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RE: EG Redesign - Ideas and Suggestions? - Drashner1 - 07-19-2024
Ok - Here we go then:
The OAUP is considering the possibility of implementing a wiki-based version of the Encyclopedia Galactica.
To help us consider the potential positives and negatives of such a project, we would like to gather information from our community members on what 'problems we would like to see solved' with the current EG and article contribution process. Please give some thought to this and use the DM feature of Discord or the Forum to submit any ideas and suggestions you may have to myself or another OA Admin or Editor no later than end of day, Friday, August 16th.
Please note that we are currently gathering information to help us make a decision about whether or not a wiki version of the EG would be a worthwhile change to make. It is not a given that we will make such a change and even if we do, it will not happen overnight.
Finally, please limit messages to lists of problems or issues with the current EG. Please do not post messages lobbying for us to make or not make the change itself as that is not what we are looking for at the moment.
If you have any questions or concerns regarding any of the above, please reach out to myself or another Admin or Editor.
Thank you.
RE: EG Redesign - Ideas and Suggestions? - 1of3 - 08-21-2024
Friday 16th is past. Do you have some statistics about the survey?
RE: EG Redesign - Ideas and Suggestions? - Drashner1 - 08-21-2024
(08-21-2024, 05:29 PM)1of3 Wrote: Friday 16th is past. Do you have some statistics about the survey?
Not yet - will see if I can get something together this weekend.
Thanks!
Todd
RE: EG Redesign - Ideas and Suggestions? - Drashner1 - 09-16-2024
Hey all,
The following is the compiled 'Problems to Solve' list of issues we would like a wiki version of the EG to fix or improvements we think it might offer.
In some respects, we may have somewhat moved on from this already, but since we had set it in motion, I wanted to continue with it/finish it up. This list was already posted to the Editors for review, comment, and suggesting any additional ideas. Now posting it here for the same. My apologies in advance if I've missed or mis-stated something - and if I have, please say so and we can get the item added or corrected.
Ok, here's the list, divided by the different posters who posted/responded on the matter:
OA - Conversion to a Wiki - Problems to Solve - List:
Selden -
Being able to generate reports about page accesses (e.g. # of accesses, sources of accesses)
Avengium -
1. Having more people capable of fixing things and creating things (on the frontend) and not depending so much on a limited amount of people with the knowledge to do things. I think this remains true for backend issues.
2. An ability to create pages and features that can be done by page editors without knowing the programming language in which the website was made.
3. I want to change the "logout" time that happens when you are logged with your password on the EG site and it unlogs you if you are inactive for a long time in OA website. In general this does not happen in a wiki if you click the "keep me logged in" button.
4. The ability to be able to apply blocks of content as excerpts on another page. I call these "templates." These can be done by yourself or another person without programming knowledge, since it is pasting the body of text from one page to another. These templates can have alterable values that make them customizable on different pages.
5. Another pain point could be the classification into Categories, that I think could be made easier. Categories have: /eg-topic/ and articles have /eg-article/ I think this feature was coded into the website but, when on the forums, we talk about merging or changing categories and converting that category into an article, that requires us to make a new page with the article on a page starting with /eg-article/.
On a wiki articles have different "namespaces". These could be equivalent to the spaces /eg-topic/ and /eg-article/ but with differences. The categories in a wiki can carry text and content like the rest of the pages, but they are usually used only to make lists of topics and the rest of the namespaces would be where the pages that are categorized are located. I think this is much more clear and could speed the classification of pages of the web.
6. Making a better file manager / image manager. In my opinion the image manager is pretty old and could be better. For example, when you search for images, there are titles. And you have to click on the image title to know how it looks, every time. There is no visual gallery. In contrast, the wiki system has a file manager that makes thumbnails and has several added file search criteria. Apart from that, wiki-categories can also be added to file and image pages to speed up your search.
7. Image CMS features like "orphan" images or files. The list provided is in plain text. So you have to do another search on the file manager to know how that image looks or where you could include it.
8. Something I want to change too is the thing that we editors are the only people who can access to the links of "minor articles" that appear as footnotes with black title instead of blue title. Readers can think these are no articles and just mere footnotes. As we can see with the articles that Andrew P has proposed in the forum. He thought it was footnotes and suggested footnotes on his forum threads. I think making minor articles clickable again while maintaining their preview text would be beneficial to give readers evidence of how many minor articles we have that need text added or consolidated.
All wikis that are made according to the mediawiki structure have a predictable structure, so it is very easy to find their short page list. Here's a test: https://strategywiki.org/wiki/Special:ShortPages
This way, ordinary users, even those without writing permissions, could easily find short articles and propose extensions or merges.
9. Having lots of special pages that can be checked by any user or reader of the web. For example: https://strategywiki.org/wiki/Special:SpecialPages
This page works as an index and changes dynamically if more features and extensions recognized by its mediawiki core are added.
10. Having the ability to create links to pages like <{link|visible text}> like mediawiki. Having redlinks too. Current EG allows to link pages but one has to know the alphanumeric code and I think it could be easier to link to a word. That could make the work of "connecting pages" on the website easier.
11. The possibility to use DPL (Dynamic Page List):
https://community.fandom.com/wiki/Help:DynamicPageList
As a tool to create more complex subsets and lists of items that the ones that can be done with Mediawiki Categories.
This way, anyone who has read the instructions on how to use the DPL pseudocode could create a page with a list of articles with a specific criteria. Without having to know how to make scripts.
12. Bonus points for other extensions or features coded for a wiki framework like page statistics, What links here, Related changes, Printable version, Permanent link, Page information, Page logs, number of views that receives the pages: https://yourcreatures.miraheze.org/wiki/...:Analytics
or any other that are already coded and we only need to implement them if we need them.
1of3 -
As a reader, I'd like to read the EG comfortably on my phone. Whitespace left and right waste space, subcategories are too small.
As a reader, I'd like reader mode to work reliably in my browser. Does not work in Firefox 128.0 Android and Desktop.
As a reader I want the timeline up to date. And well filled.
As a contributor, I want to produce articles in a format that can be used by the platform to minimize further editing.
As a contributor, when reviewing articles, I'd like to make suggestions inline.
As a contributor, I'd like to get notified when an article I worked on gets changed. I'd like to disable notification for certain articles.
Drashner1 -
Control-1 - Right now changes to the website/EG beyond a certain point have to go through a single person (Trond) and somewhat through me (because I've historically played something of a project manager/volunteer in connection to them). The downside of that has been that it creates a bottleneck in terms of time - both Trond and I are working as volunteers, have lives outside of OA, and for various RL reasons (which I'm not going to get into here) have not had the time or bandwidth to move things along as fast as anyone (ourselves included) might like. My sense is that a wiki format would be (or is believed to be by its proponents) a way of fixing this problem as it would push a lot more control of the EG (format, reporting, appearance) down to the level of the Editors and/or a subset of the staff/membership who are familiar with wikis and how to operate them and so hopefully make changes and such happen much faster along with opening up new capabilities we don't currently(?) have. I'm not clear if there are ways to make the CMS based EG more accessible to change by people other than Trond who don't have a very solid programming background.
Control-2 - From a contribution and editing perspective, our current approach of doing everything in the forums and then porting the end result into the CMS is both time consuming and struggling to keep up with the current high influx of new articles/article updates we have been seeing for some months now. My sense is that a wiki is seen as a way to possibly streamline this process - which it very well might - although this may be something where changing the permission structure of the CMS might also work (or not, I don't know for sure). A possible issue here is that this seems likely to pull the current EG article dev process out of the forums, although - depending on the details - I can imagine some ways to possibly make that work and perhaps the pros of the process would outweigh the cons.
Responsive Design for the EG so it automatically adjusts when viewed on a tablet or phone.
The following two items are me paraphrasing Trond (accurately, I hope) -
Having the code supporting the EG be more recent so doing updates/changes in how the EG works doesn’t risk breaking older code originally created when the state of the art was less advanced or otherwise done differently from modern coding and code structure.
Having updates to the coding underlying the EG be handled by a large scale/likely to be around in the long term source such as Wikimedia so we just have to make sure we stay current on updates to keep the coding current.
Steve Bowers -
Some way of connecting to anchor points within an article
ProxCenBound -
1. Linking. I want to just use simple symbols to create an inline link, not highlight it and then scroll through the whole list of articles for each once. Something like this: [[Solsys]]
2. Handling article drafts in the site itself, with change diffs automatically generated with each change instead of needing to copy-paste and bold changes manually. The latter is very time-consuming and annoying, and probably contributes to why reviewing is such a slow process. We should speed up revising and reviewing as we are already commonly generating large backlogs and the project is likely only going to grow from here.
3. Access to every past version of a page, for easy reversion of issues.
4. Being able to distribute permissions more widely without increase in risk, enabling more to share in the work of fixing typos and uploading articles. Point #3 reduces the barriers to entry, as anyone who takes excessive liberties can easily have bad changes reverted and permissions revoked if needed (ability to view a user's contributions/edits would be helpful with monitoring this as well). Perhaps all forum members could have editing access to the Draft: namespace, enabling them to work on their drafts, while a smaller group of reasonably trusted Editors could edit the main/article namespace. Admins can revoke (or restore) Editor permissions as needed.
5. Converting pages to redirects - the ability to convert articles we no longer want to be separate into redirects, rather than needing to manually delete them and hunt down and fix links to them.
Stellar Regulator (from a DM conversation on Discord) -
The visual design of the EG/OA website is outdated and looks like it dates from the 2000s.
RE: EG Redesign - Ideas and Suggestions? - inkoalawetrust - 09-29-2025
Has there been any progress on this since last year? Also personally I think the site should still look like it's from the 2000s because I feel like it's part of the general style and vibe, makes it stand out while still somewhat staying to its' roots of when OA started, and most importantly, I just think it looks cooler, especially compared to today's awful flat minimalist designs. But of course I'm also biased since I for use a 2000s skeuomorphic-ish theme on my Discord, and think the best UI Windows ever had was between Windows Longhorn and Windows 7.
Edit: Just read this last page too and noticed a lot of mentions of a wiki format. I do think it'd be best for editors if that happened, since a software like MediaWiki has advantages like being maintained by others already , being far more up to date, and having pre-existing documentation on how to do things. The "only" issues I can see are that, of course, it'll probably be very hard to convert the EG into using MediaWiki or any other software (Plus future MediaWiki updates potentially breaking EG-specific setups like custom templates and a custom UI), and also to a lesser extent, just how hard it would be to jigsaw MediaWiki's user-end UI to have a more unique look like the current EG design, or its' past iterations. Since from what MediaWiki instances I've seen, they really don't stray from the base UI layout much at all, and often don't even have very unique skins either. And IMO it'd be a bit of an un-feature to have the EG look like a dime a dozen MediaWiki instance. But this is mainly for editors having an easier time than the I presume ancient byzantine system currently in place (Plus pre-existing wiki software already has features like templates). For users the current wiki is kinda fine IMO, certainly nothing that couldn't be updated instead, such as the search function crapping out if you try going back to it; that doesn't need using MediaWiki or any other software.
RE: EG Redesign - Ideas and Suggestions? - Drashner1 - 09-29-2025
There hasn't been major progress, although one of the Editors has created a mock-up/test site of a wiki that we've played with a bit and there is some slow rolling discussion about various details of how this might work. In terms when things might speed up/really get started, we've made some changes to how we operate as a non-profit corporation that are still ongoing and eating up much of Trond's time and mine (Trond as our webmaster being most important in terms of anything that happens to the website/EG/wiki stuff). At this juncture I don't expect to have bandwidth to really focus on the wiki project until early 2026 since right now I'm aiming to get all the 'business stuff' done before the end of the year. I can't speak for what Trond's availability will be at that time, but fingers crossed.
As far as the switch to a wiki, there are various reasons for it, many of them due to a wiki providing various improvements from an editorial and operational perspective. The current content management system isn't all that byzantine once you know how to use it, but it does have various limitations that a wiki would fix mostly due to built in stuff that is pretty standard for wikis as well as granting the editors various additional capabilities we don't have now. As far as which wiki platform we might go with, IIRC there's at least one - I don't recall the name - that we all agree should absolutely NOT be used, but beyond that at this point it's not fully settled.
As far as what a wiki version of the EG might look like - that's still up in the air, but a common mention is that people like the current fractal swirly background of the EG and would like that or something like carried over. Nothing much else has been really decided, but I'm confident that we are very much not looking to create a purely generic wiki.
If/when we launch this project, I expect we'll keep the membership updated on progress.
Hope this helps,
Todd
RE: EG Redesign - Ideas and Suggestions? - inkoalawetrust - 09-29-2025
(09-29-2025, 03:52 AM)Drashner1 Wrote: There hasn't been major progress, although one of the Editors has created a mock-up/test site of a wiki that we've played with a bit and there is some slow rolling discussion about various details of how this might work. In terms when things might speed up/really get started, we've made some changes to how we operate as a non-profit corporation that are still ongoing and eating up much of Trond's time and mine (Trond as our webmaster being most important in terms of anything that happens to the website/EG/wiki stuff). At this juncture I don't expect to have bandwidth to really focus on the wiki project until early 2026 since right now I'm aiming to get all the 'business stuff' done before the end of the year. I can't speak for what Trond's availability will be at that time, but fingers crossed.
Yeah I figured, didn't know about the weird legal non-profit stuff though.
(09-29-2025, 03:52 AM)Drashner1 Wrote: As far as the switch to a wiki, there are various reasons for it, many of them due to a wiki providing various improvements from an editorial and operational perspective. The current content management system isn't all that byzantine once you know how to use it, but it does have various limitations that a wiki would fix mostly due to built in stuff that is pretty standard for wikis as well as granting the editors various additional capabilities we don't have now.
Yeah that's what I was thinking of, but also how more front-end editing would be easier, familiar to newer editors; but then that'd probably come at the expense of MediaWiki (And I presume most other software like PmWiki or DokuWiki) needing a lot wrangling to get into a unique OA-shaped layout and UI. And then risk requiring updates for any new wiki version, which would slow down updating the EG when a new version comes out.
(09-29-2025, 03:52 AM)Drashner1 Wrote: As far as which wiki platform we might go with, IIRC there's at least one - I don't recall the name - that we all agree should absolutely NOT be used, but beyond that at this point it's not fully settled.
... did someone suggest that the EG be moved to Fandom? Lmfao. I mean, it'd be hilarious for about 5 minutes I guess.
(09-29-2025, 03:52 AM)Drashner1 Wrote: As far as what a wiki version of the EG might look like - that's still up in the air, but a common mention is that people like the current fractal swirly background of the EG and would like that or something like carried over. Nothing much else has been really decided, but I'm confident that we are very much not looking to create a purely generic wiki.
If/when we launch this project, I expect we'll keep the membership updated on progress.
Hope this helps,
Todd
Fractal swirly background? You mean the faded top graphic? Yeah I think that'd be pretty trivial to add to a MediaWiki instance, for example the Minecraft wiki already uses custom background images. Also I definitely don't think any of you want the EG to be generic, I was moreso saying that customizing any premade wiki software that much might be a problem. But changes like background images and hiding MediaWiki's normal "Ediit/View history" buttons and user login stuff for anyone who isn't a logged in editor should be pretty easy.
RE: EG Redesign - Ideas and Suggestions? - DSPE - 09-29-2025
TVTropes uses PmWiki! And so does the Artix Linux guide. I imagine it might be easy to customize to look just like the EG does now...
RE: EG Redesign - Ideas and Suggestions? - Drashner1 - 09-29-2025
A potential challenge with an EG wiki is to retain the 'the EG exists in the setting and you are reading it now' element. Most SF wikis in my experience are informational or fan sites that talk about their SF setting as a separate thing, while the EG talks about the OA setting as if it is part of it (and as the main vehicle for describing it).
We also want to retain the elements that encourage browsing (and even getting lost in for days and weeks) the EG, while also potentially making it possible to locate and navigate to specific articles much faster/more easily. So there will be some amount of finding a balance there.
All various things to work thru if/when we take this on.
Todd
RE: EG Redesign - Ideas and Suggestions? - DSPE - 09-30-2025
(09-29-2025, 10:27 PM)Drashner1 Wrote: A potential challenge with an EG wiki is to retain the 'the EG exists in the setting and you are reading it now' element. Most SF wikis in my experience are informational or fan sites that talk about their SF setting as a separate thing, while the EG talks about the OA setting as if it is part of it (and as the main vehicle for describing it).
Yeah that's the coolest part of the setting for me!
So if I am correct, the EG is basically the in-universe equivalent of Wikipedia?