5.2 KiB
[D][WIP][HSF][BST][RT][RST]Constructing a fictional 'wiki' to support in world trivia and information for the author and audience.
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Author: u/Nighzmarquls *
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/3vodyr/dwiphsfbstrtrstconstructing_a_fictional_wiki_to/
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Score: 13
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Created: 2015-12-06T17:14:43
Post:
So I am making a fictional wiki for my story it is there to serve two purposes.
- Simulate a fraction of story/world building relevant internet for my plot.
- Offload the technical details that are fun to me and a fraction of my audience but will get in the way if I try to load all of it into the character dialogue and narration.
Now what does this have to do with rationality?
I feel like in science fiction in general but especially for rational fiction in particular there is a noticeable void of the internet existing in a piece of fiction.
I mean the story might technically have an internet exist and People sort of speak about it and point at it. But I feel like the ramifications of such a thing actually being part of a story world has been better handled by Terry Pratchet's Clacks then most contemporary or science fiction stories I have read.
A lot of authors make the world a post apocalypse so the infrastructure can be ignored. Or they have home bodies that don't use cell phones in order to disconnect them. Or any other number of contrivances that individually don't seem particularly damning. But on a whole make for what looks like authors not wanting to even touch the topic.
So I'm gonna try and tell a story and have the internet and it's global interconnectedness be PART of the story but not what the story is about.
Now onto the raw nitty gritty mechanics of what I plan to do to pull this off.
My two thoughts is to limit the total articles I create, and also to timestamp all of them into 'archive periods' so that events can unfold on the wiki along with the story but be preserved.
And to actually leave each 'island' open to user/reader editing.
Anyone have their own suggestions for the mechanics of story telling wiki construction?
Interested in collaborating on it?
How would you use wiki's for your own writing?
Comments:
u/DCarrier [+6] (3 hours later)
This reminds me of the SCP Foundation and Orion's Arm, but with those, the wiki is the story. I think Orion's Arm has some books, but it's more like a wiki with tie-in novels than a novel with a tie-in wiki.
u/alexanderwales [+5] Time flies like an arrow (4 hours later)
I've used wikis in the past for D&D. You can see one here. This wasn't at all in-universe, just a collection of knowledge that the players could peruse at their leisure or ignore entirely. It also served double-duty as a campaign log.
The big problem is that wikis are a lot of work. Every hour that's spent working on the wiki means an hour that you're not working on the actual story. You can't depend on other people to maintain the wiki without having people (lots of them) engaged with the story, but they won't do that if the story isn't being written well and at a steady pace, and even then I think it's something of a crapshoot.
I don't know, I think it's a neat idea but the effort involved makes it seem like it wouldn't be worth it?
u/Transfuturist [+3] Carthago delenda est. (8 hours later)
Your favorite pet peeve also holds true. When I was working on a setting wiki, I was getting all the hedons from worldbuilding without actually putting anything into the story.
u/Transfuturist [+3] Carthago delenda est. (3 hours later)
Maintaining a secondary source of canon adds a multiplicative factor to the effort involved in making the story in the first place. And simulating participation of a fragment of a fictional internet involves the observed behavior of every person who adds to that fragment, which itself adds up. Simulating in detail a system that involves more people than yourself can only be done productively with AI.
u/FuguofAnotherWorld [+3] Roll the Dice on Fate (a day later)
Well, there's Oh My Generic Monster Girls with its heavy use of internet, and Three Worlds Collide has a ship's 4chan. Still, that's only two out of the whole genre.
u/Nighzmarquls [+3] (a day later)
Well yes that is one of the reasons I'm writing Oh My Generic Monster girls. But thanks for plugging it :)
u/FuguofAnotherWorld [+3] Roll the Dice on Fate (a day later)
Oh right, that's you. And I forgot Friendship is Optimal.
u/Nighzmarquls [+2] (a day later)
Friendship is optimal is a good point. On the internet thing it's just a very strange thing to me, there is an amazing amount of authorial and story telling potential in an interconnected world.
u/Nepene [+2] (an hour later)
It might work well to make a number of primary sources, stories and pieces of evidence about the world. Any sources made would have to adhere to their existence.
Plus your story actually has to be decent. I maintain a mother of learning wiki, but there aren't that many people on there, and that's good enough that people pay money to support the author.