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 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  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.