User:Lurker/conworld documentation

This article presents various tools for documenting your conworlds. Conworlds can benefit from structured documentation much like conlangs. In particular, a personal wiki can prove very helpful.

Why not just use a word processor? A word processor or text editor will only let you edit disconnected, unstructured documents. The best you can hope for in terms of organization are headings. A wiki allows you to separate ideas and link them together. There are a few features that make wikis very suited to this task:

• Linking between pages, including linking to pages that do not yet exist
• Seeing what pages link to the current page(backlinks)
• Seeing a list of "wanted" pages (links to nonexistent pages)
• Seeing a list of "orphaned" pages (pages with no backlinks)
• The ability to organize pages hierarchically (folders/subpages) or non-hierarchically (tags/categories)

Let's start with the most popular of all wiki software, MediaWiki. That's what powers this very site, as well as countless other wikis, including Wikipedia, so there's your first advantage right there, you already know how to use it. The big disadvantage is that it's a server application, meaning you either have to install it on another computer or install it on a container or VM on your desktop.

The upside to this is you now have a potential use for that old laptop that's collecting dust in your closet, but let's not mince words, it's an order of magnitude more difficult to set up and manage compared to a desktop application. It also requires the installation of a database, which is another server application.

But the payoff may be worth it, especially if you eventually want to showcase your work online or allow others to contribute.

DokuWiki is another long-running wiki offering. It doesn't look as pretty as MediaWiki, but it has a number of advantages. First, easy namespace creation. Namespaces are like folders in a file system. Ordinarily you can't have two pages with the same name, but with namespaces, you can have a namespace named lore and another namespace named stories Or one named peoples and another named languages, and have identically named pages in each. With DokuWiki, you can create namespaces simply by searching for a page new_namespace:new_page and following the link to create the page. MediaWiki also has namespaces, but they're far more troublesome to create or remove, requiring you to edit a config file on the server.

But the big reason DokuWiki is as beloved as it is is that it doesn't use a database. All pages are stored as plain text files. If the server dies, you can still access your pages by simply reading them with an editor like you would any other text file.