Wiki Maintenance

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

• Move 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
• Move 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

(The below was valid when we were using a free wiki hosted in India.  Now that I am hosting the damned thing, I should be able to figure out how to do a real backup -ZM)
   ZM: Occasionally I do a wiki-wide backup.  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 give it a list.  I feed it a list, one entry per line, of all the pages in the wiki.  Since we are constantly getting new pages (and occasionally throw one out), before I can do this I 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.
   Because of this, I've developed a knee-jerk reaction to any page that is nothing more than a redirect.  I delete it.  If we have a bad link because some page points to "Sarah" when the real page is named "Sara", the answer isn't to create an empty "Sarah" page that points to "Sara", the answer is to fix the broken link.  Make it point to the actual page.  For that matter, which one is right?  Maybe "Sarah" is correct, and we need to fix _those_ links.
   The only reason to have redirects is if we have a standard name for a group, like maybe all the colonies have pages named for the star system.  People will go looking for "Geratat"; and it should have a page, but some colonies already have their own page "Vulcan".  In that case we should have the standard "Geratat" pointing to "Vulcan".  That's about it.  If I ever get bored I will move all content to "Geratat" and delete "Vulcan".
   (If someone ever figures out an easier way to do a wiki-wide backup, I may be willing to listen to reason here about redirects.  Until then, though, no. -ZM)
   The wiki software manual at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Backing_up_a_wiki has details on several methods.  I have not gotten any of them to work.

(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))