well it's an idea that's been thrown around before but its not as straightforward as all that. wikia has its problems but they have been going for a long time and they seem to know what they're doing; i'm fairly confident that they won't go out of business overnight or lose our wiki to some kind of unrecoverable technical problem. i would absolutely not have the same confidence about orain or shoutwiki at this point. wikkii, another once-touted alternative, seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth taking all its wikis with it. (edit: and another, tropicalwikis)
my preference probably would be a self-hosted option - i do have somewhere to host it and enough experience to pull it off (hopefully), although that still leaves it reliant on me, and if i were to suddenly disappear or become unable to pay the hosting bills it would be much harder to hand it off to someone else (effectively we'd have to do *another* full wiki move)
there are also plenty of issues on wikia's side that would make a move problematic - as you say it's a pain to back up a wikia wiki with images (although it's worth noting that shoutwiki currently does not offer a database dump feature
at all due to unspecified "technical issues" (http://www.shoutwiki.com/wiki/Help:Database_download)). wikia also (unless their policies have changed since i last checked) don't permit you to close down an existing wiki, or even to advertise the new one on the old one, which would fragment the (already fairly small) community; there'd be people still editing the wikia-hosted wiki completely oblivious to the existence of the new one. wikia's one would also continue to dominate google results for bootleg game-related topics as it's been established for longer and wikia in general is ranked highly by google, so new people would probably be more likely to find the wikia one than the new one.
so yeah really it's a lot of hassle and there are a lot of issues to be overcome, and at this point i'm not sure if it's worth it; personally i have no major problems with wikia's current skin anyway, most other mediawiki skins look about 15 years out of date (shoutwiki's "aurora" in particular is hilariously ugly) with the exception of vector, which has the unfortunate side effect of making every site that uses it look exactly like wikipedia.[/quote]Sheesh, Use Wikimedia and call it a day! :pandamad:
wikimedia is the organisation that owns wikipedia, they don't host random wikis.
- taizou
- Jan 3 2015, 06:18:36 PM
wikimedia is the organisation that owns wikipedia, they don't host random wikis.[/quote]Oh...
I actually did think about the ShoutWiki/Orain longevity problem itself. I think hosting Bootleg-Games would best for the wiki. You can try and contact someone to see if they'd do it for you (Porplemontage, for example, pays for hosting many NIWA wikis & Jake does it with Wikisimpsons).
Do you guys think this is a valid discussion too? (and yes, I dislike ShoutWiki's Aurora skin, except I can read the article easier than with Oasis on Wikia.)
- Y2K05
- Jan 3 2015, 08:46:57 PM
I actually did think about the ShoutWiki/Orain longevity problem itself. I think hosting Bootleg-Games would best for the wiki. You can try and contact someone to see if they'd do it for you (Porplemontage, for example, pays for hosting many NIWA wikis & Jake does it with Wikisimpsons).
Do you guys think this is a valid discussion too? (and yes, I dislike ShoutWiki's Aurora skin, except I can read the article easier than with Oasis on Wikia.)
[/quote]well the hosting part wouldnt be a huge problem, i can definitely do it myself if necessary (i have a VPS i'm barely using which should be fine for the wiki) - it's mostly the other stuff, ie that moving all the content (including images) would be a ton of effort, and that we'd end up with a fragmented community because the old wiki would still be around. it is definitely a valid discussion - like i said we have talked about it in the past - i'm just not sure if it's worth it at this point.
Well, Super Smash Bros. Wiki (http://super-smash-bros.wikia.com (http://super-smash-bros.wikia.com)) has forked over to SmashWiki (http://ssbwiki.com) (http://ssbwiki.com)), and the forked wiki is successful. It is possible for forked wikis to be successful.
And if the wiki does fork, I'll see what I can do to help out. But yeah, I agree with your points, mostly the latter.
I can pay for hosting forever.
Let me know if you want to do it self hosted.
Also I think I can help migrate etc. Even bring more traffic.
Hi there. It's nice to hear your input. I think that you need to bring that conversation up with taizou or some of the other admins.
It needs a major make-over and clean-up.