Doom Wiki Development - Now Open to Admins and Power Users

[Quasar]

This is a new thread to discuss the final leg of development on opening the Doom Wiki at its new home at http://doomwiki.org

Manc and I have gotten together and he has added another HTTP auth to allow the wiki to be cleaned up before we open it to the general public, which I anticipate should happen sometime in early or mid July.

The following are some of the frontend tasks that remain:

• The front page needs a complete redesign
  
• Many of the help pages are totally broken and cleared out due to the fact they used Wikia-specific information, templates, etc. These need to be replaced with information specific to the new Doom Wiki and its staffing and policies.
  
• A firm admin culture needs to be reestablished in the new environment. We should evaluate the way things were done on the Wikia servers and decide what to keep/what to change.
  
• All pages that used the Youtube video embedding extension will need to be identified and re-adjusted to use the different plugin we have installed.
  
• Worthwhile edits made to the Wikia wiki since the end of February will need to be ported over by hand (newest revisions only, no history is necessary).
  

Some backend tasks also remain, but those will likely fall on me to complete, and they include:

• Configuration of some of the anti-spam addons.
  
• Hopefully adding a license notice to the default skin, as it does not have one.
  

If you are an admin on the current wiki, you have an automatic invite to participate and it is strongly hoped that all will join in. If you are a power user editor on the old wiki, you may be considered for adminship on the new wiki once the staff is able to convene on the matter. And even if not, you should ask about how to login and you will be given the opportunity to claim your account and start editing.

To receive the login information, please contact me either by privmsg here at DWF, on IRC (OFTC.net), or by email at haleyjd@hotmail.com (privmsg is strongly suggested). Please do not post requests in this thread, I will ignore any such requests as I cannot reply to them here. Instead feel free to use this thread for external discussion of the cleanup process.

[Xeriphas1994]

Thanks to all who participated in the enormous amount of backend work (so that hicks like myself, who can't even write a script, can prance in at the end and look like they're contributing).

Response to Quasar:

• Many of the help pages are totally broken and cleared out   Er, who is claiming that the wiki has ever had "many" help pages?  :>   I actually think this would be a perfectly good stopgap measure.  I would be willing to do the customization work afterwards, though I do not really want to — it looks bad when one admin just unilaterally rewrites an official-looking page.
  
• Youtube video embedding extension   I could only find one of these.  MediaWiki's search function cannot handle characters like "<", so someone may have to grep the actual DB dump to find the rest.
  
• Worthwhile edits made to the Wikia wiki since the end of February will need to be ported over   As you noted on IRC, this has already started.  How do we know when it's done?  Generally it's difficult to agree on what is worthwhile.  :D
  
• admin culture   A necessary evil, I suppose, since the admins have a lot more responsibilities now.  I think that (1) we must always have one active admin who knows how to perform range blocks and deal with collateral damage; (2) the admins page should be revised to spell out the extra permissions for certain accounts, and to clarify the (usually unwritten) overall goals of admin actions; (3) we should revisit semiprotecting the main page; (4) we should reinstate the Problem Reports page.
  

Additional points:

• In the absence of standing Wikia directives, we need to decide whether our normal wiki-to-wiki copying practices and our licensing options are still compatible.
  
• There should be a site notice linking to these threads and the Central Processing thread about the fork, at least until we manage to write some sort of summary.
  
• A statement about the missing WAD and LMP attributions should be added to the general disclaimer.  (The license doesn't require identifying the uploader, just the author.)
  
• What does it even mean when an edit is made by "User:127.0.0.1"?  I thought that was a placeholder address that couldn't actually be used.  :>
  

[Xeriphas1994]

A few other technical points to consider:

• Block Wikia-created role accounts that we aren't planning to use (like User:WikiaBot, User:MediaWiki_default, and User:Spam_cleanup_script).
  
• SVG rendering doesn't seem to work too well (example).
  
• The [[wikia: and [[w: macros should be disabled to prevent abuse by vandals.
  
• What level of flagged/patrolled revisions will be implemented, if any?
  

[Quasar]

Most of this was already discussed on IRC but I am summarizing here for the benefit of others:

Er, who is claiming that the wiki has ever had "many" help pages? :> I actually think this would be a perfectly good stopgap measure. I would be willing to do the customization work afterwards, though I do not really want to — it looks bad when one admin just unilaterally rewrites an official-looking page.

What happened is that I threw out any links to Wikia and I didn't replace them with local resources in many instances. A lot of the "Help:" namespace links you will find do not go anywhere - I don't even think there's a Help namespace; IIRC it was originally WikiaHelp, so I removed the Wikia part under the assumption that we *might* create a "Help" namespace to replace it. It certainly isn't required.

I could only find one of these. MediaWiki's search function cannot handle characters like "<", so someone may have to grep the actual DB dump to find the rest.

Pages with links into the "Video:" namespace are the problem and finding them may indeed require some backend work.

Worthwhile edits made to the Wikia wiki since the end of February will need to be ported over As you noted on IRC, this has already started. How do we know when it's done? Generally it's difficult to agree on what is worthwhile. :D

As I mentioned on IRC, I wouldn't exclude anything deliberately, but it's up to individual editors to decide what, out of the beneficial edits since February that they happen to know about, is worth their time to bring across. We won't allow it to become a distraction or delay to the project, naturally, since maintaining parity is not a goal.

In the absence of standing Wikia directives, we need to decide whether our normal wiki-to-wiki copying practices and our licensing options are still compatible.

I don't think we can legally change the license from CC-BY-SA since we copied it from Wikia under that license.

There should be a site notice linking to these threads and the Central Processing thread about the fork, at least until we manage to write some sort of summary.

Definitely not a bad idea.

A statement about the missing WAD and LMP attributions should be added to the general disclaimer. (The license doesn't require identifying the uploader, just the author.)

AFAIK the attributions aren't missing. Since I was able to import the files, they were automatically reattached to their pre-existing File: pages with the original upload information. All users should note that re-uploading a red-linked file is not the appropriate action to take, as that would create a new file that is *not* attached to links or the File: page info for the original. Instead, I should be notified so that I can upload them via the backend. I am highly confident however that they have all been found already.

What does it even mean when an edit is made by "User:127.0.0.1"? I thought that was a placeholder address that couldn't actually be used. :>

And again as dicussed on IRC, the edits in question resulted from the aforementioned file upload/recovery process. The Upload log entries were created programmatically by the rebuildImages.php script on the server (hence the localhost IP address).

Block Wikia-created role accounts that we aren't planning to use (like User:WikiaBot, User:MediaWiki_default, and User:Spam_cleanup_script).

Definitely a good idea, although these accounts already cannot login since they have no password set.

SVG rendering doesn't seem to work too well (example).

Yep, seems right broken. This could be a problem with the php configuration, and I may need Manc's help to fix it.

The [[wikia: and [[w: macros should be disabled to prevent abuse by vandals.

These are still in the DB currently. The only way to manage interwikis is through MySQL, and I already tuned that table earlier to redirect many links to non-wikia wiki alternatives, and added a few that were missing to other DOOM-related wikis. I am not sure if it is safe to outright delete an interwiki entry from the DB, as it might create a data integrity issue in the links table, but I *can* easily change the URL to which they point.

What level of flagged/patrolled revisions will be implemented, if any?

I believe one of our existing plugins provides for this, but I have not tried to play with it yet.

[Xeriphas1994]

Stuff I did:

• Used the {{#ev}} function to fix a dozen or so broken video links. More may have been added since the DB dump, of course.
  
• Revised or eliminated links to the Help: space, either locally (including those Wikia pages mirrored without our permission) or on the Help/Howto/Central/Community Wikia sites. More may have been added since the DB dump, of course, though that seems unlikely to me.
  
• Cleared out the last of the Wikia links from project space pages.  (EDIT — nope, not quite.  Gez got a few I missed.)
  
• Cleared out the last of the Wikia links from the system messages.  (EDIT — nope, not quite.  Gez got a few I missed.)
  
• Blocked User:WikiaBot, User:MediaWiki_default, and User:Spam_cleanup_script.
  
• Put up a site notice saying that there was a fork.
  
• Added ZeniMax Media to the list of interested parties in our copyright templates.
  
• Added licensing tags to 129 images that didn't have them (I will get into fair use violations as soon as the entire community can weigh in).
  
• Renamed Template:Wikia_gaming.
  
• Slightly stricter standard for "inactivity" on Doom_Wiki:Administrators.
  
• Blanked the autoblock whitelist. As we have no record of how the decisions were made, it's best to be conservative until we have a good reason to populate this, IMO.
  

Further questions for Quasar:

• flagged/patrolled revisions   I guess what I'm really asking is, if we are not going to use this, can we at least conceal that distracting "draft page" message in the upper right-hand corner?  We don't have to make a final decision right now obviously.
  
• but I *can* easily change the URL to which they point   Hmmm, point them to doomwiki.org?  Even an error message would be preferable to letting new users think we are affiliated with Wikia.
  
• they were automatically reattached to their pre-existing File: pages with the original upload information   Er, I hate to contradict you, but that doesn't appear to be the case.  For example, I am pretty sure this file was uploaded at least three times.
  
• I don't think we can legally change the license from CC-BY-SA since we copied it from Wikia under that license   Hm, I guess that's true.  So now whenever large chunks of text are copied from Wikipedia or another copyleft wiki, we need to link to the appropriate *old* revision or old contribution history on the original page, not just the article title.  Right?
  

[Quasar]

Xeriphas1994 said:

1. flagged/patrolled revisions   I guess what I'm really asking is, if we are not going to use this, can we at least conceal that distracting "draft page" message in the upper right-hand corner?  We don't have to make a final decision right now obviously.
   
2. but I *can* easily change the URL to which they point   Hmmm, point them to doomwiki.org?  Even an error message would be preferable to letting new users think we are affiliated with Wikia.
   
3. they were automatically reattached to their pre-existing File: pages with the original upload information   Er, I hate to contradict you, but that doesn't appear to be the case.  For example, I am pretty sure this file was uploaded at least three times.
   
4. I don't think we can legally change the license from CC-BY-SA since we copied it from Wikia under that license   Hm, I guess that's true.  So now whenever large chunks of text are copied from Wikipedia or another copyleft wiki, we need to link to the appropriate *old* revision or old contribution history on the original page, not just the article title.  Right?
   

1. Only by disabling the extension. I added this extension because some users were excited about the ability to have patrolled edits. Obviously not everyone is going to agree.
   
2. Works for me.
   
3. You are right that the original upload info was lost - I was incorrect when I stated that it had been preserved. It was actually lost during the import process and never existed on our copy of the server; instead, the situation we were in was one where links to the File: page were fine but links to the file itself (including on the File: page itself) were red, and that's why I needed to use the rebuildImages.php script to fix these - the database state was inconsistent and reuploading the file through the frontend would not fix that properly, thus said the MediaWiki staff.
   
4. Isn't Wikipedia also under CC-BY-SA? I don't really see how there's any need for an operational change here. Isn't linking to the article at Wikipedia considered attribution?
   

[Gez]

Quasar said:

Only by disabling the extension. I added this extension because some users were excited about the ability to have patrolled edits. Obviously not everyone is going to agree.

It's FlaggedRev, isn't it? I think the only problem here is that people need to be members of the Editor group so that pages will get actually reviewed and stuff. Being admin is not enough. And there are no editors (except me because I just added myself).

I guess all currently invited people could be given editor status. I'm going to do that.

Edit: promoted a few admins to editor status. Not sure who is around yet or not.

[Xeriphas1994]

Quasar said:

Isn't Wikipedia also under CC-BY-SA? I don't really see how there's any need for an operational change here. Isn't linking to the article at Wikipedia considered attribution?

For Wikipedia alone, you appear to be correct.  But there are more relevant sites, like the ZDoom wiki, which are GFDL; there is not necessarily 100 percent compatibility anymore.

Also, although I'm sure Janizdreg knows this, we need to avoid concealing image sources with our skin designs.

[Gez]

Very minor issue: the basic usergroup is named "wikian". I don't know where to change that.

I've finished reviewing all templates. A few needed some cleanup so it wasn't a baad thing. (Template:Disputed isn't marked as reviewed yet since it suffers from the SVG bug.)

[Quasar]

Gez said:

Very minor issue: the basic usergroup is named "wikian". I don't know where to change that.

I've finished reviewing all templates. A few needed some cleanup so it wasn't a baad thing. (Template:Disputed isn't marked as reviewed yet since it suffers from the SVG bug.)

I wasn't sure if that was a reference to Wikia, or a general term for somebody that likes/uses wikis. Any clue what the default name of that group is supposed to be? I have a feeling I'll need to change it in the database.

[Gez]

Looking at the user rights log in non-wikia wikis, this group does not even seem to exist. Instead people just don't belong to any group at all (e.g., "<admin> changed group membership for User:<Promoted> from (none) to <something else> (<comment>)".

It may be a wikia-specific group to make the difference between people globally registered and other locally registered.

[Xeriphas1994]

Just a minor factual erratum — the database dump I searched is actually dated May 23, which is more recent than the Big Scrape.  Therefore there is little or no possibility of unreviewed internal links to the Video: and Help: spaces (unless of course I made transcription errors during my searches).

[Jon]

Good work folks, I'm glad to see progress ☺ I'll see what I can do.

[Quasar]

Please note that the ability to add new user accounts is temporarily offline due to some kind of configuration change made to Mancunet which has rendered me without the permissions necessary to execute the eval.php script required for dumping a user's cache.

Until this is rectified I won't be able to grant anyone else access.

UPDATE: This problem is now repaired. Thanks again to manc.

[Janizdreg]

I intend to try my hand at a new front page design during next week. And if that doesn't work out, we can probably use the old design from 2007 as a placeholder until a suitable new alternative is created.

[Sigvatr]

I don't think anyone should feel turned off by the possibility of having multiple skins available to use, so take a shot if you want.

[Xeriphas1994]

OK, peanut gallery update.

I found a bug today, namely that MediaWiki seems reluctant to categorize map articles.  It affects newly categorized articles as well, but I can't quite tell what the edge cases are... Thematic Elements is also categorized under "{" in Category:MAP22, but E2M1ED.WAD appears under "E" in Category:Level_WADs.

Here are the other items left on my "definitely clean up before the wiki opens" list.  All are tasks I don't know how to do or can't do alone, but OTOH maybe other editors have ideas I could help with.

1. Quasar saying, "A firm admin culture needs to be reestablished in the new environment".
   
2. Main page css cleanup.
   
3. CC-BY-WHATEVER notice still not displaying in page footer in all skins.
   

[Gez]

Basically, the map template is broken by the absence of the string extension.

[Manc]

Gez said:

Basically, the map template is broken by the absence of the string extension.

I've installed this extension, but I'm still seeing the { problem I think (like here right?). I did get the one for the appropriate version, but now I'm wondering if maybe it should be bumped to 1.17.0.

EDIT: According to special:version the stringfunctions are recognized and the hooks are showing at the bottom.

[Quasar]

Mancubus II said:

I've installed this extension, but I'm still seeing the { problem I think (like here right?). I did get the one for the appropriate version, but now I'm wondering if maybe it should be bumped to 1.17.0.

Last time this happened (with the Cite extension) I needed to change the order of include calls in the LocalSettings.php file so that the extension was included after the ParserFunctions extension. Dunno if that's related of course but I thought I'd mention it.

[Xeriphas1994]

(Bump Bump) You should know you should know that uh (Bump Bump) no news'll make you (Bump Bump) no IRC'll make you (Bump Bump) tyson lmps make you (Bump Bump) uh-huh, uh-huh

[Quasar]

We still need a decent-looking main page, and then I'll configure the spam addons and get the thing open.

[Xeriphas1994]

Rip and tear!

[Janizdreg]

I'm sorry to report that I haven't been able to come up with any usable new front page designs. Anyone else want to give it a shot?

[Blastfrog]

Quasar said:

We still need a decent-looking main page

As in the front page, right? Just curious, why can't the old one just be reused (minus textual references to wikia)? I thought it looked nice. Simple, straight to the point, well organized.

[Xeriphas1994]

Sodaholic said:

Just curious, why can't the old one just be reused (minus textual references to wikia)? I thought it looked nice. Simple, straight to the point, well organized.

Which old one?  This, this, this, or something different?

In any case, failing to display the copyright notice in all skins is a deal-breaker for some people, Quasar included.  Do you know how to fix that?  I don't.

[size=2]EDIT: Links fixed, thank you.  More coffee for me.[/size]

[Gez]

Xeriphas1994 said:

In any case, failing to display the copyright notice in all skins is a deal-breaker for some people, Quasar included.  Do you know how to fix that?  I don't.

Assuming this isn't entirely wrong, it seems something simple enough to do -- if you have FTP access to the files themselves because, except for editing this page, it's not something that can be done from the wiki interface itself.

Also I guess your first two links should have been this and this. Personally, I like the second (Entryway/New) but it is a bit cluttered and some things could be trimmed down.

[Sigvatr]

Quaser you have a male from me.

[Quasar]

Note that plans are in place to open the Doom Wiki to the general public at the first opportunity.

There is currently a caching issue either in Apache or php which has to be addressed before we can do this, however. MediaWiki staff had me disable caching altogether as a temporary workaround, and the experience is much too slow for this to be tenable.

[Quasar]

Update - the Doom Wiki will be opening today assuming Manc is available to remove the HTTP auth. More news as soon as it's ready.

Amongst things that have been completed, the captcha implementation has been configured, the main page has been repaired by Manc with his HTML wizardry, and links to the license and copyright info have been added to the Monaco skin, again by Manc.