Campaign Wiki's: What's the best approach?

Campaign Wiki's
Have any GMs created Campaign Wiki's for their games and if so what have you found to be the best approach?

I'm wondering whether there is a neat way of producing a wiki in GP, or whether to create something externally and simply link it into my game.

Has anyone done it yet, and if so, what did you find to be the best approach?

I tend to add subforums to my game that have different wiki threads. One on the nations, one on the races/ethnicities, one on religions, etc. Ability tags really help with consolidating information.

Another option is to just add a link to your external wiki, and make it easily accessible.

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Yea, I've used sub forums before.

But unless/until the game becomes very long/large?

I will usually just clearly label a thread for the purpose.

Here are my standard threads that I create for most games:

1. OOC Play by Post Basics, this is just a Locked, single post that contains the basic formatting norms that I personally use in My pbp games here (which I have found over time are what most people here use) - Bold, Italics, OOC box, text colors etc - and what they mean. So that my players are "speaking the same language" as me when we create posts, so everyone's posts look and read the same

2. OOC Chat, this is the off topic (non-story) chat thread.

3. OOC Resources, I will post links to system SRDs or cheat sheets here, also list our and describe any house rules, this would be the OOC wiki for me, this thread is Locked/no players can post here

4. IC Resources, I create 3 posts and the Thread is Locked. One post for "People", one for "Places", and one for "Things". And I populate each thread with the important... people places and things that the CHARACTERS know about. I will return to this thread and update each post as they discover new people places and things. This is the in character "wiki"

5. IC Story Threads, these are where the in character gameplay and narrative takes place. I will close one and start another, as needed. Either per "adventure"/quest, or per "session" (whatever feels right), or even just once it gets to long (after 20 or so pages it's hard to go back and find information you might need to reference).

Sometimes, depending on the system and how involved character creation is, I will create a separate "OOC Character Creation" thread that will be Locked after that.

I don't use sub forums much anymore as I find it can make it hard to find the things you need.

Basically, you'll figure out over time what works for you.

Here's a link to my public Adventures in Middle Earth game if you want to look at it in practice:

https://gamersplane.com/forums/10268/

I use a combo of sub forum and shared player sheet (a custom character that I share will all in the game with quick access information)
Typically I organize as
OOC Chat
Refference
\ Setting Info & Maps
| Game Rules / Q&A

Shared Sheet : current quest, quest log, maps, shop price list, etc

I noticed the Sub-Forum option in the Game Form tab and thought about simply having a sub-Forum called 'Campaign Wiki' and then separate thread for each subject. Although perhaps I could get away with just one thread and break down the wiki articles using Ability Tags.

Is it possible to nest Ability Tags?

'Game Rules'
-- 'Weather'
-- 'Passage of Time'
-- 'Daily Subsistence'
-- 'Social Standing'

Unfortunately, you can't nest ability tags. Legitimate question, how much of this needs to be player-facing? How much can be reduced to short blurbs?

I've already started thinking about what threads I need in the Game Forum.

On Tavern Keeper we had a few basic ones.

- The Tavern: For general out of game discussion.
- Player Introduction: Where new players could intriduce themselves to the rest of the group.
- Ask the GM: Was just for general questions about the rules etc.

The Roleplay Threads were under a separate heading, but could easily be placed in a sub-forum if I want to isolate them from the administrative threads, or vice versa.

OOC comments were simply posted against the posts to which they related. Not sure how that will work in GP.

That's a shame but can probably be worked around.

The contents of wiki articles do vary according to subject, but if they get too long, then I can always just supply a link to an external source.

e,g. 'The Facts of Life'

Likewise, some of the Campaign Wiki is already replicated externally on World Anvil, so I could just link to it at a higher level and let World Anvil handle the details e.g. 'Playing the Game' already records a lot of my homebrew rules. So, they don't really need to be repeated in GP.

That's quite a novel idea.
I could just create a Custom Character Sheei called 'Campaign Wiki' and load everything in there.

careful with custom sheets. You start loading too much actual data and it slows the loading a bit. For large data dumps, (multiple pages of text) I suggest subforums with links in a shared sheet. Feel free to experiment as this could just be my PC or network suffering

You can nest some itemsthen is you want you can put abilitie blocks inside or outside any of those
note: charsheet blocks inside a character no not show the "create character" button

Sorry! That went straight over my head. can you nest character sheets?

You can nest spoilers with snippets and charsheet expandable blocks. This you have a max depth of 3 collectable blocks

See above, inside spoilers 1

I have been experimenting with different ways of handling Campaign Wiki's this morning.

Sub-Forums

I quite like the way that GP isolates sub-forums and keeps them separate from the other Game Forums, which helps to highlight their important administrative function in the game. I may make 'Player Introductions' and 'The Tavern' sub-forums too, as this will separate them from the Session Logs.

The big negative aspect is that being a forum the threads just tend to reflect the order they were posted. So, it's not possible to change the posting order after it has been fixed.

So, for instance, I cannot decide upon reflection to place 'What is Play-By-Post?' ahead of 'How to use Gamers Plane?' in the list,

Character Sheet Wiki

By comparison, the Character Sheet Wiki is a lot more flexible and I can change the order of the articles easily and insert new ones at will.

Perhaps I can somehow combine the two by inserting a Character Sheet link inot a Sub-Forum post.

You can change thread order a bit - it's possible to pin a thread, which will place it above non-pinned threads in the order. (Although multiple pinned threads can't be sorted among themselves, so it'll only be satisfactory if you need a single thread on top.) To pin a thread, open it and press a grey pin icon on the top right, next to "Subscribe to the thread" button.

Won't help with the wiki much, but maybe you'll find it useful for things like pinning the current chapter thread and stuff. :D

Locked threads also affects their position on the ordering, again only vs non locked threads or pinned threads

Using the first post of your wiki (pinned) as a table of contents with links to subtopics reduces the need for a strict order of topics.

True! Although the table of contents could become the wiki. Dependant upon how much can be crammed into one post.