Laserdisc Wiki Project

Over the past few weeks I've been working on creating a wiki site for laserdiscs.

I know that there are sites out there like lddb that already provide a great deal of information about laserdiscs but I find they don't include a lot of information that I want to know and have limited ways of discovering data.

What I've started to do is to create a site dedicated to information about laserdisc releases, films that are on laserdisc, players and general articles about laserdiscs such as Squeeze and PALplus, using the mediaWiki engine which is used for Wikipedia. This has many advantages but to me the main one is the way it allows users to navigate the information, I'm sure many of you here have started reading something on wikipedia only to click a link to another article and find yourself clicking more and more until you're many articles away and you realise an hour or so has passed.

Another advantage is that MediaWiki is very user friendly to edit, you don't have to know HTML though there are a few little tricks that make things easier (check out [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] if you want a guide), and of course anyone can edit and contribute to the site.

That's the kind of site I'm trying to create...but the problem is that I am very new to the world of laserdiscs, I only own 17 and am still constantly trying to find out more about the format...so there's a lot of gaps in my knowledge.

I have added all of my laserdiscs and a few articles to make a start and to work out a format and style for the site, but I've taken it almost as far as I can on my own.

Ideally I'd like laserdisc releases to be added by people who actually own a copy so that the details are first hand as I have noticed quite a few omissions and errors on lddb that could be corrected by someone who owns the disc.

So if you would be interested in helping out please check out the wiki at [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], have a look round and let me know what you think. A good place to start browsing would be the laserdisc link in the welcome portal (direct link: [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]) as well as the films link ([You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]).

If you want to add any laserdiscs then you can copy and paste the code from this template ([You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]) to get you started.

There isn't a great deal on the site just now, but if each user who signs up could contribute just five titles from their collection then it could start to grow quite fast.

At the minute I'm just opening the site up to this forum, but if all goes well I'll soon give out the url elsewhere and hopefully we'll soon have a growing site!

Any suggestions, comments or constructive criticisms are very welcome.

Sorry for the long post, I hope you enjoy the site : )

I just wanted to give a few quick updates.

I think I've finalised how each laserdisc page will now look now and what information it will contain. If you guys could have a look at a few of the laserdisc pages and let me know any thoughts, critisms, suggestions etc that would be great. If there are no changes to make I'll get on with adding laserdiscs. The more laserdiscs pages there are in the wiki the harder it becomes to change the format of the pages so I want to get it pretty solid before I add too many. Currently there are 56 laserdiscs on the wiki, you can see them all here: [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

If any of you are wanting to add laserdiscs of your own I have now created an article which should cover all you need to know. You can read it here: [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

I have also started to add some laserdisc related articles. You can see what I currently have here:
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]. As you can see there is plenty of room for more. I know a lot of you have some really great experience with some aspects of laserdiscs so if any of you fancy writing some short articles for the wiki I would greatly appreciate it.

Also, to keep annoying posts on the forum down to a minimum I've started a twitter account where I will announce the latest updates/developments etc. You can check it out here: [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

Thanks again, let me know your thoughts.