Welcome, Greyhawkers!
Greyhawk Online now has a new wiki feature functionality added to the Great Library of Greyhawk!
There’s many ways to use the tools that Mediawiki allows, and they’re usually easy to implement. Which makes the Great Library of Greyhawk better and easier to use!
So, to make the wiki as useful as possible, the cross-referencing table at the end of articles now has links! Users no longer must copy+paste to see if a page for a source even exists!
Useful and Convenient
The most important fact about wikis is they are universally meant to be easy to use for the end-user. If they’re not, they’re not serving their purpose.
The biggest complaint we hear about indexes, codexes, databases, spreadsheets, etc. is they are often difficult to use. Especially as they typically use abbreviations which used to be common, but are now usually not used as often. Time was, just saying “S1” or “U1” was enough. Nowadays, though, gamers and fans would likely recognize the names of Tomb of Horrors and Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh. This is particularly true since Sinister Secret has been made available to fifth edition fans in a newer book for new players to have the same incredible experience as so many people did way back when. But, the codes don’t necessarily automatically convey the title anymore.
So, when the difference between things like “TAB” and “tAB” are unfamiliar (there’s not one!) a user wouldn’t know what they mean. Then there’s also “TSB”, “TSC”, “FTA”, and “FAT”. It can all get very confusing. There are even others which are more obscure, or people just might not know off the top of their heads. Or not know anything about.
Blue links take you to the article about the sourcebook!
So, what’d we do?
We added links! That seems simple, right? That’s what wikis do.
But the important part is where we added them! At the ends of most pages is a table derived, in part, from the “EGI”. See?! There’s another one! The Encyclopedia Greyhawkania Index was the work of Jason Zavoda and others, and catalogued GH extensively. (the EGI page has a list of all these abbreviations!) But, within that table, all it originally did was list the page numbers anywhere/everywhere a topic is mentioned, even obliquely, and list the codes for the sourcebooks. … but, what if you don’t know the code for it? What if you don’t know anything about that source? Or you’re wanting to know when it was printed so you can figure out what lore came first?
But, the tables are actually outside the wiki, and are populated from a database. So, we directly edited the database. In the “Product” column, we added wikilinks to all the sources, in each entry, on each row!
Now, every time you look at the end of the page at the References section, this wiki feature will show you links to all the Greyhawk books! The wikilinks are apparent as blue hyperlinks. In addition to the full, spelled-out name of the sourcebook, there’s some text like “WGR4” or “WGR5” that isn’t part of the link, though. Not only the code, but it also tells the user if there’s separate books in a boxed set, or other description. Typically, these are all discussed in the article for the box itself, and no additional wikilink is necessary.
Continuing to improve it!
There’s not always pages on the wiki on things that don’t necessarily relate directly to Greyhawk, like DMGs, MMs. Also, more obscure sourcebooks like Guide to Hell, or On Hallowed Ground, and others may not have an article. But, as we add more and more pages every week and edited every day, we’ll continue putting links to sources with new pages!
So, get out there, and try it out, and look up your favorite topic, and see what’s all listed for it!
‘Til the Starbreak!
(With thanks to “ari5av” on Discord for helping us clarify and organize this article somewhat.)
