Wiki Work, Revisited

There, it's been 18 days since I posted the last one of these.  The total pages has risen, I have reviewed and reworked a ton of files, including 19 I chose not to finish on the first pass.  The unedited pages have dropped somewhat below a thousand and I feel I'm making headway.   I could not be working at this speed without ChatGPT to correct language while generating ideas out of the blue.  None of this is critical writing, so the goal is to provide as much cultivated depth to the game world, while I'm here to make sure nothing steps out of the intended continuity.

I've had little to say of late about how to run the game, what the game is meant to accomplish or even providing context for gaming.  All I can do now is try to express the difficulty of keeping oneself focused on plain work... while stressing that the goal is to do anything that's necessary to keep one at it.  For example, here I'm posting this work schedule and talking about it as I go because the sharing of this process is itself supportive of my desire to continue it.

With experience, logical or not, the principle obstacle that any DM has to overcome is the will to keep going.  The size of the project is simply incomprehensible, and too much thought on that is bound to sink one's motivations.  862 pages is a lot.  But since the first week in January I've addressed 250 such pages, which serves as a reminder that most of the time, the actual work for each one of these pages is not that much.  Most of these need the lightest of tweaking, a little shifting of phrases around and a bit of continuity regarding added tables and details.

A few more complicated pages have been floating in the background with the words, "Okay, eventually" stamped on them.  Of course, "eventually" never arrives and it's easy just to ignore them month after month... even year after year, as the wiki's time stamps demonstrate.  This is why I invented the "incomplete" stage... for those rules and pages that really need a long-term approach, both due to their complexity and the sheer unpleasantness of working upon them.  This makes a little slashing away at them, shrinking the pile of work they require, a little more tolerable.  The approach allows us to say, "okay, I don't have to finish this today; I just have to do enough to make it easier to finish tomorrow."

The relief this provides is enormous.  And as I've adopted a random approach to this, it means I don't precisely know when tomorrow is going to arrive. It may literally be the next day; it may not be for a year.  But eventually, it's going to appear on the "oldest" roster — when at last it is met, if only a little, after a very long, much-appreciated rest.

I'll say first, if you're not building your game world on a computer and a wiki, you're a fool.  Yes, I know I've had trouble with them... the technology hasn't been trustworthy, at least not for me, and I would not accept, for too long, the need to pay the price for them.  But I cannot express how possible it has been for this process to produce the immensity of this project... and the potential it has to be so much larger, so long as I don't have to copy this whole monster again to some other platform.  Cross my fingers.