From this moment until I forget about it, Thursday is luchaWiki day.
What is luchaWiki?
luchaWiki is a collaborative lucha libre encyclopedia based on the La Arena website. The purpose of luchaWiki is to preserve the history of the Mexican style of professional wrestling – the wrestlers, the matches, the championships, the arenas, and the accounts of all these – in an environment where everyone can contribute. Anyone can create a user account, and add details and pictures to an article or add a entirely new page.
What happened to La Arena?
Jose knows this better than I, but it wasn’t supposed to disappear (or at least not yet). It just got lost in the mix of a highspots site redesign. You may still be able to view the site on google’s cache, but I can’t seem to raise it today. Anyway, when someone asks, point them towards the luchaWiki.
All the bios were moved to luchaWiki, and I moved the the Lucha Dictionary over just yesterday.
What about the Mask/Hair match histories?
The Lucha de Apuesta records were set up differently than the rest of the profile on La Arena, so they weren’t immediately available to cut and paste. I’ve been kinda sitting on the raw data for the last month while other things took my attention, but I’ve finally finished a script to parse out the information in a wiki-friendly format.
You can check out the data at @ http://thecubsfan.com/cmll/tapawiki.php – all that needs to be done is cutting and pasting into the wiki profiles. I’m going to work on it myself, but if any other wiki users would like to help out, I wouldn’t mind. There are many apuesta listings for people who don’t have profiles, so you could even add those if you wanted, but that’s not as big a concern.
What’s new that’s worth checking out?
There are now bios up of both El Texano (by Steve Sims) and Dr. O’Borman Senior (by Jose.)
What are you looking for this week?
Lucha libre (significant) title pictures – pictures of belts alone, pictures of people wearing their championships (where we can figure out what title it was), pictures of people posing with the title before a defense. I know titles themselves are not a hugely vital thing in most lucha, but it impresses me how long they’ve been a constant for such a long time. The same championship (and possibly the same physical title belt) Dory Dixon won in 1959 might be won tomorrow by Perro Aguayo Jr.