Help Wanted: Cigar Wiki

[Skol]

I'm looking for a few good men to help build the best authoritative cigar resource on the internet. MRN's book is a great tool, but it's not cheap/free or available online. There's also no real publication for non-cubans that even approaches the thoroughness of MRN's work.

Imagine being able to reach into your humidor, look at the brand, shape, size, and color and easily find it on a webpage that lists the make, history of the vitola, the origins of it's tobacco, and see a picture to double-check you've got the right one. Imagine seeing all this linked to tons of other information about the production of the cigar, and information of the company that produced it.

I'm looking to build this "encyclopedia" with a wiki. A wiki is a website that is open to multiple people to author. Everyone collaborates together and can edit each other's content, growing the scope and refining the quality of the publication. The most famous example of a wiki, is the Wikipedia.

We could use wikipedia, or we could set up our own site. If we chose to go the latter route, I'm volunteering to do all the hosting for as long as I can afford to. Though, all the hosting is very well preserved if we use Wikipedia's site. Would CigarWeekly be interested in hosting such a resource?

Whatever it is, I'd love to see something like this come to fruition. What say you? Are you interested in helping? Even if you'd love to use a resource like this, kindly pipe up.

[harvey]

Seems like a great idea, although I know nothing about the technical side of doing something like that. I sure spend a lot of time jumping around to different sites to find information about any specific cigar

[JoeyBogus]

Awesome idea. Wikipedia is one of the most useful resources on the Internet, right up there with Google. Having an unbiased and non-commercial Wikipedia for cigars would be an absolute boon to the cigar community.

[mrkmitch]

Good idea.

You might want to get your heads together with Jazznut, and Aizuddin who's been compiling Jazznut's exceptional cigar reviews, and has a comprehensive listing of them on the "Cigar Reviews" board here.

Also Moki, who is our resident AF expert, with many reviews and descriptions on his own web site, would be an excelent source. He's collected, photographed, and written about many unusual, hard-to-find, and rare Fuente smokes.

Steve Saka (ssaka) is another CW member who has provided a great number and wide variety of history and review posts here, and writes for Cigar Magazine as well.

You can do a search here on CW to locate their postings.

There is a lot of talent here on the boards who might be interested in contributing to a comprehensive history, review, and description listing. Should you guys be able to pull this together I'm sure it would be well received.

[MM]

This is an appealing idea, and I would certainly become an enthusiastic user of such a resource.

I also think it is a challenging project that will require good design, a strong community to keep it running, and considerable editing and moderation work. Although I am a new member, I have the feeling that the CW community would be up to these tasks.

I am not entirely certain if Wiki as such is the right platform for this, as great as it is. In my mind, something that facilitates the maintenance of various kinds of cross-references in the data to be stored in the system (cigars by brand, size, construction, producer, ...) by a community of authors would be extremely useful.

Sorry about jargon, but it might be worthwhile to see if some kind of (preferably open source) semantic Web authoring/publishing platform along the lines of Platypus Wiki http://platypuswiki.sourceforge.net would be better suited for this project. (Essentially, what this means is a system not unlike the software that drives this forum that provides additional facilities for maintaining a predefined structure of links between pages that facilitates browsing and search.)

[HamrWebDesign]

Great idea and I think the platform is perfect for such a plan!