I realized recently that there isn't one single website with a lot of detail about Archie Comics. You've got the company's main site, the info about releases and stories at various sites (particularly GCD), Wikipedia and a small wiki at Fandom (which is a terrible location for a wiki - but I won't get into that here), so I decided to try my hand at an Archie wiki called Archiepedia. Right now I'm busy getting everything set up - I have the domain and installed the software, but am busy copying/configuring templates from Wikipedia and configuring the software the way I want it. Once that's done I'll start by copying some of the articles from Wikipedia and go from there. The goal is to eventually have a one-stop online Archie encyclopedia - info about the artists, characters, related media, etc. all in one spot...
Big undertaking. How will you handle entries for stories with the same title (of which I'm sure there are plenty)?
Also, which do you get the Wiki software? And can it be set up for location viewing (something that's not online)? Before I have an idea for a Wiki for one of my fanfics that would likely be of interest to only me, but it's still something that I'd like to do for myself.
Quote from: Tuxedo Mark on April 09, 2025, 03:55:08 PMBig undertaking. How will you handle entries for stories with the same title (of which I'm sure there are plenty)?
Also, which do you get the Wiki software? And can it be set up for location viewing (something that's not online)? Before I have an idea for a Wiki for one of my fanfics that would likely be of interest to only me, but it's still something that I'd like to do for myself.
For stories with the same title, we create a page with the story title that links to all articles about stories by that name (what Wikipedia refers to as "disambiguation pages"). To distinguish the stories, I'd just add " ({year} story)" to the title. That should be enough, unless they somehow published multiple stories with the same name in the same year, in which case we could add other info such as the main artist or the title of the issue it appeared in.
I'm using MediaWiki (https://www.mediawiki.org) for the software - the same thing that powers Wikipedia and numerous other wikis.
I'm not sure what you mean by "location viewing".
They did indeed publish multiple stories with the same title in the same year. I ran into that while reviewing stories on my blog. There was a 5-page story called "The Flame Game" in Betty and Veronica #90 and a 6-page story with the same title in #91, just one month later.
Sorry, I meant "local viewing" as in just on my personal computer, not for the Internet.
Quote from: Tuxedo Mark on April 11, 2025, 03:53:55 PMThey did indeed publish multiple stories with the same title in the same year. I ran into that while reviewing stories on my blog. There was a 5-page story called "The Flame Game" in Betty and Veronica #90 and a 6-page story with the same title in #91, just one month later.
In that situation I'd probably just do it by artist instead, unless the same artist drew both stories as well. I'd have to figure it out when I got to that point.
As far as local viewing, you could use Wampserver (https://wampserver.aviatechno.net/) to set up a website that's only visible on your computer. I use it for testing the forum software.
I love the idea of an Archiepedia. While I don't think I have enough knowledge to contribute to it, I will definitely spend some time using it.
Still working on adding templates that we'll be using, but I'm almost done with that. The big one at this point is called "Infobox person", and is the one Wikipedia uses for all sorts of people - politicians, notable criminals, military folks, etc. As such, it has a ridiculous number of fields, many of which we won't have any use for. I'm going to trim it down to the things I think we'll actually use. I'm hoping to get to that within the next week or so.
Here's what's on my to-do list right now:
Finish copying (and, as necessary, modifying) templates from Wikipedia
Get a logo made
Install the add-on that will let you link your forum account with the wiki
Almost done copying the main templates we'll need from Wikipedia, though I do want to play with an alternative setup as well that would allow me to do a bit more and not rely on all the Wikipedia stuff as much. I didn't discover this until well after I'd started copying templates from Wikipedia, but it might work better. The biggest issue is I'm terrible with web design so while setting up the templates wouldn't be hard, making them look nice might be.
I also need to write up some basic policies, at least as far as copyright goes. We can't avoid using copyrighted images of characters, covers, etc. but for actual real people we need to be careful to use freely licensed images to avoid getting in trouble (although some companies don't bother going after small sites, better safe than sorry).
The eventual goal here is to document everything related to Archie Comics - comics, TV shows, movies, music, creators, etc.
Got a test installation set up to play with the "alternative" I described above and I'm thinking it might be better to go that route instead. It's simpler and allows a lot more flexibility - I can create templates quickly, then create forms to allow people to create articles using those templates.
I need to spend more time playing with it though to figure out a few things:
1. How I allow people to specify a file in the form (you'd need to upload the image first, which is fairly straightforward)
2. Allow wiki text in the form instead of just "Free text".
3. Dynamic lists/categories:
- Creating an issue page should automatically add that to a category of "Issues published in <year>" and "Issues with cover art by <artist>"
- What code can be added to a story page that will display a list of all issues it appears in
I'd still need to add some additional templates for bands (The Archies, Josie and the Pussycats, maybe The Veronicas), albums/singles, the various TV shows, etc. but that shouldn't be too difficult to do and I can take inspiration from Wikipedia for that.
Did some playing with the test yesterday and found that it's pretty easy to do some of what I want. Dynamic lists are simple and can be manipulated easily as well. It should be pretty easy to do. I'll have to look more into it this week as I have time.
Quick status update...
I added a template from Wikipedia that allows us to do the "This article is about X. For Y, see Other Article" text at the top of an article page. While I am trying to avoid Wikipedia templates as much as possible due to their complexity (and the fact that a lot of the code is written specifically with Wikipedia in mind, so it includes stuff we'd never need or use), but this one is too useful to pass up. I may also add a related one ("X redirects here. For Y, see Article") as that doesn't require a whole lot of extra work.
I added a contact page to the wiki. I may have to change some settings to combat spam, but we'll see how that goes.
I began the licensing stuff again on the wiki. This is what allows a user to choose a licensing option when uploading a file. It's a two-step process. The first step involves creating a list of templates to be used, while the second is actually creating these templates. I'm still debating on what options we actually need - I want to keep it as simple as possible while still allowing a wide range of available content (like Wikipedia, I want the images of actual people to be freely licensed so we don't have to worry about who owns the rights and whether we can use that image).
I'm still playing around with some addons for the wiki software. I've enabled a feature that will allow you to change the title of the page (so we can do "Title #x" instead of "Title/x" on issue pages - you can't use # in the URLs because that's used to link to a specific location on a page, so making issues sub-pages of the main article on the series seems like the most logical solution). I also installed an addon that uses that specified display title for all links to that page on the wiki, and have a few more ideas I want to play with as I have time.
I'm still playing with properties on the test site. This is a special feature added by an extension called Semantic MediaWiki that makes things a whole lot more powerful. For instance, on an issue page we can do [[Cover art::Harry Lucey]] then easily generate a sortable list of all articles about issues with cover art by Harry Lucey. I need to see if I should create a separate property for each role (writer, pencils, inks, etc.) or if I can just have a generic "Creator" property and further specify their role from there.
I do need to create a few specialty templates as well for indicating content that is used from another source such as Wikipedia, GCD or another site with the same license, since the license requires you to credit the source (which is perfectly reasonable of course - our wiki is using the same license as well), but some of those I can grab from other sources and modify as needed.
About done adding properties for now and will work on the templates/forms in the coming days.
I'm also still playing with the design and options for mobile users as well, plus a few additional addons that add more useful Wikipedia-style features (short descriptions and popup article previews when you hover over an article link).
Hopefully things should be ready to go live in the next week or two.
Playing around with some more things tonight. The forms thing I added makes it quite easy to create a new page with structure. I will need to tweak some template code after creating the templates to get them to display things the way I want, but that should be fairly easy.
Some other things will need to be tweaked if we want to use dark mode, but I can always look into that later. While I prefer dark mode, at this point I'm more interested in getting the site up and running - we can worry about tweaking the look later.
I will have more free time this weekend to play with things but it's going along nicely at this point.
Almost done adding properties now. Still have some more I want to add - ones for brother/sister and son/daughter, as well as one for album (for songs) and one for who portrayed someone (TV shows/movies), but that won't take long at all (it only takes a few seconds to add a new property - create a page, add the text along with the special code to specify what type it is and save).
After that, I'll work on the templates and forms, then start adding content.
Other stuff in the works (low priority): Allowing you to sign up or login with your Facebook or Google accounts.
Note that you will need to register separately on the wiki if you want to edit anything or post on the talk pages (see https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Talk_pages if you don't know what a talk page is). I may also add more social stuff like article comments, polls, etc. at some point, but the main focus for now is the content.
Will there be anything regarding shipping? Pairing one character with another, whether canonical or not? Sources from canon, list of ship names, stats regarding how popular that the ship is, etc.
Quote from: Tuxedo Mark on May 06, 2025, 11:34:46 AMWill there be anything regarding shipping? Pairing one character with another, whether canonical or not? Sources from canon, list of ship names, stats regarding how popular that the ship is, etc.
I'm not planning on anything like that.
So I guess it has to include all the horror comics, too, huh?
Quote from: PTF on May 09, 2025, 08:25:25 PMSo I guess it has to include all the horror comics, too, huh?
Yes, I'll also include pages relating to the Archie Horror issues. I'm not into that at all, but it's still relevant for documenting everything relating to Archie. I'll probably also include pages for non-Archie titles published by the company such as the Sonic and TMNT things they published for a while (especially since they even did an "Archie meets the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" issue)
I am happy to see that this project is continuing and I look forward to testing it. :smitten:
Making a bit more progress now. I'm basically done with the properties and made a template for characters that I need to test out soon.
At this point I don't have a lot left that I want to do...
Still need to finish up the licensing templates
Need to add templates for other things (albums, songs, TV shows, movies, creators, series and issues)
Need to add forms for the other templates
Still in testing:
Ability to login or create an account with you Google or Facebook account. I need to make sure these don't conflict with one another (just in case someone tries to link a single account to both Facebook and Google), need to see how they handle linking to an existing account and also make sure they're configured such that a local account will be created as well, so you can still login if you lose access or unlink accounts in the future.
Brief update on things...
Still testing the Login with Facebook thing. It should work just fine, but Facebook's app thing is broken. You have to specify one or more domains to use the app on (for security reasons), but even specifying a single domain results in it telling you you're "sending too many domains".
I updated the Character template:
- Fixed syntax so the parameter checks work properly (each parameter is optional so I have code to only display an item in the infobox if the parameter for that item is specified)
- Added a "universe" parameter to categorize character articles by which universe that character primarily appears in (Archie, Sabrina, Little Archie, Josie, etc. - currently it accepts any value but we can change that in the future)
Created a basic "Archie" article to test the Character template
Updated the form for creating/editing character articles:
- Added a field for the new "universe" parameter
- Added code to allow the VisualEditor to be displayed in the "Free text" field
Created a template to link to specific issues.
Still to come:
Finishing up the licensing templates (I'm still not entirely sure how thorough I want to get with that - a lot of the ones Wikipedia uses wouldn't apply to us, and the vast majority of the images we'll be uploading would be copyrighted but considered fair use; the biggest area there would be pictures of people and non-comic stuff, but we can cross that bridge when we come to it).
Finish up the rest of the article templates (at the very least, series, issues, stories and creators - I want to focus on documenting the important stuff first, then focus on stuff like the movies, TV shows, music, etc. as that's not as important).
I'm hoping to have this done in the next couple of weeks, especially as I'll be going out of town for a week in about a month.
Created a couple more templates:
Issue - for individual issues (fields include title (only used when the issue title is different than the series title - mainly used for things like the Showcase Series digests and Archie Giant Series), release date, artist(s) - a comma-separated list of people who are credited for the cover art and number of pages along with one where you specify the name of the file that shows the cover art, though you can also upload a file directly from the form). I still need to add a section where you specify which stories are included in the issue as well, but that's fairly easy to do.
Creator - for artists, writers, etc. This is a simple thing that includes fields for an image, birth date, death date and website.
Still need to make one for series (individual titles such as Life with Archie or Pep), stories (title and creator credits, plus an optional "series" field for things where the story was part of a series such as "Love Showdown", "Archie Marries", etc.) and a few other things, but making progress pretty quickly.
Also need to decide how to handle people who aren't/weren't creators. I'll probably create a separate template for that based on the one I made for creators, just with some extra fields such as years active, titles, etc.
A few more updates:
Got an initial issue template set up. Still debating whether to tweak it a bit to handle specifying if it's a crossover or one-shot. I also set up a property to specify characters that appear on the cover (so you can search for all issues with a specific character on the cover for instance) but don't know if I want to integrate that into the template as well or just specify that in the article itself.
Also enabled an extension to improve the talk pages.
Added pages for Fernando Ruiz and TIto Peña. Also enabled the Factbox (https://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Factbox) feature (part of the addon I'm using that allows me to create properties and assign values to them - things like cover artists, writers, etc.), though I don't know if I'm going to keep that or not. It's an interesting feature though and provides some useful info at a glace.
I also added a description for the Creators category and hid the "Pages Using the RSS Extension" category on the main page because it's not really that useful to anyone browsing the wiki.
I still need to finish the other templates for series, books and albums, and decide how to handle the licensing templates. I think most things on our site would fall under "fair use", but I don't know if I'll need to add other non-free-licensed options or not.
I also still need to figure out the best way to handle relatives. I think for now the best way is to just add properties for everything we need and specify them manually in the template. It is a bit more work that way but it's easier than trying to get it to work automatically.
A few more updates...
Re-factored the template and associated form for creators into a generic Person template. I wanted a template to use for regular people such as Jon Goldwater and the Silberkleits who are important in the Archie world but weren't/aren't necessarily creators, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized it would essentially be identical to creators except it would put the page in a different category. The new template has a field called "is_creator" that will put the page in the "Creators" category. If not set, it will put them in the "People" category instead.
I'm also currently working on the template for series/titles. I added two new properties to use for the date/year when a series/title was first and last published. I am going to add one more property for number of issues as well.
I've also started running into a bug with the Semantic MediaWiki extension I'm using that will initially cause an error when you first add a property, add/update a page, but refreshing the page through the wiki seems to fix that for now, and it's something I'll just have to live with until they fix the issue.
Still to do:
Templates for stories, story series (Love Showdown, Baby Tales, New Look, etc.), books (non-issue type books such as trade paperbacks, etc. - I'll probably treat the 1000 page ones as a regular title/series since it's essentially just a giant digest; I'll figure that out soon though), albums, films, TV series...
I also want to determine how we handle information about characters in different universes - for instance we'd want a separate section about Archie in the Riverdale universe than the regular in-comic universe. I did find an extension that lets me add tabs to pages, so I might go that route.
Everything's coming along nicely though and I'll probably delve more into adding content in the next week or two.
A few more updates...
- Added a new property called "Has EAN" to hold the UPC/EAN of a book, issue, etc. and updated the issue template to support that field
- Added a new property for the ISBN of books
- Updated the Character, Issue and Person templates to set the Image property if there's an image set in the appropriate template
- Installed another extension to let us have tabs in articles. This will be useful for separating character bios for various universes such as comics vs the Riverdale TV series
Still need to do templates for books, albums, songs/singles, movies and TV shows, but most of those can wait a bit as I want to get the main stuff done first (characters, series, issues, stories, creators, etc.) before we get into the other stuff.
More updates:
Created the template and form for stories and books
Added two new properties: "Publisher", which will link to a page about the publisher of a particular book, and "Record label" for albums/singles, which is just a text field (I don't plan on creating articles for record labels, but it might be useful to some people)
Added the extension to allow us to create tabs on pages.
Still to do: licensing templates and templates for albums, songs/singles, movies and TV shows.
Also, Archiepedia is now on X and BlueSky Social:
https://www.x.com/@archiepedia1
https://bsky.app/profile/archiepedia.bsky.social
Unfortunately someone already took the name "Archiepedia" on X way back when it was Twitter - it belongs to an account for a blog about singer David Archuleta, which hasn't been active in 15 years.