Hi. I recently put a lot of work on OpiWiki because I feel it could potentially become something huge.
However, I need some guidance. And support!
What do you think of this: [Pearl Jam]?
I created everything you see, from the band and its present/past members' pages to the complete studio discography. I also added a few singles ( see [this album] ).
As you can see, I also added database links whenever I could, and I added bold characters for the important details in the description ( on most occasions: the actual name of the person/thing being presented ). I think this should be mandatory to ensure we have great descriptions which are reading and browsing-friendly.
I also chose to stop including birth/death dates in the description, since it already figures on the left side of the screen when you do a proper creation anyway.
I've encountered a few issues while creating all of this, but luckily they are quite minor and shouldn't be much of a problem.
First of all, I quickly noticed that if I would link all the lower items to one thing, it would make a total mess of the higher item's page. For example, let's take the [Eddie Vedder] page. I chose only to include the band ( Pearl Jam ) and the albums he has worked on. At first, I began adding the singles from the said albums as lower items as well... But I realized there would be too many of them on Eddie's page. So I chose to show DIRECT lower items only, in some sort of pyramidal kind of thinking.
To make it short, here's my view on things: Musician/Singer ( main item/person ) should only have direct lower links, such as band(s) and album(s). The singles should only be linked as a lower item to the specific albums in which they can be heard.
The same should go with anything else, whether it be music or science or sports or else, you'll end up with a huge pile of database links in the lower items area.
Right now, it's not an issue but that's only because OpiWiki doesn't have enough items. But, if the website is successful, it could be a big problem in the future.
One way to solve the problem could be to add various degrees of lower items, which could work pretty much like how the rankings currently work. For example, right now, the singer ranking is higher than the studio singer ranking ( very good idea by the way ). Maybe we could do something similar with lower links to add more subordination between each items.
I also encountered what might be the first situation in which two articles share the same name. Pearl Jam ( the band ) made a self-titled album. I had previously added the name info for the band and so I did the same for the album. I think the name info should be mandatory for ANY item. Example, right now we only have one Barack Obama. But it would still be wise to add "politician" as name info anyway, just to make sure.
I also have two very, very minor issues concerning the box in which we type description ( the one I'm using right now ).
1- Whenever I want to add a database link, the link goes at the very beginning of my description. This forces me to copy/paste the link to the desired location in my text instead of just clicking on the link in the box and having it immediately lay exactly where I want it as I am typing. It's the same thing for all the other tools ( italic, underline, bold, etc. ). Not sure if I'm being clear enough here, but if you understand what I'm trying to explain, you'll have to agree that this is an issue for people who want to make quality descriptions.
2- The area in which we type is too small, I constantly have to scroll up and down whenever I'm making the descriptions ( mostly due to the issue I just talked about in #1 ).
So, yeah, I'm looking forward to some replies now... I spent a bunch of hours on OpiWiki, but now I want to know if I should invest more time on it in the future.