06-28-2024, 03:01 PM
(This post was last modified: 06-28-2024, 03:07 PM by ProxCenBound.)
I know it would be a pain to make the transition, but on the other hand based on the reading I've been doing, wikis are way easier to work with, at least for editors (setting one up is beyond me though). Creating links is as simple as [[brackets]], and a merged article can be done simply by turning the old article into a redirect - no need to hunt down old links. Categories can be used at the bottom of the page to sort articles into topics.
Vandalism, like Wikipedia has, can be prevented by simply only allowing trusted users to have edit access - same as we do now with the CMS; we would *not* be the encyclopedia anyone can edit. And unlike the CMS, viewing and restoring past versions is trivially easy, simply by clicking on "view history" - a useful feature for those times the CMS mysteriously eats our detailed edits. With this greater reversibility we could also extend edit access to more users to correct typos for us (of which we still have many - I see them in almost every article I read), and monitor changes using the wiki-wide Recent Changes feature on the left, and rescind edit access if needed.
Here's the free, open-source software used by Wikipedia and the Galactic Library: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki
Galactic Library, for reference: https://www.galacticlibrary.net/wiki/Main_Page
I'm not certain, but I'm sure there are ways to make it so the background isn't garishly white like Wikipedia, and instead resembles our current gray and swirly blue style, which I really like.
A big question for assessing the difficulty of porting all that content is: how many EG articles do we have, and what is the size distribution of them? Like, even if there are thousands, if like 90% of them are stubs from the very early days, that's easier than if most of them are lengthy. And even many of the ones that aren't stubs are only 2 or 3 paragraphs long. There might even be ways nowadays to write a script to do it for us - scrape content from the EG and plug it into identically named articles on a wiki, adding double brackets for linked text and maybe even adding pictures - though this would require true programming skills.
All in all this might be worth asking Trond about, and possibly creating a tiny proof-of-concept wiki, if that is easy to do.
Vandalism, like Wikipedia has, can be prevented by simply only allowing trusted users to have edit access - same as we do now with the CMS; we would *not* be the encyclopedia anyone can edit. And unlike the CMS, viewing and restoring past versions is trivially easy, simply by clicking on "view history" - a useful feature for those times the CMS mysteriously eats our detailed edits. With this greater reversibility we could also extend edit access to more users to correct typos for us (of which we still have many - I see them in almost every article I read), and monitor changes using the wiki-wide Recent Changes feature on the left, and rescind edit access if needed.
Here's the free, open-source software used by Wikipedia and the Galactic Library: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki
Galactic Library, for reference: https://www.galacticlibrary.net/wiki/Main_Page
I'm not certain, but I'm sure there are ways to make it so the background isn't garishly white like Wikipedia, and instead resembles our current gray and swirly blue style, which I really like.
A big question for assessing the difficulty of porting all that content is: how many EG articles do we have, and what is the size distribution of them? Like, even if there are thousands, if like 90% of them are stubs from the very early days, that's easier than if most of them are lengthy. And even many of the ones that aren't stubs are only 2 or 3 paragraphs long. There might even be ways nowadays to write a script to do it for us - scrape content from the EG and plug it into identically named articles on a wiki, adding double brackets for linked text and maybe even adding pictures - though this would require true programming skills.
All in all this might be worth asking Trond about, and possibly creating a tiny proof-of-concept wiki, if that is easy to do.