Thread:Ioyka/@comment-25432760-20140918021939

It's the start of a new day and a new Wikia. I created Rift Abridged in order to have a single source that contains ultra, concise, to-the-point guides of Rift. I'll admit there are tons of places like this: However I'd like to run things differently. As Rift evolves, these user-made guides stagnant and slowly become outdated making the information they hold worthless. This is because forums, blogs, are generally maintained by a soul author, and this author would have to stay in the loop. (Doing that is much harder than it sounds.) People go on vacation, try out different games, they move on.
 * Trion's official Rift forum
 * RiftJunkies over at JunkiesNation
 * /r/Rift via Reddit.
 * ...possibly many others I'm oblivious of.

Now, imagine if this responsibility was divided by two, three, or just five people. This is what makes Wikia such a powerful tool. Many authors can collaborate on a guide and accomplish so much more work than a single person can. Wikia even has a comment system.

Dynamics
In addition a guide should target a wide audience but leave out unnecessary information. Some guides go too much into the tiny details making the more important group wiping mechanics easy to skip over. My solution to this is make dynamic pages. The users will be able to choose their role from a drop down box, and the guide will filter out all the other roles. Some other dynamic elements could be:
 * loot tables, shown after each boss.
 * video tuts or playthrough, pertaining to each class if possible (but unlikely).
 * images, sometimes these can take up too much page space. Removing them can increase page scroll speed.
 * mechanic priority, hide minor mechanics and only show the group-wiping-HOLY-shitznets-whatingodsnamewasthat mechnic.

This dynamic feature can be done in Javascript using the visibility property. I do not know if Wikia will accept Javascript code. I will have to do some more digging to find out. Maybe Wikia already supports dynamic pages internally. Or, there is an add-on I can install to make it happen. If not, I may have to build from scratch. Fingers crossed. 