Tolkien Gateway

Tolkien Gateway
URL	http://tolkiengateway.net
Commercial?	No
Type	Wiki; collaborative encyclopaedia
Language	English
Article count	12,541
Registration	Required (since June 2010)
Owner	Hyarion
Key people	Ederchil Mith (see Top Editors)
Launch date	June 3, 2005
Status	Active

Tolkien Gateway is a not-for-profit collaborative wiki devoted to the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, being the largest Tolkien-related encyclopedia on Internet. It strives to be the most extensive and complete resource online with content relating not just to the works of J.R.R. Tolkien but also images, adaptations, events, societies, and other works of scholarly and academic interest.

Inspired by the recent release of The Lord of the Rings: The Motion Picture Trilogy, Tolkien Gateway was founded by Hyarion on January 1, 2003 as http://tolkiengateway.cjb.net, then http://tolkiengateway.tk before eventually opening up as http://tolkiengateway.net on June 3, 2005. Tolkien Gateway uses the same MediaWiki software as Wikia and Wikipedia whilst operating a GNU-FDL licence.

History

2007

Although technically relatively uneventful, 2007 saw attempts by Hyarion to increase Tolkien Gateway's user base and reach. In particular, coinciding with the release of The Children of Húrin Hyarion arranged The Children of Húrin Release Party an online gathering of artists, collectors, scholars and fans to celebrate the publication of this fresh story; a record-breaking 69 new users joined Tolkien Gateway in April 2007 as a result of this. Coinciding with The Children of Húrin Release Party, Hyarion also introduced a brand new Main Page layout which still remains the basis for the current Main Page.

On October 4, Hyarion introduced interwiki links allowing Tolkien Gateway's English articles to be connected to the fellow wikis Ardapedia (German) and Kontu (Finnish). Since then, interwiki links have also been expanded to French website Tolkiendil.

Criticism

See also: Wiki#Trustworthiness and Criticism of Wikipedia for criticism of wikis in general

Like other wikis, Tolkien Gateway has been criticised for the reliability of its information, its lack of sources and the frequency of its revisions. In particular, in the summer of 2010, Tolkien Gateway was criticised for confusing the two articles for Norman Power and Joseph Power; the prominent scholars Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull said:

The Tolkien Gateway entry for Norman Power makes a terrible hash of it by conjoining Norman and Joseph. How on earth could the writer think that someone said to be born in 1925 (Joseph) could be a student at Oxford in the late 1930s? [..] Well, call us old-fashioned (we do), and we admit to having only a passing knowledge of the ways of wiki-creation, but it would never occur to us to post a work-in-progress, to be cleaned up by someone else, especially since people often take wiki articles, in any state of completion, as gospel truth.
—Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull

Despite Morgan launching a defence of Tolkien Gateway on The Lord of the Rings Fanatics Plaza, although accepting that Tolkien Gateway was better than other online encyclopaedias, the members generally complained about the unreliability of Tolkien Gateway - and wikis in general - and the ephemeral nature of the Internet, with an agreement that there was a "distressing lack of sources". The article English and Welsh was paraded as a particularly bad example; once Morgan informed other Gatekeepers of this, KingAragorn posed the question, "If they have a problem with it, then what's stopping them from editing it?", Aule the Smith retorted, "A mix of snootiness and cranky technophobia, it would seem...". In response to the criticisms raised, both the "Joseph Power"/"Norman Power" and "English and Welsh" articles have been amended.

In a review of Tolkien Gateway, Kristine Kastle claimed that it was only appropriate for the younger reader, it suffered from poor navigation, and the design was basic, lacking colour and that the life was sucked out of it; she gave Tolkien Gateway a score of 1.5 out of 4 which translates as, "Well now at least the website is recognizable as a website; style is still not pretty much nonexistant." The skin has been updated twice since the review although the navigation system has changed little.

External Links

• http://tolkiengateway.cjb.net at Internet Archive: Wayback Machine
• http://tolkiengateway.tk at Internet Archive: Wayback Machine