Project Redcap:Current events
2014
- 3 January 2014
- As has become my tradition, I am writing to inform the community about the past year's developments at Project: Redcap.
This year, I became aware of another Project: Redcap hosted at http://www.project-redcap.org. This is some kind of non-profit data-sharing project for university researchers. I became aware of it because I received a bit of correspondence from people who meant to write to that other redcap. In fact, I received more correspondence for the wrong redcap than for the right one, but I've come to expect that, from the Ars Magica community, no news is generally good news.
In order to reduce confusion and also to reduce my out-of-pocket costs, I donated the projectredcap.org domain to the other Project REDCap. I had registered that domain years ago as a hedge against the original redcap.org domain expiring beyond my control. That is no longer a risk, by the way: I control the redcap.org domain and am paying the expenses of maintaining it as a contribution to the community.
We have had more extensive contributions from more users than ever before. I am pleased to say that mid-year, we had at least a stub article on every Ars Magica product ever published -- and very little of that content was written by me. :-) In the sense of engagement from the user community, Project: Redcap is thriving relative to recent years.
I was not very active on the Atlas forums this year, and the Berk List was pretty slow. The one user request I received for Project: Redcap was for a user-friendly guide to how to use the site and post updates. It turns out that is easier said than done. :-) I didn't reply to the requester at the time (sorry), but today I spent a solid day re-organizing, updating, and expanding the user help and documentation. I will respond to user feedback -- it is very important for users to tell me what they think, because my mind-reading skills are below average. Clear, constructive feedback is always welcome and will be acted upon ... eventually. :-)
If you have an interest in contributing to Project: Redcap but have been daunted by the lack of user-friendly help, please take a look at http://www.redcap.org/page/Help:Getting_started and let me know whether that meets your expectations and needs.
What we did not see this past year are a lot of new links to Ars Magica web sites. We did get a few. I remain convinced that there are a lot more out there that aren't currently listed. I could look for them myself, but would greatly appreciate some help. One trick that works nicely is to Google for the name of an Ars Magica spell, such as Ball of Abysmal Flame, and see what covenant libraries come up.
My priorities for the coming year are to straighten out some of the complex, organizational issues that affect multiple pages. User help was one of those. Foreign language support is long overdue. The FAQ is in reasonably good shape but can certainly be improved. I'll work on all of this as time permits, meaning it probably won't all get done in 2014. I am running like a real project now, with goals and priorities (but no budget, other than what I pay to keep the lights on). If you want to help out, you know where to find me.
All in all, I think Project: Redcap is in pretty good shape, perhaps the best since I took over in 2005. I would greatly appreciate any thoughts you can share about how to make Project: Redcap better suit your needs.
Best regards,
-Andrew Gronosky
2013
- 1 January 2013
- The version of MediaWiki that runs Project:Redcap has been upgraded to 1.20.2.
2012
Grand Tribunal (UK) 2013 Announced
The UK session of the Ars Magica convention, Grand Tribunal 2013 (UK), will be held in Cheltenham, England on August 16-18, 2013.
Kickstarter for Ars Magica Computer Game
- 20 November 2012
- The Kickstarter fundraising campaign for Years of Conquest, an Ars Magica computer game, failed to meet its fundraising target so the studio will not be able to make the game.
- 19 October 2012
- For the first time, a software studio has proposed to develop a computer game of Ars Magica! This is a Kickstarter project, meaning the developer is asking for pledges up-front and if that raises enough money, they'll be able to make the game. See our Years of Conquest page for more information.
Announcing Project Redcap 3.0!
1 September 2012
The Project: Redcap volunteers are pleased to announce that we've migrated Project: Redcap to the MediaWiki engine. We call this Project: Redcap 3.0 (where 2.0 was the previous Redcap wiki). The new wiki engine will provide an easier-to-use and more familiar user interface as well as new and powerful management tools for the maintainers.
Effective immediately, the new wiki is available at the normal Project: Redcap address, http://www.redcap.org.
Impact of the Change
The Project: Redcap maintainers believe this change will make it easier to find information on our site, and easier to create pages. Unfortunately, it was not practical to migrate the user database, so people with existing user accounts will need to create new ones. The new wiki also supports anonymous editing, so you do not need an account to edit the pages.
Our Mission
Project: Redcap is is an online reference for fans of the Ars Magica roleplaying game. It has two related goals.
1. Provide a centralized place where visitors can browse and find links to as much Ars Magica material as possible, in as many languages as possible. We want to be, as Project: Redcap's founder put it, "the crossroads of the Order." We want to link to everything related to Ars Magica, without passing judgment on the importance or quality of the site. 2. Be a guide and companion for the rules and game world of Ars Magica, providing useful rules summaries, examples, and commentaries on topics from across the game's extensive product line.
Project: Redcap Needs Your Help!
Since 2005, when Andrew Gronosky took over maintenance of Project: Redcap, we have had comparatively few new external links added to Project: Redcap. In fact, we lost links to a great many Ars Magica pages when the free Web-hosting service GeoCities shut down in 2009. Although the Redcap wiki has been slowly expanding to support the second mission of Project: Redcap, the overall number of working links has declined substantially.
Simply put, we need contributions from the community in order to survive and thrive. If you own or know of an Ars Magica Web site, please add a link to it to Project: Redcap. If you don't want to edit the wiki yourself, use our contact form at http://www.redcap.org/page/Special:Contact and a maintainer will add the link for you. We know the fan community is alive and well, and with your help we can keep Project: Redcap a valuable asset for that community.
We welcome any contributions, large or small. If you would like to get involved in the project, please visit our community portal at http://www.redcap.org/page/Project_Redcap:Community_portal
Pre-Launch Events
- 18 August 2012
- We have finished migrating content from the previous Wiki. We are now in the process of cleaning up: removing duplicate and stub articles and cleaning up formatting glitches from the migration.
- 6 August 2012
- Migration of the content from PageWork to MediaWiki is underway. We've uploaded several hundred pages as a pilot project and are making adjustments to the process before finishing the rest. It looks like there will be a consider amount of cleanup and re-organization to do. We'll take care of that after the content is all uploaded.
- 18 July 2012
- After a few months of being busy with other things, the maintainers are getting ready for a mass conversion of the "old style" PageWork-based Wiki content to this MediaWiki back-end.
- January 2012
- In January 2012, the maintainers of Project: Redcap made the decision to migrate our content from the original Wiki software, PageWork, to MediaWiki. This transition is beginning slowly with a manual copying of the more complex pages. When our schedules permit we will write software to automatically translate the short, simple pages (the great majority of Project: Redcap's content), then retire the PageWork site.
During this transition the main Project: Redcap site is still active but has a low rate of activity.
Older Events
For older events, see Project Redcap:Events history