Wiki Options for Campaigns

[Arcane_Snowman]

As the title suggests, what options are available when it comes to storing campaign data in a way that's easily accessible for the players? I've toyed around with wikia before and one of my players suggested Obsidian Portal, but what else is available?

I'm looking to be storing a bunch of key information which can get rather long, such as a library list, and a lot of small NPC stat blocks that give the general gist of the character.

Any good experiences?

[thirdkingdom]

Rpg.net has a wiki built in to it that I use for the pbp games I run. You can see the page for a Barrowmaze game I ran here: https://wiki.rpg.net/index.php/Barrowmaze

[hymer]

If you're willing to hand over your RL gp, you can use the option I use. See my signature for links.
They've cleaned up some problems with slow servers they had a year and a half back, and now things run pretty smoothly. There's some peculiarities in the way things are set up, which I can elaborate on if you're interested.

[KillingAScarab]

I had hear in the past Obsidian Portal was pretty good. Just found a page for an NPC in the campaign of the month with stats in it. Not sure how private you can make that sort of thing, but I also noticed stats on a few other NPCs, most notably Stormtroopers.

[Kol Korran]

I may be biased, but a long time ago I started using PBworks for campaign wikis, and used it ever since. The amount of detail shifts between campaigns.

A few examples follow, but an important note before I go: Keeping a wiki updated is time and effort consuming. And your players may not appreciate, contribute or add to it. Many players come toplay just in play time, and do not really wish to work on wikis and such in their spare time, so be warned. The GM is usually more involved in such matters than players (Though some players may be quite involved, just not all, or even most), so if you work on a wiki, I suggest the following:
- First of all, make it functional. Most players look at such things for the rules, the options, and less for flavor.
- Add pics if you can, for atmosphere. A good pic is worth a thousand words, as they say. Note though that this is VERY time consuming.
- If you intend to keep a campaign log, note that this will be mostly for yourself, and the few players who love such things.
- If you're using PBworks, I usually have two wikis- one for players, and one for myself, which only I have access to, a work space. Though I've moved nearly everything to my lap top since.

Some examples of my own:

Spoiler

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The Witchlings Isles, Players wiki- This is an example of how far you can go with stuff. An earlier ambitious project, for a campaign setting of my own, with quite a few of it's own rules. Unfortunately it fell after a few playing sessions, due to RL problems. Took a LOT of time to build, but I still like it.

Post apocalyptic FATE game- This was for a short lived experimental game, so the wiki was far less involved, yet still looking nice enough.

Tearing of the weave & Scouring of the land- The first wiki I made, when I was a player, mostly updated by me, a bit more basic. The DM added a few sections, and a lot of it was used for quick session summaries, loot distribution, and my character's personal log, which forms the bulk of it. Pardon my crappy English on it. A long time ago.

Good luck to you!

[EccentricCircle]

I did this for one of my games, but it didn't prove as useful as I'd hoped it would. We didn't have many players updating the wiki, so it soon fell out of use. The main problem is that you have to have lots of material to put up there at the start. Its much harder for one person to populate a wiki than for a group.
These days I generally just use pdf handouts, as those tend to look better at the end.