tbaMUD Continued development of the CircleMUD core

I've been tossing around ideas and I think this is a big one that can distinguish Circlemud from the flock for good.

I want to design a wiki'esque system for circle where anyone who connects can contribute content in the form of mobiles, scripts, zones, typo/help-file corrections, I want it all done in-game and to be done as easily as possible.

In this way, for example, your average player could correct a typo in a mobile, object, or room himself, or update/improve the format of a helpfile himself, or comandeer an unused zone number and contribute himself, with the least amount of extra work for the staff, and with the failsafes necessary to prevent permenant damage by abusers.

If things like wiki and Youtube have shown us anything, it's that if we create the necessary architecture the public can easily create a virtually endless supply of content. We should find a way to use that knowledge to further Circle.

I haven't used wiki very often but I have a general idea of how it works, and this is my concept roughly, I'm hoping others can improve upon it before I take a crack at implementing it.

Every room, object, and item vnum will have a linked list of previous versions of their data, with a limit of history versions designated in cedit, so, say a maximum of 20 prior versions.

If circlewiki is toggled on, any player can hop in to reditwiki or something like that and edit a new version of the room. The old version will be stored. The new version will be completed and can either be published live immediately or added to a queue for review by either the players or by the admins, depending on the personal preference of the mud admin.

This also has a secondary benefit in that you can modify rooms on the fly for events and revert back to the old versions once the event is over with only a few commands.

At any time you can restore a previous version and file away the current version in the linked list or delete un-needed versions.

The ultimate goal is to allow the users to improve upon anything, anywhere, any time, in a safe way.

This would need to be added for

rooms, items, mobiles
help files
scripts
zedit

In some ways it seems like a potentially interesting idea, but definitely has some flaws in some regards. As an example, you mentioned scripts. I wouldn't want players being able to view the contents of every script since doing so would allow them to figure out the solution to any scripted quests without actually exploring or doing any of the quests the intended way if they were fluent in DG.

This is an interesting idea. How is it coming?

In regards to Fizban's skepticism, I agree having the entire building interface built into a wiki opens up some potential security issues, especially if there is poorly written scripts- or even if somebody crafted a malicious script, it's not that great of an idea to leave that stuff open to virtually anyone.

BUT, what would be cool is if help files could be referenced from a wiki. Mediawiki's API would probably work incredibly well with this task (pulling help from the wiki, in-game, or even creating/editing articles), but leaving the wiki completely open to the public is another potential hazard; Especially with botnets that like to create users and post spam.