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Lost Fans Find Internet Thrills Via Wikis, Games, Second Life
Fans and producers of the hit TV show Lost are taking to the Internet, building a wiki, alternate reality games, communities, and a virtual island in Second Life to explore the world of the ABC show.
Mitch Wagner, InformationWeek, April 26, 2008
Excerpts from the article:
Fans of the TV show Lost don't need to limit their thrills to TV. They can turn to the Internet to hang out with fellow fans, solve puzzles, and speculate about the mysteries of the show.
Lostpedia is a fan-built encyclopedia where fans create detailed episode guides, biographies of the major and minor characters, articles speculating about where the series is going, and more...
Finding Answers On Lostpedia
...MediaWiki is the software platform underlying Wikipedia; he chose that software because he's "amazed and fascinated" with both Wikipedia and the software underlying it, he said. He wanted to learn more about building wikis, and thought Lostpedia was a good place to start.
...The Lostpedia statistics page shows that the site has grown to nearly 33,000 pages. The site has received 141 million page views. It has 26,000 registered users, of whom 10 have sysop rights, for increased authority to edit and manage the site.
Croy said the site has brought him professional benefit in that it's connected him with many interesting people. The Palo Alto Research Center (formerly Xerox PARC) contacted him about two years ago to study Lostpedia. "Basically, they wanted to study the way that a group of users collects intelligence, brings it back to a central place, and processes that intelligence, categorizes it and analyzes it and decides what's good and bad." PARC looks at each new episode as a big new batch of intelligence dumped on the Lostpedia community. "They want to see how they can apply that to the national defense projects they're working on," Croy said...
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