Building a Worldbuilding Wiki, Part 2

Last week, we talked about creating a worldbuilding wiki to store information. We started with a simple organizing structure using Word’s file and folders, and a slightly more complicated version using OneNote.

Now we’ll look at Scrivener and some wiki programs.

3. Scrivener

For those who are unfamiliar with the program, Scrivener combines the best of a word processor and file management program. Because it allows for the ability to display two text files at the same time, it allows you to show your research material in one window and your story in another.

While you can do this in Word, it is the ease of use that makes Scrivener still worthwhile. You can have a list of your files (including PDFs, videos, and art) on the left side of the screen, and your text-displaying windows open. Everything you need to find is within one click. You can move from your Story Bible, to your outline, to another chapter quickly and easily.

Compare this to using Word, where you have to find the file — by choosing Command+O or opening Windows Explorer and hunting through folders and shortcuts – double-clicking the file, then rearranging the window so you can see it.

Scrivener makes it easier on you mentally by putting a hard limit on where you put your information. It’s possible to have several projects, one for each of your books, with everything you need at hand. It’s hard to describe just how much easier it is to write a story using this ability to find everything you need so easily.

Scrivener was designed to be flexible, so that it will work with you, not fight you. You can organize your material any way you like.

Where Scrivener can really shine is with your worldbuilding. Let’s say you want to write six novels set in the same Space Opera world. You could set up a project for book one and copy all your worldbuilding material to it. But what if you get ideas for the other books? If set up six projects, one for each book, how can you access your worldbuilding files easily?

With Scrivener, the answer is easy. You create one project solely for your worldbuilding wiki, and leave that open while you access the other projects for whatever book you’re writing. With two projects open and displayed side by side, you have one to display character files, planetary charts, spaceship statistics, culture notes, while you write the story in the second project. Because each project can display two files at the same time, that gives you four windows to use any way you need.

Admittedly, Scrivener doesn’t give you the ability to link pages like a Wiki. There were two options that do, and therein lies a story.

In Which the Author Admits He Is Wrong

It was at this point in my plan that I would point you to several pieces of Wiki software.

There’s TiddlyWiki, which creates a single file in which everything you need is contained. Yes, the program that runs the wiki and the material you create are stored in the same file. It is accessible through a web browser such as Chrome or Firefox, although there is a variant of Tiddly that is self-contained and doesn’t use a browser at all.

There are also web-based free wiki programs such as Wikispaces and Wikia that run the backend of the program, giving you the freedom to create your pages. These companies make their money by running ads while serving your pages, so the great disadvantage with these programs is that your worldbuilding is open to all.

Then there is MediaWiki, which many web hosting companies allow you to set up alongside your website. It operates exactly like the popular Wikipedia, which means you have all the features found on that site, along with all the complexity of running it and understanding how to you’re your pages.

So now that you know that, I would urge you to forget it. Don’t bother. It’s not worth your time.

Here’s why.

The Career Indie Author is founded to give authors the tools they need to run their career. Running your own publishing business requires knowledge of a wide variety of subjects. Not just writing and editing your work, but marketing, advertising, cover design, website content, networking, and so on.

You don’t have time to waste. You want to know what you need to get the job done and move on.

That’s why I get grumpy when I see book marketers writing stories like “88 Ways to Use Instagram to Win More Fans.” Not that I’m opposed to Instagram, but it’s usefulness to engage with fans is very limited, and who has time to read 88 suggestions to “reach” them?

In fact, it seems like some articles are written to fill the hole in their schedule – because book marketers have to have something to fill the space on that day – rather than to give authors the tools they need to do their job.

So during the past week, while I played with TiddlyWiki and examined the other offerings out there, I came to the realization that it would be a terrible idea to set up one of your own. While it can be fun to set up the pages and work out the links among your material, I don’t think it helps you in the long run to organize your material in the way that helps you write your books.

And writing your books is the goal of this exercise. Not playing with interesting software.

It also didn’t help that even a simple program like TiddlyWiki was complicated to set up and use effectively. You start with a blank page and that’s about it. One video I found described how you can tweak the setup to give you an organizing structure for your pages, and how you can tag your material so that you can find it easily.

So once you set up your TiddlyWiki, you still have to adjust it just to get it to the point where you can begin using it.

Then there’s TiddlyDesktop, the version that runs free of your browser. While it works in the same way as TiddlyWiki, it’s also slow to load (as long as two minutes) and inclined to crash. Still I persisted, and even created a “Lord of the Rings” wiki (copying material from another wiki) to experiment with the linking structure.

But the more I worked on it, the more I concluded that it would be a waste of time that could be put to far better uses.

Conclusion

Learning to organize your material as you’re assembling it is a useful skill that pays enormous dividends. It doesn’t matter whether you use Word’s files and folders, Microsoft OneNote, or Scrivener. If you create a simple pattern of storage – I find a single A-Z folder system with a few folders for specific named subjects when necessary works best – you will learn to file your new gathered material easily and find them later. That’s the purpose of a good filing system.

Playing around with cool-looking programs is a distraction that wastes your time and energy that is better spent on your writing and marketing.