EG Redesign - Ideas and Suggestions?

[ProxCenBound]

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.

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.

This is 100% do-able and in fact the current setup is a far larger security risk. Wikis do not need to allow everyone to edit; for example the Galactic Library, run by the ToughSF Discord, does not: https://www.galacticlibrary.net/wiki/Gal...ntributing

In a wiki, any damage or bad edits can be trivially reversed by going into the page history and clicking "undo" on the offending edit. "Deleted" articles still exist behind the scenes, they just aren't visible to non-admins, and could be restored if needed. The current CMS does not appear to track history, and appears to have no way of reversing damage. What if someone with editor permissions became disgruntled, perhaps due to some interpersonal drama, and tried to blank or purge a bunch of articles? It seems like a lot of damage could be done.

A permissions level above mine apparently exists on the CMS, so maybe repair features exist there, but I doubt damage is as easily reversible as on a wiki.

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.

I think automation is worth looking into, given how nowadays people even write computer programs with AI assistance. It may not be hard at all to automate. Personally, I would definitely be willing to help a lot with the transfer project, for what that's worth, though trying to automate it is beyond my personal skill set.

I assume that "only adding new articles to the new EG-wiki after some cut off date" means that during the phase-out of the old CMS, new content would be added only to the new wiki-EG. I agree.

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

To be clear I don't really have strong feelings on the style, as long as it is isn't garishly white like Wikipedia. Darker or gray backgrounds are easier on the eyes.

On a somewhat related note, no matter what we end up doing about a wiki, I think we should eliminate the underlining from links if possible. Very few websites do that nowadays (and wikis do not), making it appear like a dated style; links are just indicated by color, with underlining appearing when hovering the cursor over it only.