The Purpose of the Wongery
So, I suppose not unexpectedly, the long-awaited "hard launch" of the Wongery did not immediately lead to a huge amount of engagement. There have been maybe two posts not by me on the forum since January, and nobody has posted anything yet to the Public Wongery. Part of this was no doubt due to the very limited nature of the hard launch, and part of it is no doubt due to the fact that the Wongery just doesn't have the content I'd hoped for it to have before the launch; I'm still not sure the hard launch wasn't premature, but I'd put it off long enough already that I didn't want to put it off longer.
Anyway, I guess the upside is that once it does have content, since I've already let the cat out of the bag I won't feel compelled to wait for some specific anniversary or other meaningful date to publicize it. Although I don't know when I'm going to be able to put in the time to actually make the content I want it to have... as usual, I haven't got nearly as much done on the Wongery lately as I want. It's been more than three weeks since the previous blog post, and I haven't got many new or revised articles up either. I'm still kind of dealing with recovering financially from the difficulties I had last year. That isn't to say I've got nothing done, but most of what I've been doing lately has, again, been behind-the-scenes work of reading the books for the RPGs I want represented in the Gamespace, and taking Udemy courses on PHP and other subjects that will help me develop the Wongery. Still, at some point I do really need to accelerate the pace of actually posting articles if I want the Wongery to ever be what I want it to be.
(As a side note: Yes, this blog post did happen to go up on April 1, but nothing about it is an April Fools' joke. As I said in a previous blog post, I'm not doing those.)
But even if the Wongery hasn't had much engagement since the "hard launch", that's not to say it's had no engagement. There have been a couple of posts on the forum, and I've gotten a few replies on Tumblr. And some of those comments have led me to realize that at least some people have a bit of a misconception about what the Wongery is. Among the many partly-written posts in my drafts that I haven't yet got around to finishing and posting is a page entitled "What the Wongery is not" (inspired by the similarly named page on Wikipedia). This page would, well, explain how the Wongery differs in purpose or policy from several other sites or types of things: Wikipedia, TVTropes, a reference work for real-world topics, a soapbox, a wikifarm, etc. But anyway, it appears that at least a few people have assumed that the Wongery is something it isn't that is not in this article (not that the article has been posted yet anyway), so maybe it's worth addressing some of those misconceptions here.
But instead of listing what the purpose of the Wongery isn't, I think the best approach may be to clarify what the purpose of the Wongery is, and address the misconceptions as we go along. Now, while there are a few secondary purposes I have in mind for the Wongery (which I'll get to later), but the main purpose of the Wongery, the primary thing the site was made for, is this: sharing information about imaginary worlds created by the Grandmaster Wongers. This, of course, is done through the Central Wongery, which we basically consider the most important part of the site. Is it arrogant to think that other people will be interested in our worlds? Yeah, probably. I mean, we call ourselves "Grandmasters"; I think it's pretty obvious we're arrogant.
I saw one comment that implied that the commenter was under the impression that the intent of the Wongery was to facilitate collaborative worldbuilding, that we hoped for others to contribute to the worlds we shared, that even if we supplied the initial broad description each world would ultimately be developed and expanded upon coöperatively. Which... no. I think this idea may have come about because of a past blog post in which we named other settings we found that had been released under similar open licenses, and the two such settings we discussed in the most detail were intended as collaborative projects. So I can see how that may have been taken to imply that the Wongery was also so intended... but it's not. The Grandmaster Wongers are actually kind of possessive about our worlds and plan to do all the canon development ourselves; we're really not planning on opening them up as group projects. Others can do whatever they want with them for their own stories, games, or campaigns; they can change them or add to them all they want; but we're not really looking for collaborators to help develop these worlds as they're described in the Wongery. Because of the licensing terms under which the worlds are released, there's nothing preventing someone from making their own additions or modifications to these worlds and posting them in the Public Wongery, but that's not something we're actively soliciting, and any such additions will not be considered canon, for whatever that's worth. (Well... they probably won't be considered canon. I guess it's not entirely impossible that if someone makes a contribution to one of the worlds that the Grandmaster Wonger who created that world really likes, we will incorporate it as canon, and reference it in the Central Wongery (with, of course, appropriate credit given to the creator in the Sources tab), but that's not guaranteed and not necessarily at all likely.) Ultimately, we made the Central Wongery to share the worlds we're building and let other people use them, but not with the intent of asking other people to help us build them.
So, anyway. That's the main purpose of the Wongery: to share our imaginary worlds, and make them available for use by others in fiction, games, and art. But then we figured, well, if we're sharing our worlds here, why not make it a place where others can share their worlds as well? And so that's the reason for the Public Wongery (and eventually the Master Wongeries, if any exist): to let other people share their creations as well. That's not the main purpose of the Wongery; it's more of a secondary purpose; but it is a purpose. Sure, I want to share the worlds we've created, but I also want to encourage people to create and share their own worlds as well.
I can't find it now, which may mean it's been deleted but may mean Tumblr is just being Tumblr, but I saw a reply by someone to a post about the Wongery saying that, well, when they wanted to post about their world, they'll just make their own site to do it. Which... great! Then do that! I want to encourage people to share their creations in general, and while I've made the Public Wongery as a place they can do so, I've also, for instance, made all the MediaWiki extensions I created for the Wongery publicly available so other people can use them in their own wikis too! (Although right now those extensions are admittedly very poorly documented; at some point I need to find the time to remedy that. And there's other work to be done on those extensions too; for instance, it's really bothering me that interwiki links are showing up as Meta:redlinks, and I really want to get that fixed. So much to do, so little time...) Sure, I guess I do have some selfish motivations for wanting people to post their work on the Public Wongery, because more engagement there is likely to lead more engagement with the rest of the site, but I'd rather people post their creations on their own site than not post it at all. I want more people to create! I want more original worlds out there! I set up the Public Wongery as a place people can post their work (and I think the subspaces like the Gamespace, the Assetspace, and the Buildspace do provide advantages to posting there, though admittedly they're not yet fully developed), but if you want to post it on your own site, do that! Let's see more weird new worlds and more original content, whether on the Wongery or elsewhere!
So, anyway, the main purpose of the Wongery is to share our worlds, and open them up to use by others, but a secondary purpose is to encourage other people to share their creations as well. I guess there are a couple of other secondary purposes, too, or maybe tertiary; I don't know; I guess there's not really a point in assigning them a definitive ranking. But anyway, as I was looking for open-licensed games to release Wongery content for, I kind of got increasingly engrossed in the open-source scene, and at some point I think I kind of decided I also wanted to use the Wongery to actively promote this kind of open-source content. The descriptions of some of the open-licensed games in the RPG Gamespace kind of provide a capsule history of the open gaming movement... especially the earliest open-licensed games like Fudge, Dominion Rules, and Circe (okay, those three games aren't actually represented on the Gamespace at the time I'm writing this, so those links won't be working yet, but they will be eventually). But I'd also like to encourage more use of open licensing in general, not just of RPGs but of CCGs and computer games and others. When I started the Wongery, I wasn't necessarily a big proponent of open sourcing and open licensing—I wasn't opposed to it; heck, the Wongery iself was always intended to be under open licenses; I just didn't think about it much beyond that—but as I've looked into other open-source projects I've become, I guess, increasingly enthusiastic about it. And while it's not the primary purpose of the Wongery, I'll use the platform to promote good open-licensed projects when I can.
(I'd actually considered having a little popup window saying "This site looks better on Firefox" on the Wongery that would only show up if you were using a browser other than Firefox, and that included a link to download Firefox. If pressed as to exactly what about the site looked better on Firefox, I would say that on Firefox, you didn't get the popup window. I decided not to do that (though admittedly I'm not sure how much of that decision was because I realized it was a stupid idea and how much was because I was just too lazy to implement it). But still... seriously, use Firefox. There's nothing important Chrome or Edge does that Firefox doesn't do as well or better.)
(Okay, I'm maybe a bit of a hypocrite here, in that I do use some non-open-source software myself. I do use Windows, not Linux, though that's largely because I don't know enough about computers to build my own and pre-built computers always come pre-installed with Windows. I do use Microsoft Office; I've tried OpenOffice/LibreOffice, but they were missing some features I wanted (although that was years ago; maybe it's improved since then). And I do use the Adobe art applications, although the fact that the latest versions are becoming increasingly bloated with garbage generative AI features is making me seriously reconsider that. Also, I admit I don't donate a lot of money to Mozilla or other open-source organizations, but that's largely because I don't have a lot of money to donate. If I did, I would. But anyway, admittedly a lot of that comes down to laziness; I haven't really explored all the open-source alternatives, and... I guess I probably should. (For what it's worth, these blog posts, and the Wongery articles, are all typed in Notepad++ and then copied and pasted into the browser, so... I do use open-source software for that.)
And there's at least one more secondary-or-maybe-tertiary purpose to the Wongery, too, though this one is strongly connected to the first two mentioned. As I was writing up articles for the Wongery, I came to realize that there were a lot of fantasy or speculative fiction concepts that there... just weren't good general words for. Authors and game designers may have come up with words for some of these things for their own works, but most hadn't caught on, and some that had to some degree caught on I... didn't really like. So I've been making my own words to fill in these gaps. I haven't included any sort of glossary or list of these terms, and the vast majority don't have full articles yet, though I've been trying to put in Stub articles when applicable. (Though I just checked out a past blog post where I discussed this matter and listed a lot of those neologisms, and... hm, only about a quarter of the terms listed there currently have articles, even stubs. I should probably do something about that soon.) Anyway, I'd like to offer those words up for general use, if anyone else wants to use them, to make it easier to discuss these concepts and to use them in worldbuilding. So I guess that's another minor purpose of the Wongery: to build up kind of a vocabulary of words related to magic and other imaginary concepts.
But anyway, while there are other subsidiary purposes, the main purpose of the Wongery is and has always been to share the imaginary worlds we've created, and to facilitate their use by others through open licensing. We also want to encourage others to share their work and to generally promote the creation of original imaginary worlds, and there are a few other, secondary purposes we're putting the site to. But the Central Wongery is what it's mainly about.
(Should I maybe edit the Wongery's intro to make its purpose clearer? Yes, probably. Will I do that? Not right now.)