Crawlin' Wiki

[Aule]

CrawlWiki really crawling these past couple days. The host site's other areas are not. The paranoiac in me says this is possibly a DoS attack by wiki-haters. The rationalist in me says it's likely not. Who is right?

Either way, should someone read this who can do something about it, please fix, thank you.

And, just for the record, I believe the wiki is clearly a superior format for the presentation of complex, comprehensive and interrelated data. It would be a huge loss to this game if it were to go away or become completely out of date.

[notcluie]

It would be a huge loss to this game if it were to go away or become completely out of date.

yeah, i'd hate to be the only source of bad advice

[Hirsch I]

relax, I'll always be there too.

[damiac]

I started at the wiki to learn a lot of the basics of the game, which it is very good for. It's also good for finding out what spells do, and seems to be the only way to find out what the hell the various cards do.

I think the wiki is like offline crawl. The online community pretends it doesn't exist, but in fact it's much more popular than online crawl. I think the wiki is much more popular than the tavern, and having a bad wiki isn't going to make people come here instead, it's going to make people play a different game.

[PleasingFungus]

I started at the wiki to learn a lot of the basics of the game, which it is very good for. It's also good for finding out what spells do, and seems to be the only way to find out what the hell the various cards do.

The learndb has listings for the cards, but many of them are obsolete. Of course, so are many of the wiki's card entries. Clearly just cross-correlate between them to try to figure out which is the least wrong!

I think the wiki is like offline crawl. The online community pretends it doesn't exist, but in fact it's much more popular than online crawl. I think the wiki is much more popular than the tavern, and having a bad wiki isn't going to make people come here instead, it's going to make people play a different game.

I would agree with that, with the caveat that the alternative to the wiki is not the tavern but learndb. Even so, a linked, verbose wiki entry is going to be much more useful than a twitter-sized learndb for most circumstances; learndb is designed for IRC reference, which is fine, but it's not the most common use case for most players. I would love to have a good wiki. Unfortunately, I don't see any way to get one as long as there's a huge wall between the wiki and any potential editors.

[Greyr]

Didn't Aule update the card page on the wiki?

e: maybe that was just the decks?

[dpeg]

PF: All of this is true. Couldn't we just (ask players to) slowly migrate good content from chaos wiki to dev wiki, and rename the latter? It's a pity that wiki editing is so hard... completely defeats the purpose

[Aule]

PF: All of this is true. Couldn't we just (ask players to) slowly migrate good content from chaos wiki to dev wiki, and rename the latter? It's a pity that wiki editing is so hard... completely defeats the purpose

You're talking about this wiki? I did not know migrating to this was a feasible option. Looking at it, the one possible hurdle I see is that it's not a WikiMedia wiki, so transferring pages between them is likely not going to be as straightforward as one would hope. What are the chances of revamping it to utilize the "standard" wiki architecture?

[PleasingFungus]

Didn't Aule update the card page on the wiki?

e: maybe that was just the decks?

The decks and some of the cards.

PF: All of this is true. Couldn't we just (ask players to) slowly migrate good content from chaos wiki to dev wiki, and rename the latter? It's a pity that wiki editing is so hard... completely defeats the purpose

I'd want to doublecheck chaoswiki's license, but it would probably be possible to run a script to dump the chaoswiki over to the devwiki. Also, If we asked nicely, the chaoswiki admins might give us the scripts that they use to automatically update the monster pages, which would be nice.

The trick would be, first, getting people to contribute to and use our wiki; posting about it on the blog, forums, etc would help, but google search rankings are still going to favor chaoswiki for some time. (The admins there seem like nice people - I don't know if I want to get into some weird competition with them. Probably the first thing to do with this plan would be to talk with them...) Second, we'd need to have a plan to deal with spam - which iirc is the reason that the chaoswiki people went with their extremely locked-down registrations scheme in the first place? (Correct me if I'm wrong there.)

If we do have an idea for how to run a crawl wiki without the onerous registration system that the chaosforge wiki uses, it might be simplest to just suggest that the chaosforge wiki adopt that.

[Skrybe]

Also, If we asked nicely, the chaoswiki admins might give us the scripts that they use to automatically update the monster pages, which would be nice.

I think this is what you're looking for.

without the onerous registration system that the chaosforge wiki uses

I don't get why people take issue with the registration system there. It takes all of like, a day or two for someone to activate your account. At least, that was my experience.

[Aule]

Didn't Aule update the card page on the wiki?

e: maybe that was just the decks?

The decks and some of the cards.

In fact, I created a page for every card (I'd hoped), revamped the decks topic, created a cards topic, tied them all together through linked tables, and revised the existing individual decks pages to utilize the new structure. I created the tables, all pretty and alphabetized, using SQL after I downloaded and imported the source code of versions 0.10 through 0.16 into a database I created of the card/deck arrangements. So, yeah, I did a bit, which is why I'm sad it's barely accessible lately. (I also alphabetized and reorganized the source, thought about pushing it on git, but then thought better of it.)

[Aule]

without the onerous registration system that the chaosforge wiki uses

I don't get why people take issue with the registration system there. It takes all of like, a day or two for someone to activate your account. At least, that was my experience.

Mine, too. And it is certainly easy to edit. But if this one is just as easy, then I agree discussions should take place as to putting it on the official server. I'll be happy to help.