EG Redesign - Ideas and Suggestions?

[Drashner1]

Would it be fiendishly difficult to port the entire EG to a more traditional wiki-style format? Or at least something with better/easier search functionality? Maybe something with fun multimedia functionalities, pop-up windows, etc.?

I agree with previous statements to the effect that the current aesthetic of the EG is great as-is, but I feel like we could make the under-the-hood stuff a bit more streamlined/efficient/etc.

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.

The two biggest issues/concerns I have with the idea of converting the EG to a wiki are:

a) People going in and sabotaging things, possibly with the damage not being noticed for a long time. This was a major concern back when we were first looking to move to site design that allowed multiple people to add/edit/update things w/o the need to know HTML coding. If more recent wiki packages allow security features that prevent this issue, then the issue goes away.

b) The last time we ported the EG to a new platform (the current website/CMS) it took the better part of 3 years, primarily because only a very few people actually worked on the transition compared to the number of people who actually could have or said that they would. This with significantly fewer articles than we have now. To be blunt, this left a VERY bad taste in my mouth.

If some kind of automation can significantly accelerate a changeover to a wiki based EG and/or people will actually commit to doing their part and then do what they've committed to doing and we make some logistical adjustments such as only adding new articles to the new EG-wiki after some cut off date, then this would hopefully become much easier and go much faster and my issues with making such a change would be correspondingly reduced.

Finally - as far as an updated look for the EG - When Trond and I worked on the redesign of the main page and non-EG pages we discussed this and had pretty much decided to go with a slight variation on the non-EG page design (or maybe even use the exact same design), both the keep things simple and to make it more likely that the EG design stayed 'evergreen' since the 'future data interface' look that we went for with the current EG has had issues with being considered dated and required a long long time and lots and lots of debate (think months and months) to come up with. Would prefer to avoid that.

Ok, I think that covers my thoughts on this for now.

Todd