News from Project Redcap

Greetings,

There have been some exciting developments at Project: Redcap that I would like to share with you all. Unfortunately I also have some bad news.

The good news is that the venerable Project: Redcap is getting re-designed as a modern Wiki. Users will be able to contribute material directly instead of having to e-mail it to the Redcap maintainer. Also, the mission of Project: Redcap is expanding to be more than just links and a FAQ. We are well on the way to making it a kind of "Wikipedia for Ars Magica."

The new, improved Redcap is currently under development at http://hermesweb.ekkaia.org. Please feel free to visit and look it over! (Note: we are working on a brand-new navigation menu so the navigation should get much easier within the next few days!) Already it contains all the Saga pages from Project: Redcap, and over 400 pages of the new Ars Magica encyclopedia! Many thanks are due to Yair for his incredible efforts on the encyclopedia, and to Pitt Murmann for conceiving this new format and providing all the tech support to make it happen.

I am now working on migrating content from Project Redcap into the new site, which is currently called HermesWeb. As I migrate each Redcap page over, I am marking the Redcap page as "no longer maintained". Once HermesWeb contains everything that Project: Redcap now has (and more), we will move HermesWeb over to the www.redcap.org address and it will become the new front page of Project: Redcap. All the old Redcap pages will remain in place, so if your own Web site links to something on Redcap, those links will still be good.

We are making good progress with the effort. I meant for it to take about three months, and we started in January 2008. :blush: But the end is really in sight now, and we are building up momentum for a real transition, probably in March of 2009.

You can help. Go visit the HermesWeb site, have a look around, and give us feedback (please post feedback in this thread). We have a guest account set up so you can add or edit content to the site. There are over 400 articles there already but many of them can be expanded upon and improved by adding more rulebook references, details, examples, and so on. There are many more articles that remain to be written. Anything you can contribute will help the community.

Now for the bad news. I have been having a serious problem with e-mail addressed to redcap.org. The redcap.org address is being used by spammers as a fake return address, and there is some kind of anti-spam measure (either a blacklist or a filter) that has been blocking messages from Redcap users to me, the maintainer. I am going to work with our Webmaster to get past this problem. What it means is that I've received no update requests and no new content for Project Redcap in six months. Many of the sites to which Project Redcap used to link have either moved or gone offline. If this keeps up for long, Project Redcap will get badly out of date and will become a lot less useful than it is now.

Please help re-invogorate the Redcap. Send me links to your Ars Magica pages and/or log into HermesWeb and upload them yourself. Partially this is my fault for not solving the e-mail problem earlier. I'll need the help of the community to keep Project Redcap alive and healthy for the next decade.

You can reach me by private message on this forum, or by e-mail at redcap at andrewgronosky dot us.

Thanks and best wishes,

Andrew Gronosky
Project Redcap

A noble goal, Good luck!

I'm confused - the page you list looks... exactly like just links and a FAQ. I see no "Wiki" at all, or, at least, not one like what I'm accustomed to.

I would expect every article to have all the massively interlinked keywords, and also a handy search window - every link is to a diff webpage, and the Search is on a separate page, which, again, looks more like your standard html webpage format.

Is this just "getting re-designed as a wiki", or is it actually going to be a true Wiki? Or is this just a different "but similar" software package?

Regardless, some suggestions -

  1. include a Word Search window on the main page - too handy not to have.

  2. Better Navigation - a Homepage for the Wiki itself that lays out what options there are. These are similar to the one from the actual Wiki site:Navigation

    • Main page
    • Contents
    • Fan content
    • Current events
    • Random article3) I'm not sure what you mean when you say "good progress", and I don't doubt that merely creating the framework is a herculean task, but as an Encyclopedia or Wiki it's not there yet. Connect the basic words to pages, esp the ones that really need explanation. "Effect"? "Target"? "Ward"? "Penetration"? These are topic-words that give every new player (and some veterans) headaches, but...[color=darkred] The specified page could not be found. If you don't have those pages, what do you have up? What are you planning?

Growing pains...

Try
hermesweb.ekkaia.org/page/Overview

That is supposed to be the front page. Is that more to your liking? It has lots of interlinked keywords, although some of them are off-site links. The search option is to be found to the left, at every page.

At least, that's how it looks on my computer.

It is a wiki. Not using the MediaWiki program that Wikipedia is using, but it's just as much a wiki.

Word-Search within the current page? I just use my browser for that. Is this really necessary? We have a search within the wiki, it's accessed on the left. Do you mean we better make the search-field in the main window, rather than open up in a new window?

A navigation sidebar, somewhat like that, will be implemented shortly. A rudimentary menu is already available on the left, but certainly it needs improvement.

The Overview page, hermesweb.ekkaia.org/page/Overview , also provides an aid to navigation. We hope.

The curremt content extends mostly to covering the Houses of Hermes books. There are certain more basic concepts, like Spell Guidelines, Regio, and so on. Much basic content is still missing, however, as your keywords indicate.

In a sense, the idea is that the reader is probably most familiar with the core book so we tried to cover the supplements. So you won't find Talisman in there, but you will find what the Colentes Arcanorum is. We also tried to provide introductory essays, like explaining what Mythic Europe is or explaining a bit about Hermetic Society.

Which isn't to say that covering the core book isn't important - it's on our "to do list", and rather at the top; we just thought it less important to have on the get-go. And the supplements, too, are only very partially entered into the wiki, so it's not like we have them covered. We were hoping other people - like you - could chip in, to ease our load...

Cuchulainshound,

Thanks for the feedback. It's especially useful that you point out specific things that caused problems for you. We'll work on it.

Technically it's not a Wiki but it functions exactly like one from a user's point of view. People can log in and create or edit pages. If it looks different from something like Wikipedia, that's because it's powered by different software.

Every article does have massively interlinked keywords. Is it possible that the link color is too close to black for you to have noticed the links?

Now I'm the one who's confused, because the Search window is right there on the bottom of the left-hand column.

Absolutely, I said in my post we're re-designing the navigation bar right now.

What we do have is:

  • All the Saga links from Project: Redcap
  • 400 pages of mostly Order of Hermes related stuff

Incidentally, when I say that Redcap will be an online encyclopedia, I don't mean that it will be an online rule book. In fact, we've specifically been asked by Atlas Games not to print detailed rule information online. I think you can see how if we did that it could potentially hurt Ars Magica sales. So even when we do have pages for "Ward" and "Penetration," those entries are going to be short, and focus on telling you where in the rulebooks to look for the official rules, and on clearing up any confusion or pitfalls those rules may cause.

The next thing I am going to do is migrate the Ars Magica FAQ. That will take days or perhaps weeks, but it should give you more hits for the sorts of things you were looking for.

Again, thanks for your feedback. :slight_smile:

and

What exactly would be a true wiki? – One that uses the software Leuf and Cunningham introduced almost a decade ago? Or one that allows anyone to contribute? As far as the latter case is concerned, the access restrictions are currently being revised. Regarding the branding, you are right: the site does neither bear a sunflower, nor a C2 logo.

Personally, I agree with you – the more links, the more references, the better. However, it is a matter of personal style to link certain termini, or to refrain from doing so. I wouldn't want to force anyone to put large quantities of links on a page, especially if he or she is primarily used to WYSIWYG-editing.

That's a good idea. The current solution is not very convenient.

I remember seeing Andrew positing at least one article (on the forum as well as on BerkList) that contains some sort of mission statement. Is it really necessary to repeat the basic idea over and over again?

Thank you for your feedback.

Okay, I'll take your word for it.

(PM - that's what I was asking, about Wiki software vs a clone. Didn't look at all the same, and I didn't dive in and try it yet.)

I noticed the blue vs. black, but most of what I found was not interlinked, and the links were not to other wiki pages, but to external sites. Maybe it was just those pages. So long as it can happen, so long as the software supports later guest contributions and connections, I'm sure it will eventually expand if it needs to.

Well, there's a link to the search page right there - I'm talking about a small field on any page, so no additional navigation is necessary. As typical in most any Wiki-software-driven page.

(If one had a desire to search every page for an instance of a word/term, that could deserve a separate page.)

Cool, just wasn't sure what/where your vision was focused, what parts you considered "finished" vs. "in progress".

Of course, nor should it.

But in typing in those terms I was thinking, specifically, of recent public questions about terms that caused some confusion. While "rules" would be inappropriate, fan-interpretations or clarifications would (to me) be exactly what might be expected in such a site, and one service it could provide, as a synopsis and repository for the sort of give-and-take that we regularly see in our public threads here.

Take "Aegis of the Hearth" - as any Wiki-type page, I would expect a simple "canon, RAW explanation", but also the sort of commentary we see here on these pages, different opinions and suggestions on houserules and interpretations, fan-created solutions to the wording that it "blocks" spells", which can (I hope, most agree?) be problematic - "cancel" the spell, "stop" the target of the spell, what? Similarly exactly how Wards work, Magic Resistance and the whole the "pink dot" discussion that arises seasonally, the scope of Penetration, the Target (Form) of a spell vs the target (victim) of a spell, & etc., etc., ad infinitum.

I can see an entire section discussing varying interpretations of the Code - as with any wiki-type, each interpretation presented neutrally, and all interpretations represented with a quick rationale, so that any Story Guide, new or old, can weigh the spectrum of opinion and fan-solutions for themselves.

If it is merely a short, vague, formulaic definition of each term, that is hardly a useful supplement to the Rules as they stand. The strength of a wiki is to expand based on current drift and to evolve with changes.

All excellent ideas. By all means, go create the pages :slight_smile:

Absolutely. The intention is certainly to point the reader to the pitfalls and introduce him to the fan-community commentary and discussions, not just to provide a raw summary of the terms. I couldn't agree more that this purpose is very much under-represented in the wiki at the moment.

Yes, that is exactly the idea. I guess I need to find a way to express that idea more clearly as part of the mission statement.

The Children of Kalesh page seems to not be avilable

Maybe report to this thread instead:

:slight_smile: