MediaWiki on New England Online

It has been over year since New England Online went over to using the MediaWiki platform. The difference this upgrade is making has been nothing short of extraordinary.

Striking a Blow

For a long time, I have felt that New England Online is in the top three for the most comprehensive and largest geofiction site on the internet. Given that geofiction is usually the haunt of children and those of us with childish imaginations, I suppose it isn’t much to boast about. Typically, a piece of geofiction will be built on a free web hosting site, such as geocities, and consist of six to ten pages. They often fall out of use after a short period as the author reaches an age where there are more important priorities. For what it’s worth, I feel that New England Online shares a pedestal at the top of the pile with Bergonia and Verduria, both of which are remarkable and the continuous creations of adults.

I think the time has come for me to challenge the status quo and go for a complete package, the likes of which haven’t been seen much in this genre before. This week, I have settled on a course that will see what is currently New England Online become the Encyclopedia of New England, which more content added with a view to having around 1,000 pages. In addition, I plan to add multimedia, news, and weather. The site will become a portal, and contain a full package of information aimed at selling the Kingdom of New England to the world. It will be a massive undertaking, and will take some time. However, New England Online is now three years old, and needs a massive reinvigoration to bring it up to date with the technologies that now exist in the so-called “Web 2.0″ world.