IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT - The Iron Maiden Commentary Wiki

LooseCannon

LooseCannon

Enterprise-class aircraft carrier
Staff member
Attention, ladies and gentlemen of the Maidenfans.com forum community!

It is my pleasure to announce that the Maidenfans.com Administration team is launching the new Iron Maiden Commentary Wiki beta!  This is a new format for the Iron Maiden Commentary we know and love that will allow for Maverick's years of hard work to become the base of an even more extensive series of commentaries, analysis, and reviews over any number of years.  While the body of the current work belongs to Maverick, as time elapses we will be welcoming (as Maverick did) comments and additions from all members on a selective basis.

At this time the Wiki is a work in progress and much information is missing.  The Iron Maiden Commentary Wiki Team, currently led by myself and SinisterMinisterX with Real World and Perun helping out, are pleased to look for new people to assist with the task of moving over Maverick's work to the new format and creating new analysis.  If you wish to assist with the Wiki Team, please check out the following criteria:

1. You must be fluent in English vocabulary and grammar.  English is the language of Wiki code and of the majority of Commentary users, and as such is an imperative tool.
2. You must be a forum member with a tenure of over six months, posting.  The quality of your posts will, as always, weigh heavier on our decisions than the quantity, but inactive posters or new posters simply cannot be considered.
3. You must be a forum member in good standing.  Any member who has had an excess of warnings against them will be ineligible.
4. You must have extensive knowledge of Iron Maiden and of something relating to their songs.  Basically, you must be able to add to the Wiki from your own personal knowledge base.

If you wish to apply, please write a short paragraph on why you think you're right for the Wiki team and send that in PM to myself and SinisterMinisterX.

On behalf of the Maidenfans.com team,
LC
 
Cool!  It's great to see the Commentary get a new boost to its already substantial credentials.  A few things almost instantly crop up though;

1. The layout is still very much part of the Commentary.  In particular, there are some huuuge pictures is certain articles...perhaps following Wikipedia's example of cropping/resizing them and having them link to the full-size version would clear up a lot of space?

2. Mav's Commentary can be...a bit...well, Maverick at times.  We could always take his Commentary and 'Wikify' it (i.e. make it sound more like a proper Wiki article), unless you had envisioned leaving it the way it was on the IMC).

3. A lot of the Commentary could be cleaned up, grammatically.  I can proof read, and I have spell checker enabled on FireFox. :P *hint hint*
 
The Wiki format is only chosen because of the ease of editing and, specifically, adding.  Nothing Maverick wrote will be edited.  It's his work and we don't have the rights to alter how he wrote.

Many pictures are being thumbed instead of getting full sized links.  However pictures that Maverick clearly wanted at full size are being maintained at that level.
 
Good initiative to "save" the Commentary.

Will the lyrics, the bootleg section etc, be there as well?

Will the old IMC still be accessible?

Cheers
Forostar
 
Do you not need permission to have the lyrics? If not, then having the lyrics would be quite a good idea. As would discussing more of the musical side of the songs over and above the interpretation of the lyrics.

I take it most of the current work is a load of copy/paste?
 
Forostar said:
Will the old IMC one still be accessible?
Click to expand...

It's still there, at the usual address.  Perhaps it will be taken down once everything in it is transferred over (considering the amount of bootlegs...not for a while!)
 
Great initiative. I know I'm a bit of a newbie, but the IMC has been a resource of mine for over a year. I guess I have a little while to go before I can make an input. None the less, great idea.

There's one thing that I don't quite understand though. If we're to leave Maverick's work intact, how are we going to provide further analysis, without altering his texts? Will there be an "official" Mav's take, which is later supplemented and commented by other individual users further on down the page, similar to the way it is on the IMC now? Or do you plan on making a "consensus-based analysis" as a whole text uploaded when the admin-crew agrees on it?
 
I recommend looking at the entries on Moonchild and These Colours Don't Run to get an idea of how we intend to continually expand the Commentary.

A decision on lyrics and the current IMC has not yet been made.

Bootlegs can certainly be moved if a member wishes to volunteer their time to work on that section.
 
Let me add my take on this process, to hopefully clarify issues a bit...

Anything written by Maverick will be moved to the wiki unchanged (with minor exceptions for some grammar errors ... yes, Maverick did make such mistakes). Furthermore, anything written by Maverick will be explicitly credited to Maverick. If you look at the entry for any song, you'll see that his commentary is clearly labeled "Commentary by Maverick". Thus, we can add more "neutral" information and make the articles more authoritative without altering Maverick's work.

To answer Albie:
Yes, at this time there is a great deal of copy/paste work still to be done. Album and song commentaries are copied over, but the songs still need work. (On most of them, I've copied the text but not the images etc.) I'm just starting on the singles today.

However, this does not mean that we are rejecting other contributions. While we are mostly interested in volunteers to help with the copying, we're mainly doing this so that the Commentary can be expanded by Maidenfans members. What we're aiming for, eventually, is a site that does more than just present Maverick's point of view: we want new, original material from other people. It will become something like "The Iron Maiden Commentary, by Maverick and Other Maiden Fans".

But the copying of Mav's work to the wiki is the top job right now. So start writing your magnum opus if you want, but it may have to wait a bit before it gets added. After all, this is not a typical wiki - it is only editable by the official team members. (Hint: joining the team and volunteering to do some of the admittedly boring copy/paste work will probably encourage us to get your original contributions up faster!)
 
After having read the These Colours Don't Run-entry, I see what your going for. I figure you're right in that it's the smoothest way to go about this. Obviously keeping Maverick's legacy intact. I do think you're going to have a hell of a hard time picking out which entries to post and which to omit, though ;)

However. Once this project is "live" so to speak, I have a feeling it would be magnificent. The IMC as it is now is a great resource, but with even more user-input it could become massive. It's really quite an ambitious project.

And while I know this isn't a feature-request-thread, here's a thing I've always wanted for the IMC that might be interesting to implement: theme-based song-browsing. As in "songs relating to war/religion/poetry". Similar to the tag-type systems you see on places like last.fm.
 
Last.fm-style tags are out. Wikis don't work that way. But your ideas of categorizing songs by topic is worthy of inclusion. Can't say when it will happen, but I like it a lot, so it will happen sometime.
 
Keep posting, Shrike, and talk to us in a couple months.  You have intriguing ideas and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
 
I wish to inform everybody that the main reason why I haven't been participating in this is because I don't have that sort of time. I'm not saying I won't take my time to contribute once the main work is done, but the migration is a process that needs hours, if not days of dedication, and that is something I can't invest now or in my predictable future. I hope you understand.
I also think that, taking this into account, we owe LC, SMX and RW a huge hand for the impressive work they've done so far.
 
Perun said:
...the migration is a process that needs hours, if not days of dedication...
I also think that, taking this into account, we owe LC, SMX and RW a huge hand for the impressive work they've done so far.
Click to expand...

Hours? Days? Try weeks.  :blink:

But thank you for your kind words, Perun. I'll always treasure them, except when I'm editing your posts in the other thread. :P

Seriously ... Raven, Forostar and Albie have all volunteered to join the wiki team. Let's give them a round of applause too. We're still interested in other members: send a PM to LooseCannon and myself to apply. Read the first post in this thread for qualifications.

It will be a short while before we can turn new team members loose on the wiki. There is some final administrative work to be done, although it hopefully should only take a couple of days.

A word of warning that bears repeating:
Our main task right now is migrating the existing content of the Commentary to the wiki. If you volunteer, that doesn't mean you'll be writing your own essay about "The Trooper" right away. LooseCannon and I will be assigning tasks to the team members to get the job done quickly. For example, I'm currently moving the commentaries about the singles to the wiki at the rate of 2 singles a day. Someone will probably be assigned to help with that. Someone else will likely be assigned to copy the tour commentaries. If we all do this together, we can finish much quicker.
 
Perun said:
I also think that, taking this into account, we owe LC, SMX and RW a huge hand for the impressive work they've done so far.
Click to expand...

Agreed, great work guys, keeping the commentary "current" is always a good thing. Keep up the good work. If I have any free time when I get back to the STates (currently enjoying a month of vacation in Mex.) I'll submit some essays for consideration.

later gators!
 
SinisterMinisterX said:
Last.fm-style tags are out. Wikis don't work that way. But your ideas of categorizing songs by topic is worthy of inclusion. Can't say when it will happen, but I like it a lot, so it will happen sometime.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I wasn't talking about implementing a copy of the last.fm-system. Just having a few choices of theme subordinate the "songs"-site. I guess having a link of themes directing to that theme within the song-page itself would help too. But I had nothing fancier than that in mind. I'm glad you liked the idea.

LooseCannon said:
Keep posting, Shrike, and talk to us in a couple months.  You have intriguing ideas and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Click to expand...

Thanks a lot, nice to feel appreciated. Though I'm embarrassed to say I don't know what you mean by newsletter :p
 
Hehe, fair enough, I thought I was familiar with most forum-lingo, but I guess you never stop learning.
 
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