Soft Cell Wiki:FAQ

This page contains answers on so called Frequently Asked Questions, provided by me – KatozzKita, founder and main administrator of Soft Cell Wiki.

If you don't find an answer on your question here feel free to ask it on forum board or in this page's discussions.

What is a wiki?
A wiki is a web site working on software called. It helps create highly structured sites, with much simpler approach than of traditional web site, and lets people to contribute content regardless of their status – editors can register an account, or remain "anonymous" without any registration, and they don't have to be admins, like, again, in case of traditional old sites. Of course the most famous wiki is, the biggest free online encyclopedia with high content standards, available in hundreds of languages. But anyone can start a wiki site on their own and dedicate it to any subject – a hobby or profession, a celebrity or piece of media, etc, and host it independently or on so called, which take the hosting part on themselves, and that's our case.

Why a Soft Cell wiki?
Back in 90s and early 00s, people would create sites and forums, sharing, structuring and discussing various content and knowledge. With the rise of social media this trend decreased, giving more freedom to people who aren't familiar with Internet and computers in general by creating dedicated groups and pages. Of course the discussion and sharing parts are still there, but these places are significantly more chaotic and don't work well for archiving content or structuring information. So fan made wikis, with the possibility of entire community to contribute, have become successors of old school fan sites, which were maintained by a small circle of tech savvy fans.

I saw that fan communities of Soft Cell, Marc Almond and Dave Ball are extremely chaotic AND very separated, even if you take English speaking fans, plus they are mostly closed. One of the possible reason is, of course, that these artists aren't as popular as other monsters of 80s pop I won't mention here, but the amount of work they have produced – and still produce, is very big and, on my opinion, is worth of proper exploration and documentation. And once in a while I'll see even oldest hardcore fans admitting they haven't heard that ultra rare song from an obscure compilation appearance, or misunderstood some line in the lyrics, and so on. I believe that a wiki will make such info more accessible for all sorts of fans, including those who just got there, and even non-fans, and will give more room for discoveries. I also believe that it might bring together these groups of fans that are usually scattered away from each other.

Why not Wikia/FANDOM?
My engagement with wikis started on Wikia, not long before its rebranding into FANDOM. I was an avid supporter of this platform, but slowly it has become less and less pleasant: advertisement, that worsen experience for unregistered readers and editors, unwanted media features forced upon with corporate thinking, painful process of software updates and merging with other platforms, limitations of functionality of MediaWiki itself, unfriendly policies toward users and even admins.

Miraheze, like Wikipedia, is a non-profit organisation that relies on volunteers, donations and very transparent community driven administration. On top of that, people have much more control over how their wikis function and how customized they are, than on FANDOM.

The only downside – it's extremely hard to get a wiki into results of search engines, while FANDOM, being a corporation, is massively backed by Google. So I really would appreciate if you, dear readers and editors, will spread the word about and links to the Soft Cell Wiki.