MayaWikiOnline
October 11th, 2007I discovered mayawikionline.com only a few weeks ago, by blindly googling “Maya wiki” in hopes one existed. Behold and lo, Ed Caspersen, a student at ITT Tech in Grand Rapids, had apparently started just such a thing in August, and had entered the vast majority of content on his own.
There’s certainly a need for this sort of resource. The bulk of home-grown online advice seems to be in forums, a format prone to spam, abuse, rambling conversations, tangents, and redundancy — it’s really not suited to any kind of communication apart from the ad hoc and ephemeral. So I was excited to find such a wiki, though it was clearly in its very early stages. I edited a few articles but hadn’t become very involved, and today I checked the site again to see how it was going. This is what I saw:
“The Maya Wiki is dead. After having to perform repeated backups of defaced articles, spam, and hacking of root config files and having hardly any participation from the Maya community except for the negative emails day after day about the lack of content, I have decided to close this wiki. If you people want a wiki so bad YOU pay for it, YOU administer it, YOU write 98% percent of the articles and YOU can deal with nasty emails. I am going back to focus more of my time back to studies and my own projects. Good day….”
Maya’s an enormous topic — just learning it can be exhausting, to say nothing of documenting it from scratch. Judging by the amount of participation on related forums, I would have guessed there were enough people interested in a reliable and detailed repository of organized information to keep it healthy and growing, if only they’d known about it. Does the Maya community simply lack the critical mass to support a wiki? Is it terminally crippled by sociopathic script-kiddies and malicious burnouts?
I don’t think this is the case. In my experience with sand castles and bullies, the urge to create is greater than the urge to destroy, but destroying is much easier. You just need to have somebody watching your back so you can focus on the work. According to google, in the wiki’s short life there were only a couple of announcements of its existence on the appropriate forums. It was met positively by those who heard, but apparently few heard.
So: Courage, Ed Caspersen. I hope you revive the MayaWiki in the future. And if you want some help, spread the word a bit more. The Interweb is full of people who want everyone else to be smarter.
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November 9th, 2007 at 9:56 am
Peter,
From time to time I read about people wishing I would bring the wiki back. Even though I have considered it the approach will be different if it happens. I am not going to spend countless hours trying to provide content, I am far to busy with my school and mentoring. It is some what distracting to work and be quizzed in 3ds Max all day long to turn around and try to write a Maya article right afterwards. This caused me to write to inaccurate information on more then one occasion.
If I do revive it I will not be involved with it like I had been previously. Outside spam removal I will leave it sit and see what the Maya community is really made of as far as initiative goes. The existence of the site was hardly a secret. I had received a little over 900 emails in a single week concerning various topics and subjects of the wiki. At the last Autodesk show in Chicago I had talked with people directly from Autodesk who knew about it.
One thing had occurred to me towards the end, it was that a majority of the people with something to share are far to busy being productive to volunteer much time, if any, to writing articles. This is my situation as well, unless there is a break between Quarters then my time is minimal to write anything. It comes down to “Retain my 4.0 GPA, or write and article for a web site”, obviously I choose school.
I do not know when, or if, the wiki will come back. I think the community could benefit from one, but the community can’t sit around and expect for a few people to do all the work. This is something that the rep’s from Autodesk agreed with me on. They know first hand what it took to write the user manuals and even though they didn’t give me an estimate in size they did state that the involvement from the community to make it possible would have to be huge. Time will tell I guess….
Best of luck on your own work, enjoyed the site.
Ed Caspersen
November 9th, 2007 at 1:35 pm
Thanks for the reply, Ed –
It’s a good point: perhaps sites like Wikipedia are written by people at work killing time, like at the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, whereas the people with Maya-specific knowledge are more likely to be busy working in Maya.
I do suspect that the userbase is larger than it looks, because that’s the general trend online — historically, most users are fairly passive. But Wikipedia has shown that people will contribute to the common good if it’s easy.
Either way, a project the size of a Maya Wiki is definitely far too big to maintain alone, and might be better managed by a dedicated staff… e.g. Autodesk’s.
November 9th, 2007 at 7:03 pm
“Either way, a project the size of a Maya Wiki is definitely far too big to maintain alone, and might be better managed by a dedicated staff… e.g. Autodesk’s.”
Yes, Autodesk employee Lee Fraser told me that the idea of a wiki has come up more then once around the office. We had a good talk about this and they took some of my tips from my experience into consideration. One being that I feel that there needs to be a panel of respected individuals overseeing the development and direction of the wiki. I will admit that spammer bots are very difficult to deal with when there is only a single dedicated moderator. The MediaWiki software needs a more secure account creation system or a new and more secure wiki system needs to be in place. Maybe someday Autodesk (or a large panel of users) will host and run a dependable and thoroughly moderated wiki.
Ed Caspersen