Encyclopedia Gamia

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Encyclopedia Gamia is the name of a gaming wiki, started in mid 2005 by a user named Achernar. It began as a project by members of Penny Arcade forums containing information on all games, though it focuses primarily on video games. Other subjects include, but are not limited to board games, card games, and role-playing games. Things relating to games, such as gaming TV shows, game websites or voice actors featured in games are also found in the wiki. It has less stringent rules about point of view than Wikipedia, so styles of writing will vary from article to article.

At its peak, Encyclopedia Gamia was one of the biggest gaming wikis available with over 2300 legitimate articles. However, a large proportion of these articles were offshoots from other articles. Furthermore, it is important to note that Wikipedia's computer and video gaming content, both in number of articles and depth, eclipses all third party gaming wiki's. At times, Encyclopedia Gamia includes wikipedia content in its text with a disclaimer. One of Wikipedia's sister project Wikibooks also has a few bookshelves dedicated to board games and video games, though this is being phased out per a high level directive.

Since the issues with hosting described below, Encyclopedia Gamia is temporarily reduced in size, and currently has 2,358 active pages, covering 960 games (as of 31 August 2006). This is significantly lower than that available on other Gaming Wikis, such as the 10861 games covered over 11148 pages at GamerWiki. While the latter has a more comprehensive list of games covered than even Wikipedia, neither has as much full content.

[edit] Domain transfer problems

Due to the problematic host in April 2006, Encyclopedia Gamia transferred to a new host. Unfortunately, a bad combination of MySQL server updates, MediaWiki revisions, and bad unicode translations, content was force transferred from one installation to another. As an administrator, Achernar, explains:

The Encyclopedia Gamia is currently undergoing major renovation. An error in mySQL's handling of Unicode has rendered much of our database unusable and has necessitated re-starting development of the Encyclopedia.

Virtually all of the content has since been moved over to the new MediaWiki installation.

This series of unfortunate events may serve as a guideline of what common pitfalls to avoid when handling MediaWiki installation translations and maintenance.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Encyclopedia Gamia