New and a little different

I've just turned on a new feature for the Gothic BC website - "Alph". What is Alph? If you know what a Wiki is then you're off to a good start, although rather than Wiki syntaxes Alph uses HTML and some HTML-like custom tags. Alph is named after the river that run through Xanadu in deference to Ted Nelson's Xanadu project, another source of the inspiration for this weirdness.

And now in English for those of you that aren't utter net-geeks: Alph is something I created that is basically web anarchy. It's a web space where any user, without having to sign in or open any sort of account, can create pages or (and this is the unusual part for most of you) edit any existing page. Every user has equal rights to every page, free to create, edit, ammend and otherwise alter as they see fit. Yes, that does mean any old dick-head could delete anything - exept that every change, no matter how small, is archived and the archive is accessible to all. Any user can go back and recreate old content from the archive with a simple cut and paste. Every user is a "moderator" capable of deleting useless crap. This is an experiment and there is no telling what kind of content will spring up here, if it gets used at all. Maybe it will get used to create a collaborative stories, maybe a user-maintained calendar of events will spring up, maybe some user-created galleries (you'll have to host the images elsewhere though, same as you have to with Livejournal), or maybe it will degrade into an infantile collection of whinging, bitching and flaming like so much of the 'Net. It's completely up to the users whether it turns out to be crap or brilliance.

Right now the only link to Alph is on the Gothic BC homepage at http://www.gothic.bc.ca - I'll be adding it to the site wide navigation later.