Forums:Wikipedia Portal:Middle-earth

Tolkien Gateway > Council > Wikipedia Portal:Middle-earth

Do you guys know this portal? It's meant to organize all Wikipedia articles on Tolkien. So, now's the existentialist question: what are we here for? Why are we here? Does this Wiki add anything to Wikipedia's portal?

--Earendilyon 08:58, 15 February 2006 (EST)

Great question! I think in the near future as a community it would be nice if we could come up with sort of a mission statement about what we really do want to accomplish. I know in the back of my head I think Wikipedia has done a great job, but they probably only have 1% of the content that is actually out there. Wikipedia being not Tolkien specific they simply cant have an entire article for every edition of every book published by Tolkien, or information about his relatives, and articles delving deeper into the mine...works of Tolkien. Look at Wookipedia, almost 25,000 articles! Arda is much more complex and has been around a lot longer, we can't let the Star Wars nerds beat out us Tolkien fans. :) But as of the present we already have quite a lot more articles than Wikipedia's Tolkien section, albeit their's are being updated quicker I think we have our eyes farther out into the horizon. Do you have any suggestions for answers? --Hyarion 19:00, 16 February 2006 (EST)

I think the biggest task we're facing at the moment is to get more people involved in this; at this moment, only you and I are frequently adding to it (and I'm 'just' fixing dead links mostly). Have you considered mailing around a bit to get more attention to this Wiki? --Earendilyon 03:02, 17 February 2006 (EST)

I've tried quite a few different things: searching google for "tolkien links" and going to hundreds of sites and emailing them manually to exchange links with us, unfortunately a lot of them were just dead ends. I've also tried posting links in forums but it's hard to not look like I am simply advertising the site. The linking that has helped the most has been at wikipedia ironically enough, because so many websites mirror the content from there, they mirror our links, search engines are also helping quite a bit. Hopefully word of mouth (or text of fingers?) will help as well as we gain more content. Another thought I had is seeing if any of the current Tolkien Encyclopedia websites would like to merge with us but I don't think we are to that point yet. We have had a few people in the past who edit quite a bit but unfortunately after a couple days they become burnt out and stop. Any suggestions? I think the best offer we can give people is to make sure they know this is not just one person's site as it is true for most websites out there, but the community's. As the popularity grows I would like to have a board of people who make the final decisions and the community would vote as a whole on topics, no one person would 'own' the site. Thanks again for your thoughts. --Hyarion 11:26, 17 February 2006 (EST)