So today I went to the root of Wikiverse (which, I mentioned yesterday, emailed me to tell me they had linked to one of my Imperium Romanum pages) and discovered that it's simply "an up-to-date high-speed static mirror" of Wikipedia, which is far and away my favorite online reference site. When I was working on... Hey! I just discovered that d20 Past appears on the Wizards web site now! So I can mention that it's the d20 Modern book I wrote (with Gwendolyn Kestrel), which I've been alluding to in my Bullet Points columns all this time.
Anyway, when I was working on d20 Past, Wikipedia was my encyclopedia of choice. While it's about as useful as any encyclopedia when it comes to really hard-core details about things like early firearms (which is to say, not very useful), it's absolutely fabulous for quick reference questions and general overviews. And it's just darned addictive. When I was a kid, I used to spend hours lying on the living room floor in front of my parents' shelf of Encyclopedia Brittanica volumes, with half a dozen volumes spread out around me at once. Browsing Wikipedia is like that experience—the comprehensive hypertext linking allows you to just follow your train of thought wherever it leads you. Even if it weren't a free, community-updated reference, it would be a fabulous online encyclopedia. The fact that it is free and community-maintained is quite a testament to the power of open-source projects and the like.
So, sure enough, Wikipedia's page on Hispania Tarraconensis links to my Imperium Romanum page on Hispania. The section on religion is derived from my pages, which I guess were responsibly researched. Anyway, for some reason I'm tickled to be used as a reference for Wikipedia. That's just fun.
Weird thing about Wikiverse: The email I got from the webmaster is the strangest piece of writing I've ever seen. The text is right-aligned, but punctuation often appears at the left end of the line. So the first line is ",Dear webmaster at aquela.com". What do you make of that?
Could it have anything to do with the fact that the Wikiverse.org domain is registered in Israel?
Anyway, when I was working on d20 Past, Wikipedia was my encyclopedia of choice. While it's about as useful as any encyclopedia when it comes to really hard-core details about things like early firearms (which is to say, not very useful), it's absolutely fabulous for quick reference questions and general overviews. And it's just darned addictive. When I was a kid, I used to spend hours lying on the living room floor in front of my parents' shelf of Encyclopedia Brittanica volumes, with half a dozen volumes spread out around me at once. Browsing Wikipedia is like that experience—the comprehensive hypertext linking allows you to just follow your train of thought wherever it leads you. Even if it weren't a free, community-updated reference, it would be a fabulous online encyclopedia. The fact that it is free and community-maintained is quite a testament to the power of open-source projects and the like.
So, sure enough, Wikipedia's page on Hispania Tarraconensis links to my Imperium Romanum page on Hispania. The section on religion is derived from my pages, which I guess were responsibly researched. Anyway, for some reason I'm tickled to be used as a reference for Wikipedia. That's just fun.
Weird thing about Wikiverse: The email I got from the webmaster is the strangest piece of writing I've ever seen. The text is right-aligned, but punctuation often appears at the left end of the line. So the first line is ",Dear webmaster at aquela.com". What do you make of that?
Could it have anything to do with the fact that the Wikiverse.org domain is registered in Israel?
No comments:
Post a Comment