The Sum of Our Collective Knowledge

[Archive]

Posted By: Joann

Damn. I sure wish I had some expertise in something.

What a completely great idea. Web-based so it's always current, but a book would be nice too. Guess I'm a throwback - I still prefer books and newspapers to online, even though I do a lot of online reading.

Include a feedback or comment section for each article so people could point out updates, omissions or even mistakes. Peer-review would also do much of this, but I'm afraid there could be too much there by way of personalitites, politics, etc. But something to help alleviate the current and growing knock on Wiki - that much info is suspect because it is posted freely.

I don't think it would do what Old Cardboard does, and what VCBC did, and what Trader Speaks did. The content in terms of articles would/could be the same, but the structure, collation and presentation would be totally different and serve a different end.

Trying to find any particular article from a set of magazines is difficult to do even if you remember it was there and approximately when. Having something centralized and indexed would be much more useful in that respect. I love the periodicals because I read about things that I wouldn't normally be investigating. As tools for looking up information though, they don't do that as well - they aren't made to or meant to do that.

How about a section/article on reprints? Which sets were reprinted, when and by who. Maybe scans of reprints showing how they are or can be identified, etc. I could definitely work on that - at least to cover some of the major sets. Scope creep - I know. But to non-advanced collectors this kind of info can be very helpful.

But the value of having the knowledge of the participants here being collected and accessible in one spot is almost mind-numbing.

Joann