DoomWiki.org is now open!

The new Doom Wiki is now open at http://doomwiki.org and is fully operational.

Things to Note:

• If you own another Doom-related wiki, please change your interwiki links
  
• If you own a webpage, please change your URLs
  
• If you need to access your existing account, let me know immediately. Your email address has to be entered into the database manually before you'll be able to set a password.
  

Bookmarked, wikia can now rot on the vine.

It's... Beautiful.

Nice job guys. Thanks for all your hard work.

    Xeriphas1994 said:

I see that the new wiki is now open to the public.  Congratulations to Quasar and Manc for reaching the finish line!

I'm only a mouth-breathing gamer after all, so I don't quite know how to say thank you.  This process sounded like resolving a family quarrel — expensive, full of setbacks, and having "milestones" that actually return you to the original position but several months older.

If historians of pop culture need to refer to this wiki in fifty years, now they'll have it, because this fork allowed it to continue growing.

(PLEASE, IF YOU DON'T LIKE WIKIA, JUST IGNORE THE OLD SITE AND DON'T EDIT IT.  KTHX.)

Hmm, so is there a way to lobby for a news post about this?   :D

Lobbying sounds too much like hard work, probably be quicker and easier to just submit a news post. ;-)

It doesn't accept my old password (username MikeRS) and there's no email associated with the account apparently. If you can at least set the account's email to mikeonthecomputer@gmail.com it would be great, then I can get a new password created.

Great work on the wiki though. I hated wikia's tiny-column-on-the-screen layout when logged out.

Please update the email for 'Fredrik' (fredrik.johansson@gmail.com)

ZOMG Fredrik!!!!

Will accounts be accessible later on or does each previous user need their email or password reset manually? If the latter, sign me up please! ("EarthQuake" seismos@gmail.com)
By the way, great job on the fork. Can't wait to start using the Wiki again without all the bullshit!

GreyGhost said:

Bookmarked, wikia can now rot on the vine.

this. no more misclicking to some other wiki, i mean community, because i wanted to see the recent changes page.

Oh.
So you can reclaim your old account?

I've resigned up as "Vermil", but ideally, I'd like to reclaim my old account.

May I reclaim the account "Verm" and have it attached to "XYZ"?

EDIT: Now my account has been re-set up, I've removed my email address from the above.

Excellent stuff. It's great to see this finally launched.

So we should now use this one and abandon doom.wikia? I am not up to date, what is wrong with the wikia network?

Tetzlaff said:

So we should now use this one and abandon doom.wikia? I am not up to date, what is wrong with the wikia network?

It's just crap. Don't know the full details, but the forced new UI was horrible. That, and I think there might have been other questionable policies, IIRC.

Regardless, I'm glad the new wiki's up. Great job, guys.

P.S. Is the old wiki going to be shut down? I notice it's still up.

Sodaholic said:

It's just crap. Don't know the full details, but the forced new UI was horrible. That, and I think there might have been other questionable policies, IIRC.

Regardless, I'm glad the new wiki's up. Great job, guys.

P.S. Is the old wiki going to be shut down? I notice it's still up.

It's a fork! They are now two separately maintained entities originating from the same source. I think there was talk of sabotaging the old one, but reason rightly won out. Hopefully it'll end up like the shed skin of a snake, but there's no reason a group of intrepid editors can't turn it into their vision of what a Doom wiki should be.

kmxexii said:

there's no reason a group of intrepid editors can't turn it into their vision of what a Doom wiki should be.

I dunno, wouldn't that effort be better spent on the new one? I mean, the goal is still the same (to document all aspects of the Doom engine games), so it seems like dividing the same efforts across two sites is a little counter-productive. Best to have things organized, to have one great wiki, as opposed to two good wikis.

Besides, what if a new visitor comes along and sees the old site, having no idea that the new one exists?

Sodaholic said:

I dunno, wouldn't that effort be better spent on the new one? I mean, the goal is still the same (to document all aspects of the Doom engine games), so it seems like dividing the same efforts across two sites is a little counter-productive. Best to have things organized, to have one great wiki, as opposed to two good wikis.

Besides, what if a new visitor comes along and sees the old site, having no idea that the new one exists?

My statement was literally true but also meant in sarcasm.

I believe the handling of the old wiki was discussed in the thread that founded the new one. I also believe that the points made still stand.

Quasar said:

• If you own another Doom-related wiki, please change your interwiki links
  
• If you own a webpage, please change your URLs
  
• If you need to access your existing account, let me know immediately. Your email address has to be entered into the database manually before you'll be able to set a password.
  

• Done
  
• Done
  
• doomad2000@yahoo.co.uk
  

Very nice. I'm pleasantly surprised that you kept it exactly as it was before. Thanks for your work.

Quasar said:

Things to Note:

• If you need to access your existing account, let me know immediately. Your email address has to be entered into the database manually before you'll be able to set a password.
  

This fact happens to be quite true. my email is rmalec@gmail.com and the username should be obvious (InsanityBringer).

Phml said:

Very nice. I'm pleasantly surprised that you kept it exactly as it was before. Thanks for your work.

Mostly anyway, this Monaco skin is a rebuild due to it actually being one that wikicities/wikia made themselves.

We will be trying to tune and optimize performance over the coming days and weeks.

kmxexii said:

I think there was talk of sabotaging the old one, but reason rightly won out.

Fingers crossed yes.  Sorry if I'm repeating myself in every thread, but PLEASE DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT DOING THIS.  There are no possible good consequences (and PM me if you want a list of the bad ones).

Sodaholic said:

I mean, the goal is still the same (to document all aspects of the Doom engine games), so it seems like dividing the same efforts across two sites is a little counter-productive.

See this post for a serious response to that question.  My 2 cents: in theory, we could do what myk suggests, but it sounds like only a tiny number of people want that.

Besides, what if a new visitor comes along and sees the old site, having no idea that the new one exists?

That can't be helped; it's a natural part of the forking process.  Hopefully in a few years, when the old site is only edited by spammers and the new site has a much higher SEO, it won't matter.

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE DO NOT edit the old wiki to link to the new one.  Such links are always removed and it creates conflict where none is needed.  Just make the new site so awesome that it isn't an issue!

Tetzlaff said:

So we should now use this one and abandon doom.wikia? I am not up to date, what is wrong with the wikia network?

kmxexii said:

I believe the handling of the old wiki was discussed in the thread that founded the new one. I also believe that the points made still stand.

Yes.  For more detail about "what is wrong", see the original thread.

Can people transfer new "content" that they didn't make over to the new wiki or should it be left to original authors (due to attribution requirements or something)? What about screenshots (they aren't much of an original work)?

tempun said:

Can people transfer new "content" that they didn't make over to the new wiki or should it be left to original authors (due to attribution requirements or something)? What about screenshots (they aren't much of an original work)?

Text, absolutely, provided you say you copied it from doom.wikia.com and give the article title.  (Someone feeling very paranoid could also link to a snapshot of the edit history in the references section.)

Screen shots are a completely different <s>quagmire</s>topic, and opinions vary.  If someone is not in the habit of thinking about fair use when they upload, then they're probably not going to do it now either.  But I would say, at least give attribution to the original uploader (even if they're not on the new site) and pick the appropriate template from the drop-down.

Xeriphas1994 said:

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE DO NOT edit the old wiki to link to the new one.

Also, and this probably goes without saying, but

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE DO NOT link the old wiki from the new one.

I will likely remove any reference or link I find to it other than ones which are purely for historical explanation purposes, such as if an article about the forking process were established (and I'd really rather not see active hyperlinks in such an article either). Otherwise we are only serving to feed the beast. Note that there is *no* interwiki for use with it.

Quasar said:

Also, and this probably goes without saying, but

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE DO NOT link the old wiki from the new one.

I will likely remove any reference or link I find to it other than ones which are purely for historical explanation purposes, such as if an article about the forking process were established (and I'd really rather not see active hyperlinks in such an article either). Otherwise we are only serving to feed the beast. Note that there is *no* interwiki for use with it.

Has someone sat down and gathered all these pithy bits of wisdom into a do's/don'ts page so that people know what's allowed and what's not allowed?

Maybe make that part of the registration process, you must read the guidelines and agree to abide by them prior to being allowed to post.

spicyjack said:

Has someone sat down and gathered all these pithy bits of wisdom into a do's/don'ts page so that people know what's allowed and what's not allowed?

Maybe make that part of the registration process, you must read the guidelines and agree to abide by them prior to being allowed to post.

We already talked about this on IRC, but for the benefit of the forums:

My word is not automatic law just because I am an admin. To become official policy, anything I say would need to get brought up and voted on by the wiki admins as a group, like normal.

All I can do is make some strong suggestions ;)

Quasar said:

To become official policy, anything I say would need to get brought up and voted on by the wiki admins as a group, like normal.

I hate to start up the J.I. Case Drama Hauler so soon after our triumphant opening, but we are going to have a lot of new traffic so it's important to say this.

To this point, our admins have NOT had the powers you just described.  Proposed policies/guidelines/whatever are supposed to be thrown open to *all* active editors to see if they are accepted.  Where accepted means a strong consensus, not just nobody dropping by with a counterargument that weekend.  If consensus is not obvious then the rule is not written down, and users continue discussing individual situations as they had been doing.

Yes, I personally have worked on some "dos and donts" lists without such broad debate, but I now think that was a mistake and I refuse to do it any more.  I also think few people ever read those pages anyway because they'd rather be editing.

Discussing rules is even more boring than reading them, and almost no one ever bothers.  Therefore, the arrangement you describe might prove very practical.  But then, I am an admin myself, so people expect me to say that!  We should at least ask other power users who have migrated themselves.

Xeriphas1994 said:

Discussing rules is even more boring than reading them, and almost no one ever bothers.  Therefore, the arrangement you describe might prove very practical.  But then, I am an admin myself, so people expect me to say that!  We should at least ask other power users who have migrated themselves.

Sometimes there's not a lot of practical difference, because only admin-types and a few of the highly involved editors ever show up to discuss such matters anyway.

There's always been an obvious flaw in the Wikipedia-grown consensus system in that it cannot practically be based on a quorum. In order to achieve that you'd need a formal balloting system with email notification, and then you'd need to wait possibly for months to get enough votes to take action on something. Instead of that, it's always been a kind of fuzzy "we wait for a while and then tally the results based on the idea that nobody else is going to give input now" or, slightly worse perhaps, "everybody who matters has weighed in".