That’s not a moon…
| Thursday, December 6th, 2007 | --Sean |
Star Wars fans can be a passionate bunch. They know the ins and outs of each sparsely colonized star system, each furry alien race, each Sith Lord and the Sith Lords that came before them, et cetera. They lament for those better days when Han shot first. The potential application of this vast array of kinda useless information and the devoted community that lives and breathes it is what makes our World of Star Wars and particularly the character/item/place pages pretty interesting.
Take the Death Star, for instance. You start off with a stub page, with a nice picture and a basic description. Then, people can just go crazy with it. Add photos and videos, notably stuff that you wouldn't necessarily expect or find on your own. Affiliate themselves with it so that you can browse through other fans of this thing and see what else they like. Add tags to put into their own words what they associate with this space station. Top it off with some external search data, questions and answers, message board posts, and you're starting to generate a nice collection of data without actually needing to do any work.
This isn't exactly being fleshed out as such on the site, but there's a lot of potential there. It basically feels like we're pre-seeding a wiki on a niche topic and seeing what the Internet can come up with, and that's always something to look forward to. I would love it even more if we actually opened it up -- allow users to really edit and customize descriptions of characters, items, and places, basically turn the pages into Mash profiles, maybe tie in the site reputation system to control which edits are worthwhile, who should be permitted to make changes, and so on. In a nutshell, make it as easy as possible to capture the energy and knowledge of this fan base. It's really an exciting world of possibilities, and I hope it fares better than Alderaan. :)