I first launched this site to coincide with the year of the rat (Feb 7, 2008) with a goal to make mahjong more accessible to English-speaking players. A year has gone by and we've made a lot of progress and yet a lot more progress can still be made. I'm still looking for contributors. If you would like to write, edit, translate, or share your love and knowledge of mahjong feel free to join.

Keep a look out for upcoming changes. tankbot

UPDATE 1/30/09
I decided to give our tile set a little umph by applying some of my photoshop skills to the mangan font. Hope you enjoy.

Also here it is, wiki stats - 2008 in numbers:
Page Views
13,730

Unique Visitors
2,807

Visits
3,470

Top 5 Countries

1. United States 49%
2. Canada 11%
3. UK 6%
4. Singapore 6%
5. Australia 5%

Top 10 States

1. California 31%
2. New York 9%
3. Florida 5%
4. New Jersey 5%
5. Texas 5%
6. Illinois 4%
7. Washington 3%
8. Massachusetts 3%
9. Pennsylvania 3%
10. Virgina 3%

Browsers
Firefox 46%
Internet Explorer 43%
Safari 5.7%
Opera 2.19%
Chrome 1.79%
Mozilla 0.35%

tankbot

• Adding resources links to rule pages
• Relocating images to local servers
• Renamed Japanese Modern (EMA) to European Riichi

Ideally, I'd like all the rules self contained and cut down on the referencing back to the basic rules. It makes no sense to have a beginner who wants to learn a specific type of mahjong have them read two sets of rules (basic and the specific one) in order to play one style. Not to mention how confusing it'll be if they differ a great deal.

I'll admit that I'm guilty of making the dealing, seating, and gameplay sections stripped down versions. That's only because there's a lot of content that can be added and these sections can always be returned to later.

Well obviously I made some pretty bad assumptions.

First off, I didn't know this:

My thought process behind this was that all rules sets would be "self-contained" meaning you shouldn't have to read the whole site to learn how to play this style.

so of course the terminology has to stay. Do you want the terminology in both the overview and gameplay pages like how it is now?
I'll flesh out the sections that are lacking, but I'll leave out seating, dealing, and anything explained in the beginner's guide. (Seating and dealing are linked in the overview page. The beginner's guide is mentioned in the gameplay page.)

Second, everything I wrote was specifically for the HKOS pages, but apparently most of the changes I suggested (such as removing or editing sections) would mean that all the other rules pages would get changed too. In that case I won't be editing or removing any sections. I'll just stick the information in whatever section seems appropriate.

As for that 13 Orphans question, it's just a minor hole in the rules. If you don't care about it then I don't care about it.

The other changes in the scoring section are not major. I just reorganized some stuff and removed redundant info.

• Anime
• Books
• Equipment
• Movies
• Online Play
• Video Games
• Rules
• Symbolism
• Tournaments

Keep checking back on updates and excuse me for any broken links, etc. I'm working on it.

Categories

In order to setup a category, each page must be named using the following syntax category:page-name. For example, I can create an American:Rules, American:Overview, etc. In order to find all American pages, we can do a System:American page to display all of them.

The downside to this is that mahjong shares similar elements with one another. Take Thirteen Orphans, Nine Gates, All Green. These are common limit hands that belong to more than one category (i.e. appears in World Series, Chinese Official, Japanese Riichi, etc). How would we organize this then? One idea is to leave theses pages un-categorized altogether. The same problem will occur with general mahjong topics and strategy.

Tags

Tags are an easy way to find all pages label with a certain field. This would solve our pages that fit in more than one category. Problem: you'll notice tags are separated by spaces. (Which genius didn't think of comma separated tags?) Thus, we cannot have a "Chinese Official" tag. This is problematic because we have "Chinese Classical", "Japanese Classical", "Japanese Modern", etc. How would the tags distinguish between the two?

What are your thoughts on wiki organization?

The majority of our visitors come from:
1. United States
2. United Kingdom
3. Canada
4. Australia
5. Singapore

It's good to see that the US is getting interested in mahjong!