign to run, and only so much time to spare. Let me set up a test case on Wikia. I'll post the link in due course. If it fails, I can upload *mwiki files to Google Docs.
EDIT--20110416
All the rules on one page at the Eclipse Phase Rules wiki on Wika. I can dump them in pieces as small as a single node, but that takes a great deal more work.
Finally--thank you and everyone else involved with Mobile Eclipse Phase. I use that document more than the core book.