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Vermil

Should there be two Doom Wikis, for game information and for maps?

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A likely laughable random thought that crossed my mind; should there be two Doom Wikis, one for game information and one for maps?

 

Sort of like a 'technical wiki' and a 'walk through wiki'.

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2 minutes ago, Poncho said:

Uh... no.

 

Yea.

 

Also articles are usually divided in multiple sections anyway.

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Theoretically, two different DOOM wikis already exist, but their content is more or less identical. Either way, why have two different wikis for two different aspects of a game? It's much more efficient having everything in one place. 

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In a way, we actually have three Doom Wikis.

https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Entryway

https://zdoom.org/wiki/

http://www.eternity.youfailit.net/wiki/Main_Page

Both cover many technical aspects of Doom (though the ZDoom Wiki is, obviously, geared more toward ZDoom, and Eternity Wiki toward Eternity Engine) and many projects made over the years.

There's also wikia, but we don't use that one.

Why would we need a "walk through" wiki and a "technical aspects" wiki when we could (and have, and do) condense them into one thing that hold an umbrella over all things related?

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 Not sure what the rationale it would be for two different wikis. One possible issue with things the way they are is that the bot edits for map articles can swamp the recent changes page, but I think there is a filter for that.

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2 hours ago, Aquila Chrysaetos said:

In a way, we actually have three Doom Wikis.

https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Entryway

https://zdoom.org/wiki/

http://www.eternity.youfailit.net/wiki/Main_Page

Both cover many technical aspects of Doom (though the ZDoom Wiki is, obviously, geared more toward ZDoom, and Eternity Wiki toward Eternity Engine) and many projects made over the years.

There's also wikia, but we don't use that one.

Why would we need a "walk through" wiki and a "technical aspects" wiki when we could (and have, and do) condense them into one thing that hold an umbrella over all things related?

Four counting the Wikia one.

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The wikia one absolutely doesn't count.

 

Also there are more Doom port wikis than that; Choco has one, Odamex has one, Doomsday has one, Zandronum has one, Vavoom had one but it's been invaded by spambots, Doom Legacy had one but I'm not sure it still exists, SLADE 3 has one, etc.

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3 hours ago, Jon said:

 Not sure what the rationale it would be for two different wikis. One possible issue with things the way they are is that the bot edits for map articles can swamp the recent changes page, but I think there is a filter for that.

 

Not 100% sure, but I believe bot edits are hidden by default.

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36 minutes ago, Gez said:

The wikia one absolutely doesn't count.

Of course it counts. It's a wiki, and it's for Doom. Whether it's good or complete shit is quite another matter... and yes wikia is a shit.

 

How shit? A wikia page for another game managed to freeze and crash Chrome on my phone.

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No reason to divide the wiki, why would you ever want to do that?

@Gez I've heard so many people mention how shit the wikia is but never in any detail. I've always used doomwiki but looking at the wikia now it seems shallow and with less strict quality guidelines - is this what people hate about it?

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The long and short is that it used to be okay and it used to be the home of the real Doom wiki, but as time passed and Wikia tried more and more to monetize the hell out of it with ever-more invasive ads and unwelcome style changes to rebrand the wiki into some sort of social network, we got really fed up, took the plunge, and moved out.

 

Wikia is a shitty host and there is no longer any quality control on its edits. Do not use it. If you know and care enough about Doom to read Doomworld, do not go on the Doom wikia.

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6 minutes ago, elarmadillo3 said:

pretty much the same

 

"Pretty much the same" I don't even know where to begin but I guess some key points would be that doomwiki.org isn't crawling in ads, actually still keeps documenting the Doomworld Cacowards whilst the other gave up like 3 years ago, has articles about PWADs released after 2012 (lmao), and somewhere upward of 2000 more map articles with at least reasonably substantial skeletons than the wikia site, more extensive documentation of Doom 2016 and related physical media...

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5 hours ago, elarmadillo3 said:

I dunno what's so bad about the Wikia one, it's pretty much the same as the other one.

This is not true. We're not the same at all.

  • We do not run ads
  • We do not harvest and sell users' data
  • We respect the CC BY-SA in spirit as well as in letter and do not encourage use of unattributed material from other wikis, or allow blatant copyright violations. Wikia no longer cares about these kinds of things until and unless they get a DMCA.
  • Likewise, we similarly allow linking to other open, free wikis; they don't.
  • We have more than twice as much content.
  • We have significantly higher standards for our content as well.
  • We are run by recognized community members who earned their admin positions through hard work and respect. Wikia appoints random people to run their sites because the people ask if they can take them over.
  • We focus exclusively on being a wiki; we do not have forums, blogs, achievements, comments on articles, etc.
  • We run a much newer, better, faster, more featured version of MediaWiki with custom extensions
  • We offer five different skins; wikia has no alternative choices any longer.
  • We are able to fully take advantage of MediaWiki by totally customizing our site's JavaScript and CSS; wikia does not allow this.

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16 minutes ago, Quasar said:

This is not true. We're not the same at all.

  • We do not run ads
  • We do not harvest and sell users' data
  • We respect the CC BY-SA in spirit as well as in letter and do not encourage use of unattributed material from other wikis, or allow blatant copyright violations. Wikia no longer cares about these kinds of things until and unless they get a DMCA.
  • Likewise, we similarly allow linking to other open, free wikis; they don't.
  • We have more than twice as much content.
  • We have significantly higher standards for our content as well.
  • We are run by recognized community members who earned their admin positions through hard work and respect. Wikia appoints random people to run their sites because the people ask if they can take them over.
  • We focus exclusively on being a wiki; we do not have forums, blogs, achievements, comments on articles, etc.
  • We run a much newer, better, faster, more featured version of MediaWiki with custom extensions
  • We offer five different skins; wikia has no alternative choices any longer.
  • We are able to fully take advantage of MediaWiki by totally customizing our site's JavaScript and CSS; wikia does not allow this.

Jeez, ok, i get it. 2 people already answered.

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IMO suggestions like this, even well-intentioned, are incompatible with the all-volunteer nature of the Doom community. There is no CEO to force everyone's contributions into a particular structure. The overall pattern develops incrementally over time, according to what people are motivated to do.

 

Gez is correct that a few, but not all, specialized topics are separate from doomwiki.org. Personally I wouldn't have designed it that way, but I can see that it serves the community. There is this horde of people who desperately yearn for one copypasted function or one flag at a time, and to learn nothing else in the process. For them, a well-referenced history article is just noise. (See here for a counterargument however.)

 

Also on a practical level, this would be a large amount of programming and coordination without adding or improving any actual content as a result, just to organize link targets better. Somehow I can't see any power users coming out of the woodwork to add that to a to-do list. (It has occasionally been done to avert permanent information loss, e.g. when the Chex Quest wiki was abandoned.)

 

6 hours ago, elarmadillo3 said:

it's pretty much the same as the other one

 

If doomwiki.org stays operational long enough, it will eventually have so much additional documentation (as Eris says above), and so little trolling and malware (remember who is the supermoderator at Wikia?), that 99.9% of search terms simply won't exist on older sites. That's more the 60-year plan though. :>

 

11 hours ago, Aquila Chrysaetos said:

when we could (and have, and do) condense them into one thing that hold an umbrella over all things related?

 

Again speaking only for myself, I would actually apply this statement to broad-based wikis with a handful of Doom pages (like TCRF) and non-wiki specialist sites (like classicdoom.com), for two reasons: [1] doomwiki.org is better at fitting their individual facts into an overall narrative, as a permanent historical record. [2] Such sites seem to live off corporate goodwill and/or one maintainer having copious hobby time, and either of those can change overnight.

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