Wiki Maintenance

(Temp note - editor software crashed while saving after update, slowly adding sections in until I find the culprit. ZM User (talk) 07:32, 11 May 2024 (PDT))

Wiki Maintenance Notes

   This is a discussion and notes page for ZM, Sgt. Stoner, and the others who maintain the Swarm Cycle Wiki.

Operation Duplication Elimination

• Moved all useful content from "Home" to Main Page and Unwritten Stories -done 4/30/24; I left the history section for now.  On 5/2 I eliminated all links to "Home" and renamed the remaining history section Wiki History. -ZM
• Moved all useful content from "Join" to Contact Us -done 4/30/24 ZM, including the "How-To" section. -done 4/30/24 ZM, deleted "Join"
• If there's only one article listing stories, we'll never have conflicting updates where different articles say different things.  And, if there's only one article listing stories, we don't need a category to list all the articles listing stories. -done 4/30/24 ZM, deleted Category:Story Listings
• If there's only one article listing authors, we'll never have conflicting updates where different articles say different things.  And, if there's only one article listing authors, we don't need a category to list all the articles listing authors.
• I guess I don't understand the difference between a "listing article" and a "category".  Exactly what added value do we get by having both
  • a "Corvette" article which describes the class of ship and lists all known designs, and
  • a "Corvette" category which describes the class of ship and lists all known designs?

  From where I sit, the two do the same thing.  Duplication in a critical warship system is good, as it improves your chance of surviving damage.  Duplication in a 600-article hobby wiki is stupid and leads to confusion when one is updated and the other is not.  One or the other is going. -ZM

Pages Still Needed

   As I go through the "Wanted Pages" list of bad links I'm finding several places we _should_ have an article, but we don't yet.  I'm 'fixing' the bad link by replacing the double-brackets with triple-apostrophes.  Instead of Hell we have Hell.  I should probably list them all here as I find them: Dreadnaught, Atlanta, Plasma Torpedo, Artillery, list of pod freighters...

   We still have three big groups of 'needed pages':

• All stories - Every Swarm Cycle story should have its own page, filled with all the metadata that Sgt Stoner was working on.  This is an automated task better left to someone who deals with scripts better than I do.  Meanwhile, I have made a page for all the "ZM" stuff including author info and story info at Zen Master and Charlie Foxtrot has created stub articles for all the stories hosted on SOL.  All the metadata will have to wait. -ZM
• All authors - Every writer who has published a Swarm Cycle story should have his own page.  It should, at the very least, list all stories he/she has published, as well as a link to where it can be read or downloaded.  If the story has been removed from the publication site (Silly Artie and Just Jack are good examples) this should be noted.  This need is taken care of by the Library.  I don't see why we often have separate pages about an author and about their stories.  I've set up a combined Zen Master and ZM Synopses article as an example to see how it works.  On 4/30/24 I created several pages for authors who can't speak for themselves: Artie, JJ, Just Jack, Robert Auld, Tomken.  Still need: Lordshipmayhem, Zaffen, etc.
• All colonies - Every colony should have its own page.  These would be great places for the various writers to tell other writers about 'their' colony and surrounding system.  A script can create these and populate them with basic information pulled from the "ColonyList" page, but in many cases there really isn't anything there so there's no point in creating empty pages.  Best to simply leave them on the "ColonyList" page until we have more detail to put in the dedicated pages.

Helpful "Special Pages"

   The Wiki software gives us several management tools.  Some pages are simply lists of problems.
   Any broken redirects, where a page is redirected somewhere else but that new page doesn't exist, are listed here: [[1]].
   Any broken links, places where a link was made but it doesn't work, are listed here: [[2]].  The wiki software politely refers to them as 'wanted pages'.  Many of them are simple typos but many more are actual pages we should have.

Backups and Redirects

   Anyone can make an .XML text "backup" of the wiki:  The wiki software has a built-in function at Special:Export for this, but it's awkward.  The function is set up to "export" a particular page to a local file, but you can feed it a list, one entry per line, of all the pages in the wiki.  Before you can do this you have to go to the "All Pages" page and convert that screen-list of all the pages in the wiki to a .txt file with the name of each wiki page on a separate line.  Doing that once was a pain in the butt.  Doing it every time I do a backup got old fast.
   Anyone with server admin rights can do a complete database backup in several different ways.  The wiki software manual at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Backing_up_a_wiki has details on several methods.  Some of them require all users to be logged out.  If the admin forces all users off, any editing being done at that time is lost.
   ZM: Since I'm (as of late April 2024) hosting the wiki now, I can do a complete site backup, including the complete MySQL database.  I will periodically do that and put the SQL.gz file in our DropBox account.  Supposedly, if anything ever happens to me and my wife stops paying for my hobby hosting stuff, anyone can create a new wiki on the host of their choice, upload the latest SQL.gz file to it, and be back in business.  I have no intention of ever actually doing this as a test, but anyone else can if they want.

Script Management

   Sgt Stoner wrote a series of scripts that added a lot of functionality and cross-referencing to the wiki.  Naturally, the initial run showed several issues that would have been corrected in V2 but he had a computer crash and that effort ground to a halt.  One thing his scripts did, for every page containing info on a particular story, was provide a list at the bottom of the page of Swarm-Cycle terms used in that story.  This list included links to the page for that term, and in many cases that page does not exist.  At one point the "Wanted Pages" list had more broken links (1600+) than we had actual pages in our wiki (~700)- and this was in large part due to links that only existed in these lists of interesting terms.
   In most cases we should have those pages, but in others we already have them.  They just aren't named what he expected.  A lot of them are collection pages listing everything known about several examples of a group.  As we learn more about those items many of them may get their own pages, but it is senseless to create separate pages for a series of items when we don't know anything to put in those pages.  For example, simply redirecting all the bad links in "Ship weapons (Story Usage)" to "Warship Weapons" fixed 80 of them.
   While someone could invest the time in manually re-directing all of those links, if those scripts are ever run again the manual corrections would be over-written with the bad links a second time.  It would be better fix the scripts, then run them again and have the scripts fix all the errors.  In the hope that he can get back to that effort someday, here is a list of corrections for V2 of his script system: (This list has been moved to the DropBox "Wiki Maintenance" folder.)

Categories

SGTStoner: Anyone adding pages should put at the bottom [[Category:Needs_Category]] to tip admin staff off that they need sorting.
   A category doesn't really exist until it has a member.  Also, there must be some text in the description/text box or it isn't created.  It appears easiest to add the new category to a member article, then click on the red link to create it. -ZM

Secure Pages

   Several of the wiki's pages seem to be magnets for vandalism.  Those pages have been protected; only people listed as management in the wiki host's system can edit them.  Naturally, those few people never get around to needed updates.  We need more management people.

(Someday this will be a navigation template.  It will provide a bar across the bottom of each article with useful navigation links.  Until then, this is just a placeholder to get rid of all the red "broken link" indicators. -ZM User (talk) 10:00, 3 May 2024 (PDT))