What warrants a wiki?

maiki
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Continuing the discussion from The mundane decisions that make Mediawiki such a pain:

Okay, I keep searching for wikae, for games and music, lots of pop culture. And here is what I find:

  1. Fandom (a company) hosts it, or
  2. It doesn’t exist.

Da fuck?! And a lot of this stuff I don’t actually care about. Like, I don’t think most people should play Icewind Dale. Fuck that game. You don’t need know how to get through it!

But dammit every story in history should have a searchable summary. And right now we are choosing, for the most part, to host our summaries between one of two companies: Fandom and WMF.

So we ought to make more wikae. But what is a good reason to have one? I keep running into this. Likely a very personal issue (I’d hope so!), but I keep thinking, “well, does that fit in to the theme of this thing? Does it make sense to be subpages of a high-level concept, or will lots of weird people want access and I’ll not want to give those same people access to like, pictures of my kid?”

Wikae are just kinda weird to deal with.

Here’s a different approach! How about things in wiki-form that would make sense to me if I came upon it (note: anything that is a “database” means it contains useful info to us, including who be trolling, and very, very, very very very specific nuanced metatdata concerning licensing…):

  • textmode - all the textmode stuff. No images, very efficient wiki!
  • video games database
  • separate ttrpg database?
  • personal archive of photos and random scraps of writing, providing a timestamp common placebook for my digital family and tribe
  • lyrics database
  • database of databases, because have you seen what generates XML and JSON these days?!
  • quests! Imagine the strange weighted inference/webhook/interwiki nonsense to decide which quest should be progressed?!

Now I can squish some of those together, huh? You know what else there should be? A full wiki representation of every freely licensed roleplaying game! Is that one wiki? One each? Namespaces?!

I don’t know. I think I’m definitely going to build one at archive.interi, because then I can say I already work at the interi archive, they really should merge our orgs… :slight_smile:

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github attempted to provide wikis and i’ve been on multiple teams that try to use them for work, but they get stale and abandoned real quick.

even habitica’s wiki is on fandom! i just wanted to read and maybe attempt to clarify some parts of the local install instructions with docker and it’s so many ads. and i forgot my fandom account info. yes these problems are solvable by me taking just a few steps but we’re in 2019! i want instant gratification on everything!

that was just to say i just had a “wtf everything is only on fandom” moment too!

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would you call a league of legends guide compilation a wiki? for example: League of Legends Strategy Build Guides :: Browse popular LoL strategy builds created by other fans!

obviously not: you can’t edit someone else’s guide.

but also yes: anyone can submit a guide or build.

but no: that just means it’s … a compilation or articles. with comments and structured metadata on each article.

i’m sidestepping this thread’s “what kind of info can be in a wiki” question and asking a “what is a wiki” question. haha. because now i’m thinking, what if that site were more wiki-ish? it could be updated with more stats, or really good revision history stapled to game builds so you can see how the guide stayed updated through time.

okay, there’s something that is very wiki-ish about a wiki: tracking revisions. (or is that very MediaWiki? am i doing a tissue/Kleenex thing here?)

so part of my answer for what kinds of data go in a wiki is data that changes over time, and the way it changes is data itself.

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Hot take:

Start with most content (indexes of stuff) in one general wiki, when specific subject matter grows beyond a certain size. Split it off.

Really the question should be: have we gathered enough specific knowledge on this subject matter where it warrants dedicated resources? If not, then it needs to continue to incubate.

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and incubation can happen here, where some posts can be wiki-like (by which i mean editable-by-all), or on said general wiki.

it can be a star nebula!

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That’s a really good point. I can even shortcut some of the data modeling we do with templates!

An easy criteria for me is: when I need to ask a question about a data set that I can’t easily answer in Discourse, move that data to a better system. I think it largely overlaps with amount. :thinking:

Okay! Now I can focus on just my immediate issue, which is building a media archive, for personal use. All CC0, but I’ve decided I really like what is possible with Mediawiki. If we are capturing directories of data here, I can be okay with that and focus on a practical application. :slight_smile:

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