Carthax Wiki Woes - Community Input Required

[Van Helser]

I have just received an email from wikispaces stating that as the wiki is not for educational purposes, it will now start to cost $5-20 a month to keep the site running. I don't think I'm prepared to pay for the service, so I am looking for suggestions for hosting the wiki elsewhere. Fortunately, all the pages can be downloaded for transfer.

Anyone got any thoughts?

Ruaridh

[MarcoSkoll]

I guess we pick names from this list - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wiki_hosting_services - and look around to see what works best.

Wikia seems to be the most popular service going around at the moment, although it is of course littered with ads.

In any case, I'm exporting the current wiki as I type in both Wikitext and HTML formats (as which'll be most convenient for transferring it I don't know).

EDIT: ... aaaaaaand done. Exported in two formats, downloaded and backed up with two spares.

[Van Helser]

I'm not too fussed about ads personally, and I'd like to assume that somewhere with ads won't suddenly decide to start charging. Anyone have an opinion on that?

Thanks for downloading all the stuff... you've saved me a job!

Ruaridh

[MarcoSkoll]

Hello chaps.

In response to this whole deal, Van Helser and I have started the process of moving the Carthax Wiki from Wikispaces to Wikia.
It will now be found at this address: http://carthax.wikia.com/wiki/Carthax_Wiki

All the old content is backed up, but it will take a while for it to all be put up onto the new wiki.

[Heroka Vendile]

is it literally a case of having to copy/paste every page one by one from the old wiki?

[MarcoSkoll]

It's a little more ugly than that. There's no direct import option and, even if there were, the wiki layout and coding aren't identical.

I may get bored later on and write a script to convert from one to the other, but at the moment I'm also trying to get more consistent formatting on the major pages.

[MarcoSkoll]

Right chaps. In the effort to try and get some standardisation across the wiki, I'm trying the following starting set of guidelines, largely pilfered from some other wikias' style guides.

This much relates to article naming:

- Article titles should only normally have their first word and any proper nouns capitalised.
- Similarly, page titles should not be plural unless specifically referring to groups.

In combination, a page about "M37 Mars Pattern Battle-cruisers" should be titled "M37 Mars pattern battle-cruiser". A faction called "The Red-Arm Pirates" could however retain that spelling and pluralisation.

- Pages for characters should exclude titles, ranks and nicknames, but normally otherwise be the character's full name. (However, redirects can be set up for other sensible formats).

For example, if there were a character called called Inquisitor Garn Theodore 'Long-Arm' Allarick, his page should be at "Garn Theodore Allarick", but could potentially have a redirect from places such as "Inquisitor Allarick".

We can however make sensible exceptions. An Arcoflagellant called Mahler-932 could keep that page name, rather than it needing to be his former name.

- Disambiguations should use (parentheses) in order to differentiate the article titles.

If there are any objections, I'm happy to go with whatever consensus is reached, but I think we need a little standardisation. Nothing too strict, but at the moment we have a mix of page names like "Inquisitor Kaled", "Inquisitor Ottakar Grant" and "Marco Skoll", all referring to Inquisitors.

As above, I'd prefer to go just the full name and then add any titles, nicknames or aliases in the page's internal title text.

From there, we can then group characters with Wikia categories - the above could be tagged with things like "Character" and "Inquisitor"; That would let all characters or all Inquisitors be found easily from one category page.

[MarcoSkoll]

I'm at about 12% of pages transferred now.

I think I've transferred across most of the core pages about gaming, and some of the text has been given a bit of a polish along the way.
I'm still transferring the photos back into these articles though - I'm taking the liberty of swapping some of them for my own characters at the same time, to give it a bit more variety than just Kaled's characters.

The top high level "category"-type fluff pages are in place, but I'm still spidering down through the articles they're linking to.

I'm also trying to set up a Classified/Semi-classified/Declassified system - as has been previously discussed, this will largely be for marking whether a page is a PC or an NPC.

- PC characters, planets and the like which the player doesn't want modified (without permission) are "Classified".

- NPC pages that are largely free-reign are "Declassified" - although the freedom is explained as largely that to expand the article, not change it. (So you can add more details about another hive city on a planet, but not completely change it to a death world).

- And I'm also dropping in a "Semi-classified" category, which is between the two, with the owner having to explain their "rules" on the article's talk page.
If, say, the player is happy to have their sub-sector's history added to, but don't want any more systems added, that's the kind of thing this covers.

[Van Helser]

Thanks for all the hard work so far Marco.

Having some standardisation is a good thing, as the wiki has been a bit hit and miss in execution up to this point.

Ruaridh

[Van Helser]

Just thought folk might be interested in a rough map of the Carthax sector I've put together. Very amateurish, but useful I hope:

Ruaridh

[MarcoSkoll]

Because re-uploading the stuff is regularly slipping my mind, I have uploaded both the HTML and Wikitext dumps of the old wiki to the Skoll Archive:

https://www.mediafire.com/#wzk6zx697t4ok

Anyone who wants to help get it uploaded faster can now assist!

[Van Helser]

I have started adding pages to the wiki from Marco's upload. I am simply working through alphabetically and have reached the 'Alykia Sector'. Might do some more today after the dog's been walked. I'll keep updating this post to show where I'm up to in case anyone else is adding stuff (to avoid duplications it's easy enough to search the wiki for existing pages before uploading).

Ruaridh

EDIT: and I'm up to Ezekiel Dune. Happy Hogmanay folks!

[Van Helser]

Right, I think I have uploaded all the pages from the old wiki now. Some of the formatting might be a bit off, but in general I think most of the pages look good. There are probably a few dead links on some of the pages though, so if you come across any while browsing either let me know, or edit them yourselves.

I'm planning now to start adding new pages with rules, abilities, and whatnot from Dark Magenta articles.

Ruaridh