Comixpedia

From Wikinfo

Comixpedia is:

A magazine ("news and views") about webcomics - http://www.comixpedia.com
A portal listing the topic webcomics - http://www.comixpedia.net
A free wiki encyclopedia of webcomics - http://www.comixpedia.org

Magazine

Xavier Xerexes founded Comixpedia to create a news source and general hub for the webcomics community. The first issue appeared in February 2003. Updates appeared every week, but there are now multiple updates per day. Because Comixpedia is so large, it has an editorial board and staff.

Comixpedia takes a very broad approach to covering the field, including news, reviews, opinions, interviews, histories, and how-tos, among other sorts of material. In recent months, Comixpedia has even begun to offer criticism in comics form, with the additions of comics columns by Ryan Estrada, Kristofer Straub, and Ping Teo. Articles appear as blog entries on the front page. Comixpedia has featured cover art from leading creators including Scott McCloud, Cayetano "Cat" Garza, Jeff Rowland, Mike Krahulik, Bill Mudron, Christopher Baldwin, Jon Morris, and Kazu Kibuishi.

Comixpedia has community forums.

Portal

The portal - http://www.comixpedia.net - uses statistics to rank webcomics. As of 3 August 2006, there are 86 webcomics in the list. One can use the "Surf Webcomics" button on the right of the portal to display frames allowing you to visit the webcomics in the list. Each comic in the list belongs to specific category and links to a statistics page and its encyclopedia entry.

Wiki encyclopedia

The encyclopedia - http://www.comixpedia.org - appeared in September 2005 and functions as the library of Comixpedia. It has over 1,872 articles which together form the best, most comprehensive reference to webcomics. This is because most of the entries are about individual webcomics, and many of these are not listed in other references. Because the wiki is in the GFDL corpus, information about webcomics gathered here can be reused in other documents - this is in addition to being able to edit and add wiki pages on site.

Anyone can edit Comixpedia. Like Wikinfo, Comixpedia requires account registration - a simple technique that reduces spam. Just use the create account page; you only need to provide a username, password, and possibly an email address.

Xavier Xerexes runs the Comixpedia wiki using the MediaWiki wiki engine. In early March 2006, a MediaWiki upgrade and server move caused the site to be temporarily offline.

The list of webcomics

Central to the encyclopedia is its List of Webcomics. The list includes comics which are (or were) primarily published on the World Wide Web, as described in the main article on webcomics.

The webcomics are sorted alphabetically. The dates shown relate to the period during which the comic began appearing and, in the case of defunct comics, finished appearing. There is usually a fair degree of accuracy about the starting date, particularly in the case of comics whose archives are organized by date, but because of rights being transferred or the very gradual loss of appeal of a particular strip the termination date is often very uncertain.

Most importantly, the names in the list link to their own pages. Yes, each webcomic has its very own wiki entry! The entry about Clan of the Cats serves as a model. Though individual characters, locations, and subplots do not have their own entry unless there is much content, individual webcomics do get an entry, even a short one. As an example, the entry about Penance for months consisted of only one paragraph.