PinWiki: The Pinball Encyclopedia
After several months of tinkering and gradual updating, I’ve decided the time has come to pull back the curtain, as it were, on one of my recent projects: PinWiki: The Pinball Encyclopedia.
It was three days before Christmas, 2006 when the idea popped into my head: the world needs a pinball wiki! Thoughout my nearly 12 months in the pinball hobby I’ve been searching and searching for information. There’s a lot of exceptional information on pinball repair (Clay’s Guides), and an incredibly complete IPDB, but there isn’t that much raw history on the internet. A wiki that specialized in pinball seemed like the ideal platform for it. And so I coined the name PinWiki, promptly registered the domain name, and got to work on setting up the wiki.
It seems, though, that in my excitement I had neglected to check for others with the same idea. There are a lot of people that know a lot about pinball in pinball, but there aren’t a lot of people that know a lot about computers in pinball, so I assumed I was probably the first. It wasn’t until later that day I found that somebody else had started a pinball wiki, but by the looks of it they had done it mostly for personal use (link). Then a few months later, after PinWiki had been pretty significantly fleshed-out, I stumbled across another (link) which looked like it had similar goals, but there didn’t appear to be much in the way of actual content yet. Or a photo of designer Dennis Nordman on the front page! Hah.
So I can’t claim to have invented the idea, but I can claim to have a snappy name and logo, and some fairly nice (if I do say so myself) articles on designers like Nordman, fancy rulesheets with pictures for games like Medieval Madness, and profiles of manufacturers like Bally. There are still many, many gaps, but the time has come to open up the editing to the public (who is hopefully much more knowledgable than I on many of these items) in the true Wiki style. Here’s hoping that others will find it as rewarding to read and write for as I have so far.