Submissions/Introduction to the RPG-Dev-Wiki System Project

This is a rejected submission for Wikimania 2012.

Submission no.

641

Title of the submission: Introduction to the RPG-Dev-Wiki System Project

Type of submission (workshop, tutorial, panel, presentation): Presentation

Author of the submission: Daniel Werner

E-mail address: DanWeEtz@web.de

Username: Danwe

Country of origin: Germany

Affiliation, if any (organization, company etc.): Wikimedia Germany

Personal homepage or blog: mw:User:Danwe

Abstract (at least 300 words to describe your proposal): Note: This is not a tutorial or workshop on how to work with RPG-Dev-Wiki. It focuses much more on the technical aspects and how (Semantic-)MediaWiki is used for this. So this might not just be interesting for people potentially interested in working with the system but also for people thinking about extending their MediaWikis in a similar fashion (including reduced redundancies and massive generating of information across the wiki)

RPG-Dev-Wiki has started as an experimental pet project of mine about three years ago. Meanwhile it has grown into a massive set of best practice guides, extensions, and templates bundled into one system based on (Semantic-)MediaWiki with the aim of being a powerful tool for teams working on so called Role Playing Games (RPGs). The project is still in its beta phase and mainly used by some German hobby RPG developers so far.

The RPG-Dev-Wiki system provides templates for describing all kinds of contents for RPGs and is able to generate and exchange various kinds of information cross-article-wise and globally e.g. in form of generated lists, infobox data and extensive overview diagrams. Everything is designed towards avoiding redundancies and therewith providing the authors full flexibility when it comes to renaming or changing whole pieces of existing content without the need to search and replace these pieces of information throughout the entire article or even the whole wiki.

Followed by an introduction of the system and its benefits compared to plain MediaWiki usage for RPGs and similar projects, this presentation will also give a closer insight on the history of RPG-Dev-Wikis development, where it has actually been deployed so far as well as the technological obstacles it has overcome. This will include an overview on some of the most important extensions used (most notably Semantic MediaWiki) and what the future development of RPG-Dev-Wiki could be like, focusing on the fact that so far RPG-Dev-Wiki is mainly available in German language and what it would take to make it available in English and other languages without the need to maintain the systems templates separately for each language as well as the effort associated with this next step.

There is more information available on RPG-Dev-Wiki on the official website http://rpg-dev.org. Currently this information is reduced to German language though.

Track: Technology and Infrastructure

Length of presentation/talk: 25 Minutes

Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?: Maybe

Slides or further information (optional)

Special request as to time of presentations: Not during this WikiData panel, preferably before my second presentation.

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