A few days ago, Iain Cheyne showed what I thought to be a good amount of initiative by taking the content of the faq on the uk.games.board message board and posting it as a wiki on Boardgamegeek . The intention was to have a place to which people could be directed if they wanted info about boardgames in the UK. The use of a wiki meant that it could be easily amended and updated, overcoming a disadvantage of the old message board, which was several months out-of-date.
The response from those that saw it was very positive, me included, but what Iain hadn’t done was check with Chris Dearlove, who maintained the faq on uk.games.board, that it was ok to make use of Chris’s information. Unfortunately, Chris was a bit peeved when he found out and I don’t know whether this is going to be resolved or whether Iain will have to remove the information from BGG. I do sympathise with Chris, who may well have agreed if asked by Iain for permission to proceed, but I do feel that uk.games.board does not get enough visitors these days for such a valuable tool to be sited there.
That said, BGG isn’t ideal as it is very much international and, with the wealth of information on that site, you wouldn’t easily find the uk faq wiki unless you knew where to look. Now, the point of this post is to try and gauge whether we ought to try and have a dedicated site for this and, if we did, what should be included. Now, I’m not saying that I would want to take on such a venture, although my original aim for this site had been to develop it into such a resource, and I wouldn’t want to mess Iain or Chris about if they want to develop something. I guess my questions are:
Do we need a resource to collect the kind of information about the UK boardgames scene that has previously held on uk.games.board?
Is a BGG wiki the best way to host it or is there a better alternative?
What information should it contain? We don’t want a UK version of BGG – that site does a tremendous job – but what sort of stuff should a UK focussed resource include?
How should it be maintained and what degree of moderation / management would be needed?
I’d really be interested in hearing people’s thoughts.