[game_preservation] Changing the Projects page - thoughts/ideas needed

[Andrew Armstrong]

Hey all.

I am still looking for input on the 3 project discussions, but in any 
case, I need to clean up the wiki pages some more - specifically today, 
the Projects page: 
http://www.igda.org/wiki/Game_Preservation_SIG/Projects - this is part 
of my "Spring cleaning", just a continuation of it.

This page is aimed entirely at "Every single website link, physical 
place or project which isn't a specific resource". Urg, yeah, a lot of 
stuff! Everything in fact :/

Therefore, it's an disorganised mess. It started out reasonably well, 
but, well, that was a incomplete set of links in the first place.

So, possibilities:

- Splitting up "proper museums and archives", metadata sites, "Retro 
sites" (containing articles), fan sites ("we love console XXX") and 
blogs (usually personal ones). I'd add in all the "real museums" I've 
added on the contributions page, which yes, I've mainly left out so far.
- Keep "Videogame-Related Media" separate, maybe on another page - 
simply put, some sites/items would overlap or bleed into this section. 
Possibly instead make it "Digitally Downloadable Resources" or 
something... thoughts?
- Adding new sections specifically for collectors / retro shops (who 
repair old consoles, sell old games)
- "Related items" expanded - could use a list of industry organisations, 
and related fields; computer hardware/software history sites and 
repositories, videogame magazine sites...any others?
- Add new sections for general videogame related sites - business, news, 
developer categories. Archive.org links as appropriate.

New page somewhere for videogame history/retro events. This would 
contribute to the previous discussion I raised about Back-Bytes - any 
more in 2009?

I need ideas on what would make this easy for people to use. Some other 
possibilities (which will cause me some major work):
- A better formatted list - table form or with outlines, with a bigger 
description and maybe page thumbnail, and perhaps tags/keywords, and 
"systems covered" (or "area covered").
- Multiple pages for each type of link. Things can be in more then one 
place.
- Individual pages dedicated to that resource which can hold detailed 
information on the site/project/item - which are linked to from the main 
links page.
- Addition of archive.org wayback machine links to better ease the cases 
where sites disappear. When I add this, I'd go and input every URL into 
the wayback machine too (although this takes a few months to do anything 
it is better then nothing, since we sadly don't have the funding to use 
the subscription based Archive-It :( ).

Basically, I realise not many people likely use the page as it is - and 
with my recent additions it's been made pretty unreadable. Please, I'd 
love to know what can make it better at least in the short term.

There is another option, that I build the Digital Game Canon site I have 
in mind, which would have a links section dedicated to making it easy to 
link together things with tags, keywords, categories, searches (as well 
as adding specific articles) and provide a good way to get citations and 
info about the sites. This will in the long run save me a ton of time, 
and I don't think conflict with any existing website since I've not seen 
any listing this information. However the initial time to build it will 
be "a while" so it's more long term.

Andrew