Upcoming Fansite Idea: Neopian Times Wiki

[Ryanruff13]

(Note to moderators: I initially considered posting this in the Times Lobby subforum, but I figured that the Creative Endeavors subforum may be a better fit.)

I actually had this idea in June of last year, and it wasn't until today where I suddenly had some spur-of-the-moment inspiration to continue working on it just today. But it hit me that one night in June: as popular as Neopets is and as much fan content has been produced, as far as I am aware, nobody has created a wiki about the Neopian Times! Sure, there is a database of links to Neopian Times submissions, as well as this very forum, but there's no Wiki dedicated to describing aspects and submissions of the Neopian Times itself.

My plan: to create a Wiki where one can describe notable aspects about the Neopian Times, such as its history, its authors, and perhaps recurring characters.

Before unveiling it, I created this thread to get your opinions on the idea to see whether it would be worth it or not. I already have the wiki software installed, so my biggest next step is to register a domain name (of which luckily happen to be cheap, from what I've gathered), which I didn't want to do until I saw what people thought of the idea. So, yay or nay?

[Moni]

Ryanruff13 okay so

This idea comes up every few years and iirc the main problem is that. There's so many issues in the Neopian Times to catalogue everything in it--so many that I don't really think it's feasibly possible without some automation involved.

If you wanted to catalogue more, like, the most notable series and authors, popular fanon that came from the NT, etc, then I think that's perfectly feasible! I guess it depends on what you really want to do with the Wiki.

[Ian Wolf-Park]

I'm going to put in my two cents on this.

As Moni mentioned, the main problem is the amount of issues (and the number of contributors, the majority have only appeared once). Look at other wiki like sites (like Bulbapedia, TV Tropes, etc.) and you'll see what's common between them: they have other people contributing to the site itself, not just a single person running the site.

There's also the fact that you're planning to include notable stories and/or contributors/authors. Those tend to be subjective, which is quite the opposite to the other wikis, where they are mainly objective.

While I don't hate the idea per say, I just think it may be a bit too ambitious for one person to tackle alone, but again, it all depends on what you're planning to do.

[Thorn]

I think as a group project, this could be cool. As a personal project, I feel it would be tricky (and yeah, Best Stories is very subjective), but I'll still give it a browse.

[Coaster]

Given enough free time, it wouldn't be hard to make a web crawler for the NT and populate a database with all the authors, entry titles, and entry types; from there it wouldn't be hard to determine the most prolific. Influential or good, on the other hand, is a much trickier problem which would definitely have to be done manually.

Also an issue is when people switch NT accounts and thus wouldn't get full credit for what they did unless, again, it was merged manually. And collaborative works would be difficult to credit as well.