Cool Cherry Cream

I’ve been contemplating for a few days about making a “Charles in Charge” wiki. Sounds absurd, right? Which is one of its appeals.

You see, I need a new project. None of my current ones are all that appealing to me at this time, and starting new projects is what I do. And a wiki is certainly a project.

I’m also not all that well-versed in the MediaWiki technology and it’s something that I think would be good to learn. I don’t really see myself doing anything where I really need wiki knowledge in the future, but what’s the harm in knowing it? I’m sure it will introduce me to all kinds of crazy, complicated problems that will make me wish I never knew what a computer was.

Plus, one of my 43 Things is to become an expert on something obscure. Being the administrator of a “Charles in Charge”, of which most (if not all) of the content will be added by me, I think would nearly get me there. I don’t think “Charles in Charge” is all that obscure, but it’s something that I don’t believe many people in the world can claim to be an expert on. Going along with that is the fact that people who actually have heard of “Charles in Charge” will look at it at go “there’s a wiki for that!?” and that’s exactly the kind of reaction I’d want to get.

Of course, on the other hand, that kind of deters me from making this wiki. There’s absolutely no use for it. I can’t see why anyone in the world wants to know that one-time character Bradley Simpson likes pistachio ice cream and the sound of helicopters, or that his favourite month is October and he’s allergic to tabasco sauce. No one is ever going to look up his character bio, expect to see his picture, the name of the actor who played him, and so on and so forth. There is very little demand for “Charles in Charge” websites in general (I believe I own about 33% of the actual “worthwhile” CIC fan site real estate on the web) and absolutely no demand to know all these obscure things I plan on putting on it. And while the WTF reaction is nice, I don’t think it’s worth all the work I want to put into it. I don’t like doing things without a purpose. Like, really don’t like. Hate, in fact. Doing things without a purpose makes me cry.

There’s also the fact that the whole notion of wikis is allowing the community to add to it and edit it… and that’s not at all what I want. It’s my website, what *I* say goes. I don’t want someone coming in and thinking they know what they’re doing better than me and going around and changing my templates and capitalization patterns and whatnot.

In fact, today I happened upon some edits someone did to a wiki page I once edited long ago (to what I felt was near perfection) and I found I didn’t quite care for their formatting choices. Wikis without strict policies drive me crazy. As such, if this wiki had stricter policies, this wouldn’t have been an issue because I would have followed the policies in the first place and this new user wouldn’t have changed it, and if they did, I wouldn’t have had a problem reverting it.

Anyway, that of course leads me to know that my wiki would have super strict policies. But saying “only Jenny can edit” is a bit to strict for the whole wiki thing.

But then, I realize, well, since no one is going to use the site in the first place, what are the chances someone’s going to want to change anything? So, problem basically solved, I guess.

Which leads me to really my only problem — considering I’m probably going to do this wiki citing “learning” reasons and forget its uselessness and assume no one else is going to bother contributing — which is that I don’t have a name. Charleswiki? WikiCharles? Charles in Wiki? Wiki in Charge? Charlesapedia? Chargeapedia? Encyclocharles? None of them seem right, and I’m dead set on having “Charles” (or possibly “Charge”) in the title so that it’s immediately known what the subject is. I can’t just call it “Sid’s Pizza Parlor” or “Encyclopedia Stanleywillardica” and assume everyone on the planet knows what that is. We lose the WTF-factor if the subject can’t be derived from the name.

Sigh. The dilemmas of a university student.

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