I have so much written it’s hard to keep it all in mind now. I have a few scribbled ‘bibles’ but they aren’t easy to use. I don’t want to take the time to read entire books, much less series, before starting new things to refresh my memory. It’s also hard after you’ve changed a book several times, adding and removing or shuffling entire chapters in writing it, to remember WHICH variation you kept as final. I’ve resurrected both a character and a ship now and had to correct them in published versions.
So I downloaded a wiki to try out. This particular one is the ZIM wiki. It’s going to be a learning curve I see looking at the manual I’ve never contributed to any wiki much less made my own. Any of you with experience at them are welcome to advise me.
Are you going to publish the wiki? One option to make it easier to maintain is to leverage your community. If not that, I’m uncertain if wiki really is best.
I’ve used wikis, but never installed one. For what you’re doing, though, you might want to consider Fossil – it’s a wiki and source management system integrated together, so you could version control your books in the same system where you keep your wiki notes…
I have very limited experience with fossil, since most of my work is in git, but it seemed to work as advertised in my limited tests. One big advantage is that it’s just one executable for all these functions.
https://www.fossil-scm.org/index.html/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki
Is this solely for your own use, or are you planning to make it public? Or for a restricted group of fans? Would you like your fans to help fill in the details, or only yourself?
Amanda Green has outlined how to use it better than me.
https://madgeniusclub.com/2017/03/14/keeping-track/#comment-91543
I’ll be playing catch-up to her. I need to learn the wiki language.
I’m going to just do it for myself because I don’t want to have to police it.
Mac I hope you know most successful authors of series are exposed to the same issues. Fans just read the ‘finished’ version so it is easier for them to remember the ‘facts’ than it is for the author and some fans have read the books multiple times..
In the past some authors had assistance with that problem from editors doing continuity checks and some still use ocd alpha or beta readers.
The longer the successful series the more possible continuity issues which make attentive fan readers go wtf and bump them from your created world.
DIY requires persistent effort with payoff being self satisfaction but not cash (unless you later sell it) and nothing human made will be without errors and there will always be heisenbug mistakes that takes others to find.