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Quasar

Doom Wiki

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printz said:

Establishing a new wiki ground because the old one was inconvenient is a good idea. Pissing on the old one as well -- that is immature.


I don't want to piss on the old Wiki. If all things were perfect it would just get closed and redirect to the new one. But since the greedy corporate goons that host it will never allow it something has to be done to steer people clear of it. A seemingly benign name change sounds like one of the best options for that.

Then the maintainers could introduce a 'new direction' concerning content and slowly edit out the current stuff to be replaced by other Doom related things of lesser value. Then links to the real wiki would be legitimate content wise. No idea how Wikia would take such an approach though...

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Graf Zahl said:

Then the maintainers could introduce a 'new direction' concerning content and slowly edit out the current stuff to be replaced by other Doom related things of lesser value. Then links to the real wiki would be legitimate content wise. No idea how Wikia would take such an approach though...


If the current administration and primary editors start doing it gradually, I don't thinks there much Wikia will do. If it's a legitimate community change of focus, I don't think they will have much of a problem.

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Abyssalstudios1 said:

If the current administration and primary editors start doing it gradually, I don't thinks there much Wikia will do. If it's a legitimate community change of focus, I don't think they will have much of a problem.

Efforts to do this on the GTA Wiki have met with resistance so far. In particular they are not allowing it to be renamed.

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Hm...

I'm not certain that swithing from one commercial host to another is such a good idea. Remember, Wikia wasn't such a cesspool when the Doom Wiki was started. It slowly degraded into one. Who guarantees that this won't follow suit? Wanna lose ownership of your info again?

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They are in a situation where they can do it, at least they think they can do.

However, with the 700k visits one should not forget that many links to the Wiki are centralized on a handful of pages and if all those change their link the numbers will drop significantly, especially if the Wiki is no longer maintained by anyone with interest in its contents.

But this will take time. One can only hope that not some idiot will come along and continue to maintain it, despite the fork.

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fraggle said:

I'd much rather we move to an independent host.

Why not get in touch with DRDteam if they would be interested in hosting the WIKI ?

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Kappes Buur said:

Why not get in touch with DRDteam if they would be interested in hosting the WIKI ?

What's wrong with hosting it on Mancunet? Did Manc back out?

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Quasar said:

What's wrong with hosting it on Mancunet? Did Manc back out?

I don't think they realized he offered to host. I think he's the best option so far. He's not likely to meddle with the wiki's affairs beyond the hosting itself, which hopefully won't have any issues.

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Solarn said:

I don't think they realized he offered to host. I think he's the best option so far. He's not likely to meddle with the wiki's affairs beyond the hosting itself, which hopefully won't have any issues.

Right. The current issue at hand is what to *call* it, and/or what the domain name should be. Note this isn't dependent on the hosting solution (so long as the host has a nameserver to which they give external access). I guess there is some confusion going on about this.

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Graf Zahl said:

I don't want to piss on the old Wiki. If all things were perfect it would just get closed and redirect to the new one. But since the greedy corporate goons that host it will never allow it something has to be done to steer people clear of it. A seemingly benign name change sounds like one of the best options for that.

Then the maintainers could introduce a 'new direction' concerning content and slowly edit out the current stuff to be replaced by other Doom related things of lesser value. Then links to the real wiki would be legitimate content wise. No idea how Wikia would take such an approach though...


If you're going to form a new community, I'd just invest all your time into making that new community work, and making the doom wiki fork better. IMHO trying to decrease the quality of the wikia site is a total waste of time. If your objective is for it to be unpopular, then continuing to edit flies in the face of that. Build a better site, and they will come.

Graf Zahl said:

But this will take time. One can only hope that not some idiot will come along and continue to maintain it, despite the fork.


What is moving is the community, not the content. The content would be *copied* out. If anyone feels like being a part of the Wikia community, that's their prerogative.

The new wiki will need to use a content licence compatible with the old one, in order to migrate out the content. That will probably mean there will be nothing to prevent somebody, be it wikia admins, be it folks who want to stay at wikia, from copying *newer* content from the fork back to the old site. Another reason IMHO to just turn your back on the wikia site and don't worry yourself about whether it is maintained or not once you've left.

I think moving to an independent host is a good idea.

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fraggle said:
They haven't provided any.

Ah, I see... not even a FAQ on the subject? Damn!

Private individuals with their own interests have *always* been able to control the wiki. We have admins who control it. Whether we have sensible, neutral admins is much more of an issue than who owns the server.

That, which is nothing new to me, is not an answer to what I said, as hosting and admins are two separate aspects and one factors in on the other.

Graf Zahl said:
Well, that's the risk you take if handing over your data to corporate goons. Now they have control and they won't give it away.

Great thinking there. The advocacy of sabotage is wonderful too. And this goes out to all the fools being concerned that the wiki on Wikia cannot be deleted. If they had your philosophy of media possession in mind they wouldn't have used the CC license for the content and there would be no tarball to download.

They do not delete wikis because it is very hard to tell whether some people may still find them useful or may still be willing to contribute. Wikis aren't owned by their admins or editors. Wikia owns them only in the sense they host them, allowing anyone to copy (or modify) the content.

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myk said:

They do not delete wikis because it is very hard to tell whether some people may still find them useful or may still be willing to contribute. Wikis aren't owned by their admins or editors. Wikia owns them only in the sense they host them, allowing anyone to copy (or modify) the content.



If that was true they wouldn't actively sabotage a move to another server. They have a financial interest in keeping the stuff and obviously try anything in their power to keep as much control over it as they can.

In this case the 'free' license is a double edged sword. Yes, they cannot prevent anyone from making a fork of the information but on the other hand they also can take over full control over the database stored on their server and block any edit that might hurt their own interests.

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Graf Zahl said:
If that was true they wouldn't actively sabotage a move to another server.

Again, and who decides the wiki should be removed? Why should they remove it if it may be useful to others and profitable to them?

In this case the 'free' license is a double edged sword.

I suppose if the "DOOM community" had used a fully proprietary license, they, whoever these people are, could have just totally owned the wiki in harmonious and doubtless unity, am I right?

Yes, they cannot prevent anyone from making a fork of the information but on the other hand they also can take over full control over the database stored on their server and block any edit that might hurt their own interests.

I fail to see how the fact that it exists is worse than that it doesn't. Might as well start hoping other source port developers die in a fire so you can be the only one left, the only one to recur to.

Bah, we did recently have a thread referring to a blog about the sense of entitlement gamers have...

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myk said:

Again, and who decides the wiki should be removed? Why should they remove it if it may be useful to others and profitable to them?


Yes, it's profitable to them - but once forked hardly useful to others anymore. A link to the new page could take care of that. The entire problem here is that Wikia does not want sites moving off their server and actively blocks them.

myk said:

I suppose if the "DOOM community" had used a fully proprietary license, they, whoever these people are, could have just totally owned the wiki in harmonious and doubtless unity, am I right?


That's utter nonsense. I never said that Wikia is violating any terms of the license, just that they abuse it to their own advantage.

myk said:

I fail to see how the fact that it exist is worse than that it doesn't. Might as well start hoping other source port developers die in a fire so you can be the only one left, the only one to recur to.


The only problem is that the Wikia wiki sooner or later will become outdated - but thanks to Wikia's prohibition of forwarding and their active enforcement of this prohibition (and banning of contributors doing such things) no uninitiated visitor would notice.

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Graf Zahl said:
but once forked hardly useful to others anymore.

So someone decided that for everyone? I missed that part.

I never said that Wikia is violating any terms of the license,

Who did? I was pointing to an alternative, where authors or a leader of these authors, having proprietary rights over the articles, could take it down, and how ludicrous that idea is considering that the community is made up of various semi-related people. Quasar already mentioned the fact that understanding what people want in an online "community" is by no means trivial.

The only problem is that the Wikia wiki sooner or later will become outdated

Not necessarily. If people out there, plus any in our oh-so-unified community are interested enough, they keep it going.

It's been pointed out that the wiki on Wikia gets a lot of hits, and that their aim in the changes includes getting even more hits, which can attract contributors from around the world, including people not immediately interested in our "community". Sure, people like you would like to use their private servers as nothing but a link to another site, to leech the traffic that goes to the huge series of wikis they form a base for, but they aren't retarded enough to allow that.

I'm thinking two wikis may not be such a bad idea. The Doom wiki has always had a focus first on the main game materials, then adding "custom" stuff around that. It could be easy for anyone interested to maintain that if the fork acquired a somewhat different stance. Given the fork appears to be the initiative or urging from source port maintainers, that may well happen quite naturally. The fact that each wiki would be free, allowing each to take from the other what contributors feel is sound, only helps.

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myk said:

Not necessarily. If people out there, plus any in our oh-so-unified community are interested enough, they keep it going.



Who?

I had a look through the contributor list and >90% of all content comes from people that are strongly in favor of moving away from Wikia.


But really, why are you defending a bunch of people that quite obviously don't care about the pages they host, aside from potential profit? Content only matters to them as long as it doesn't hurt their bottom line and that's never a good scenario. The fact that they remove links that might steer people away from their pages tells more than anything else. It's corporate censorship and nothing less. Who can tell if they won't start removing legitimate links because it ulimately points to information that's detrimental to their profit margin. Too far fetched? I don't think so.

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Graf Zahl said:
But really, why are you defending a bunch of people that quite obviously don't care about the pages they host, aside from potential profit?

I already said or implied what I find beneficial about using Wikia, why are you asking?

Too far fetched?

Of course not, neither is the fact that Wikia is run by reptilians. It's all common knowledge.

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Jon said:

Build a better site, and they will come.


I think NOT having the oasis theme as the default is a grand start, but other than that how can it be better?

This is a very bizarre and random decision to suddenly change the layout. It seems a lot of companies are pulling that crap recently. Other than the GTA wiki are any other communities suffering, and planning to move?

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Cutman said:

Other than the GTA wiki are any other communities suffering, and planning to move?


Wikipedia says:Wikia also revealed the official name of the new skin, Wikia.[71] The Wikia skin will become the default skin on Wikia on November 3, 2010. Wikia also changed the Terms of Use, prohibiting any modification that changes the default layout of the skin.[72] As a result of the skin change, some users have proposed to move their wikis to another wiki farm.[73] Some important wikis like WoWWiki[74], Halopedia[75][76], WikiSimpsons[77] and Grand Theft Wiki[78] have already moved.

And that's not a complete list either.

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Cutman said:

I think NOT having the oasis theme as the default is a grand start, but other than that how can it be better?

Templates everywhere. ;)

My model of a very good wiki is this. Most of the article meta-information and all repetitive stuff is handled through templates; kinda like what I started on the ZDoom wiki with the actor template and my updates of the wad template to handle categories. But the UESP also feature very advanced custom features which wouldn't be usable on the Doom wiki. They've turned templates into what can nearly be considered a full-fledged scripting language.

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Cutman said:

I think NOT having the oasis theme as the default is a grand start, but other than that how can it be better?


By being maintained, growing, articles being improved, etc.

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There haven't been new fork name suggestions for a while now, so I think the poll for choosing one should be set up now. My suggestion for formatting the poll would be this:

Which name and URL should the new, independent Doom Wiki fork use?

  • Cacopedia (cacopedia.org)
  • Doom Database (doomdb.com)
  • Doom Engine Wiki (doomengine.com)
  • Doompedia (doompedia.org)
  • DoomWiki.org (doomwiki.org)
  • id Tech Wiki (idtechwiki.com)

If a mod/admin could attach this to the thread, it'd be nice. And if we stick to the original idea of having a week for voting, the poll should be closed around November 2, 12:00 PM UTC.

On the other issues at hand, I'd like to hear Manc's estimation on how his pipe and hardware can handle the 700K pageviews per month, as well as the eventual traffic spike that will occur around the upcoming Doom 4 release.

Also, who is willing and capable of handling the database dump acquisition process? I'm not even sure how it can and should be done exactly. If we need to write a request about it to Wikia, I can certainly deliver it to them, but someone who actually knows the technical side of the process should probably write up the request itself.

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