Man, a blank wiki is daunting. It’s worse than a single blank page, it’s a million blank pages. They’re not serial, or linear. They’re just one big connected open space of emptiness.
There’s a reason I’m keeping the locks down on it for now. For starters, it’s hideously empty. The only way to change that will be through work. Which is fine. The other reason is that I want to have the space to just blather and throw stuff around. Some things will stick, and some things, in retrospect, will look like I must have been waking from a very strange dream involving eulogized lemons for me to have those ideas.
I do like the interconnectedness and immediacy of a wiki, though. Have a new idea? Make a link, fill that out when you’re done with this page. Everything all scattered around? Add category tags. Sorted. Changes get tracked, comparisons are easy as anything to make. And you’re already online to do distracting things more research.
Working on a wiki feels intuitive. The reason for this is that I’ve been conworlding for a long time — maybe even ten years or so now. I’ve done it longer, really, but it was only eight or ten years ago that I learned what the term was, and what it applied to.
The projects I was a part of all used a wiki as a way to provide diegetic information on the world, the countries, the people and the culture. Straightforward and brilliant. So I’m totally cribbing off someone else for this.
If, in the course of the work that happens, part of my wiki takes on that kind of polish, I might make them available for public viewing. Not sure how I’d do that — maybe post excerpts, because access to wiki pages is an all-or-nothing deal — but I think it’d be interesting to throw that part of the work into the spotlight.
Now, back to working on a reading list and schedule. There’s a lot of work to get done.