(06-29-2024, 05:44 AM)ProxCenBound Wrote: While I was writing the above comment I asked on Discord, and it was Tasp who did that. They said "Probably pretty easy to get at least ballpark numbers for each article. I'll play with it when I get back to my personal machine". So we might be able to find out soon.

(07-01-2024, 03:14 AM)extherian Wrote: I would like to ask, does the OA CMS have any sort of backup system? Or is our only way of restoring lost/damaged articles to use web archiving services?

(06-29-2024, 12:43 AM)Avengium Wrote: For people who want more customization, there are lots of skins: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Category:All_skins

(07-03-2024, 12:30 AM)Avengium Wrote: How can I move this topic forward?

Is there anything we have discussed to do regarding this redesign?

(07-01-2024, 03:14 AM)extherian Wrote: I would like to ask, does the OA CMS have any sort of backup system? Or is our only way of restoring lost/damaged articles to use web archiving services?

(07-13-2024, 07:26 AM)Drashner1 Wrote:

(07-03-2024, 12:30 AM)Avengium Wrote: How can I move this topic forward?

Is there anything we have discussed to do regarding this redesign?

I think before we get much further with this that we should run it by Trond. As our Webmaster and resident website guru he has the expertise to consider how this might (or might not) work with the existing website (the EG is the core of both the OAUP and the website - but is not the only part of the website).

I am just back from vacation and still digging out from a backlog of both OA and RL items. I have some things I need to discuss with Trond later this month in any case and can raise the idea of an EG wiki with him as well.

Or - Others taking part in this discussion can reach out to him directly. We have other members of both the 'staff' and the Managing Board taking part and it's not like I have a monopoly on talking to him. The last time I spoke to him he was very busy in RL, and I don't know that that will have changed. But if he doesn't have time/bandwidth to respond then I imagine he either won't or will make that known.

Or I can touch base with him later this month and ask. If the idea has landmines or other issues that prevent it, I'm sure he will let us know. Conversely, if it is workable/positive, he can let us know that and possibly suggest things we should look for in a wiki package or the like.

• Outside of substantial customization, all structure in most wikis is manual, meaning that there are no semantics associated with individual pages articles that can be queried and used to do various things. So, we can't easily extract a list of articles authored by a particular person, we can't extract copyright notes in an automated fashion, and we can't populate the timeline automatically as a view over the wiki. You get date, title, and version metadata, but not much more. There are some janky workarounds and you can implement these things with custom code on top of a Mediawiki site, but doing so can be a lot of work, and tends to be pretty fragile over time. We also have features on the EG wishlist that take advantage of our more structured DB, though granted, they've been on the back burner for some time.
  
• The options in Mediawiki for look and feel aren't great. Different wikis have different pros and cons, but the system we have is more flexible than any wiki I'm aware of, in large part because we control the templates and stylesheets directly.
  
• In general, any customizations will be fragile. That is, as they post updates to the framework (which we would need to stay up with for security reasons), things will need to be updated and maintained, and I know from experience this can be quite time consuming.
  
• As it is the EG ties into the main site in a bunch of ways that would be lost if we shifted to a generic wiki solution. 
  

(06-29-2024, 05:44 AM)ProxCenBound Wrote:

(06-29-2024, 05:42 AM)ProxCenBound Wrote:

(06-29-2024, 01:07 AM)Drashner1 Wrote: So - as one of the admins who has been very resistant to the idea of converting to a wiki - and to throw my 2c into the mix on this:

Taking the easiest bit first - IIRC someone on the discord or here ran a script or the like to do a page count and it came back that we have something around 4500 pages in the EG.

I wonder how hard it would be for it to measure article length in word count by that same means.

While I was writing the above comment I asked on Discord, and it was Tasp who did that. They said "Probably pretty easy to get at least ballpark numbers for each article. I'll play with it when I get back to my personal machine". So we might be able to find out soon.

(06-29-2024, 05:59 AM)Drashner1 Wrote: Another possibility that might reduce the overall number of articles to move is to reimagine how information is organized in the EG.

As a major example - the History Topic contains some 33 sub-Topics - out of around a total of 300 - so something like 10% of our Topics are devoted to just that one aspect of the setting. Replacing all that with a single very large page, perhaps with 'table of contents' links to jump down to specific area, search functions, and possibly other things would hopefully be a better end-user experience (of course all the actual entries would still have to go in....).

Something I would love love love - but don't know that a wiki can do it - is to make a timeline that we can take chunks of and insert into other pages - creating 'sub-timelines' in other articles - that are still linked back to the master timeline. So a change to the master is automatically reflected in all sub-timelines. I'm told this is possible and not all that hard, but it would need Trond to program it up. If a wiki could just do something like that baked in, I would be very impressed.

Todd