New Wiki Working Group

[weldon]

This new thread is for working out details related to the new wiki (Vault Wiki). Anyone who wants to contribute to moving L4W content to the new wiki, please jump in here. Use the old "Character Template Bugs & Assistance" thread for anything related to the old wiki (MediaWiki).

I'm not able to help much at this point (because I don't know the wiki admin and templating system yet), but I am going to try and create my character in the new wiki this week.

The L4W pages should all be in the L4W category...

 

[stonegod]

Unfortunately, it appears VaultWiki only updates category pages for pages that have been visited recently. So the L4W page doesn't list all the pages that are likely there.

Luckily, as new/old pages are edited, they do appear.

 

[covaithe]

Ugh. Broken categories?

 

[Fragsie]

I'm here to help, though i dont know how to build templates or anything too complex, though i'm a quick study if someone could link some instructions on the wiki's language.

 

[Phoenix8008]

So, if we update our character sheets its going under some new Wiki stuffness? What about new characters? I figured out my first PC with just copy/paste from another character already in the system, but if its different now I guess I'll see what happens when I try.

 

[weldon]

The current wiki uses software called MediaWiki. ENWorld has said that they are going to retire this system and remove the software. In its place, ENWorld has setup the new Vault Wiki software (which is linked from the "The Vault" in the horizontal navigation bar in the forums). This new wiki is very similar to the old one, but also includes tighter integration with the forums.

Eventually, we will need to move all the current content into the new wiki system. There is an import function, but I read somewhere that the last test import of L4W didn't go very well. We may have to manually move everything, including characters.

 

[stonegod]

Eventually, we will need to move all the current content into the new wiki system. There is an import function, but I read somewhere that the last test import of L4W didn't go very well. We may have to manually move everything, including characters.

The import did okay, but had two major limitations:
- It didn't get the recent version of everything (some of the LEB pages were the newest version, some very old).
- It seemed to have missed some (characters, mostly).
It is still unclear how well the templates are going to work (something I haven't had time to look at).

 

[covaithe]

It's been on my mind recently that we should probably give some serious thought to the direction of the wiki, preferably before people put huge quantities of work into it. Questions like: should we stick to being hosted on ENWorld and convert to VaultWiki, or should we go to an external host like wikia or bluwiki, and keep our MediaWiki stuff? And, should we keep our current character sheets, or switch to something more flexible like LEB's sheets?

Since ENWorld has been reasonably quick for a week or two, that reduces one of my objections to the Vault, but... My "this software is crap" sensors keep going off every time I get near it, and I can't seem to shut them up.

Eh. I don't know. It's not like I really have time to put real quantities of work in just now anyway.

 

[Dunamin]

I'd like to help somehow, but I don't have much experience with wikis besides the old one, and that was purely learned by looking at other people's coding.

I would, however, suggest more trimmed and condensed formats than what we currently have for the new templates. A minimalist approach would probably go a long way towards making life easier for reviewers.

There's a few minor details about our current format that I also think could be clarified, such as renaming "Attributes" as "Abilities". The current form of "Attribute" and "Attribute Type", would probably also make more sense as "Ability mod" and "Ability", respectively.

 

[weldon]

It's been on my mind recently that we should probably give some serious thought to the direction of the wiki, preferably before people put huge quantities of work into it. Questions like: should we stick to being hosted on ENWorld and convert to VaultWiki, or should we go to an external host like wikia or bluwiki, and keep our MediaWiki stuff?.

This seems like an important question to address first. We have three options on the table...

• Move to ENWorld's Vault
• Move to a hosted MediaWiki-based site like BluWiki or Wikia
• Host our own MediaWiki site and get an admin from our community

My inclination is to go with ENWorld because that is where the forums are anyways and it looks like there might be some forum / wiki integration possible. Changing software seems like a pain.

I like the big community around MediaWiki so that seems like a plus. And we get to keep all the existing templates. Hosting it with an outside company like Wikia or BluWiki seems like an easy way to do it.

Hosting our own installation of MediaWiki would give us the most flexibility and control, but it also means that L4W becomes dependent on an individual or set of individuals to admin, maintain, fix, etc. the wiki. People come and go so quickly though that I'd be concerned about losing key individuals and getting stuck. In theory, since it would be MediaWiki based, the site would be easy to move to another host.

Seems like one way to move forward would be to determine if the Vault or MediaWiki is better for what we are trying to do.