User blog:Ioyka/Day One

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 As Rift evolves, these user-made guides stagnant and slowly become outdated making the information they hold worthless.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. Even a regular visitor can contribute just by using Wikia's 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. For example, 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 tutorials or Playthroughs – 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.
 * Achievements – details on how to get them.
 * Quests and Carnage – step by step details.
 * Mechanic priority – hide minor mechanics and only show the group-wiping-HOLY-shitznets-whatingodsnamewasthat mechanic.
 * Jargon level – replaces abbreviations and obscure words with more meaningful definitions.
 * Magelo plugin – contains thousands of tooltips definining what all the skills do.  Download here.

This dynamic feature can be done in Javascript using the visibility property. These settings will be saved from page to page so the user does not have to reapply everything. 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.