Creature Catalogue Wiki?

I don't know if you have ever used the website called The Hypertext d20 SRD, but for those who have not used it the basic advantage of this is that words within monster entries are hyperlinked to the relevant parts of the core rules.

Here is a quick example: the drow section of the elf page links to poison, Ex, darkvision, low-light vision, spell resistance, spell-like abilities, dancing lights, darkness, faerie fire, (Weapon, Armor, and Shield Proficiency), hand crossbow, daylight (spell), blinded, wizard and cleric. (That is 15 links that let you jump elsewhere to check the rules instantly.)

I like the current Creature Catalogue website and would love to see these monsters get grouped into PDFs when full sets of monsters are ready, but I wonder if we could have a Creature Cataloge Wiki (within the ENWiki) as well as what is currently planned.

A wiki would allow people to hyperlink the monsters to the rest of the rules (in the same style as The Hypertext d20 SRD), but would also allow the monsters to be catalogued with multiple categories (such as "humanoid", "Greyhawk" or "aquatic subtype"). If this was done then it should be possible to build up a series of category pages that tell people as much information as a search through Echohawk's index.

I frequently use The Hypertext d20 SRD to help me generate characters and if a Creature Catalogue wiki could be fully hyperlinked it would be just as easy for me to create characters from out of print monster races as SRD monster races.

So I have got two questions:

1) Would the Creature Catalogue owner(s) be interested in using ENWiki as another way for people to use their monsters?

and

2) Would people be willing to help copy CC monsters over to ENWiki and add the hyperlinks?

Well, I use the Hypertext SRD some and the Sovelier-Sage SRD a lot. So I agree that hyperlinking would be very useful. Yeah, I could probably copy stuff into the wiki from time to time, once I learn wiki markup at least. We'll see what the head honchos think, but I'd guess it would be favorable.

freyar said:

Well, I use the Hypertext SRD some and the Sovelier-Sage SRD a lot. So I agree that hyperlinking would be very useful. Yeah, I could probably copy stuff into the wiki from time to time, once I learn wiki markup at least. We'll see what the head honchos think, but I'd guess it would be favorable.

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At the moment everything in ENWiki seems to be in a single namespace. I think (that if the head honchos say yes) we would want a Creature Catalogue namespace. I believe this just means adding something like a Creature Catalogue page and then making sub pages for all of the monsters.

We would probably also want to make some sort of templates for displaying the stat blocks correctly.

(I don't know if we would want to link things directly over to another place, like The Hypertext d20 SRD, or see if we can get ENWiki to host a copy of the SRD in another namespace. In the long term it might help multiple ENWiki projects to have a local copy of the SRD. In fact in the long term it might help for ENWiki to have both the 3.0 and 3.5 SRDs as well as any other SRDs.)

I don't think there's a need for another namespace. Namespaces are for drastically different sets of pages in the wiki, and I think a catalog of monsters fits right in with the normal EN Wiki theme. If you want to set them apart from the other monsters/creatures in the wiki then you could make a category for them.

The wiki is about putting a whole lot of information in one place. Creating a new namespace kinda defeats that purpose.

But I agree that linking to things like darkvision in monster pages would be a great idea. That's another purpose of a wiki: interconnection. We might want to look into actually copying the 3.5 SRD over into our wiki. Not all of it needs to be done at once. People could make links in their monsters to things that they think should exist, and then they (or others) could go in and copy the SRD info into that page.

In fact, I'm going to add something into the wiki guidelines now about links. Our pages should have more links!

Merkuri said:

In fact, I'm going to add something into the wiki guidelines now about links. Our pages should have more links!

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Thanks Mrs Wiki!

I'd obviously want to be reading and following any guidelines before I started anything big on ENWiki.

Big Mac said:

I'd obviously want to be reading and following any guidelines before I started anything big on ENWiki.

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Thanks! It's easier to keep organization guidelines in mind when you add stuff than to organize it later. By the way, if you disagree with any of the guidelines, please let me know. They were just ideas I had to make the wiki easier to deal with, but they're not set in stone.