

The ASOIAF wiki thread

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Posted (edited)

Discuss here about improving and expanding the wiki.

Link:

http://awoiaf.westeros.org

Edited by Onion Knight

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Posted

You might get in touch with Ran and ask what he thinks about the idea. Sounds good to me.

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Posted (edited)

Wikis are made by people. If you see an article that needs improving, or think an article is missing, there's nothing stopping you from doing it but yourself. :)

For those interested, the Wiki is linked right at the top of the board. And I'll link it here. Just remember to use the appropriate template for any articles you grab from Wikipedia.org and paste here to indicate the source. If you have an account here, you already have a wiki account, so feel free to go to town with editting!

Edited by Ran

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Posted (edited)

Wikis are made by people. If you see an article that needs improving, or think an article is missing, there's nothing stopping you from doing it but yourself. :)

For those interested, the Wiki is linked right at the top of the board. And I'll link it here. Just remember to use the appropriate template for any articles you grab from Wikipedia.org and paste here to indicate the source. If you have an account here, you already have a wiki account, so feel free to go to town with editting!

It's not the content that bugs me. The wiki is pretty buggy, the search engine is really really annoying, and you can't upload pictures(or whatever the reason the wiki lack's of pictures)!

It's all making it very uncomfortable to use.

Edited by Onion Knight

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Posted

Bugs should be reported so we can look into them.

The search engine is the standard MediaWiki search engine which drives 99% of the wikis out there, and you can't upload pictures because it's not intended to be a repository of character art or anything like that.

If there's images that are absolutely necessary, we can look into getting them added. What kind of images are you thinking of?

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Posted

In terms of an actual encyclopaedia, with a list of terms, places, etc and definitions for each, the eventual plan is to add one to the Citadel (the space has been there for years, heh). Right now, with the Worldbook and all, we don't have the time, and I am also waiting on 2.0 of the CMS we use to see if it adds any of the functionality I need (like tags). If not, I'll need to save up and buy the add-ons. :)

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Posted

Bugs should be reported so we can look into them.

The search engine is the standard MediaWiki search engine which drives 99% of the wikis out there

Bugs seems to be solved as i started using Firefox instead of IE(today).

The search engine work's fine too with Firefox.

So disregard what i said about those :leaving:

and you can't upload pictures because it's not intended to be a repository of character art or anything like that.

Why not? Can't we add profile images to each character like Toweofthehand?

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Posted

This is something I meant to raise a while back.

When the idea of a dedicated ASoIaF Wiki was first raised, we tried to get one done on Wikia but were turned down for some reason. So Ran created the linked to on the board. However, shortly after this Wikia seemed to relax its policies and there are now dozens of new entertainment-based Wikias out there, and a bunch of non-Wikia-based Wikis have moved over to it because, frankly, Wikia rocks. Very easy to use, even moreso than standard Wiki, and adding images and things is very straightforward. I've been working a lot on the Wheel of Time Wikia in the last few weeks, adding maps to the nation guides, filling in blanks in the history of the nations from the World book and so forth, and it's been great.

Some bright spark, possibly unaware of the board wiki, created the 'new' SoIaF Wikia a while back even though it is in a very embryonic state at the moment. It's also got a number of copyright-infringing images that need to be brought under control. I much prefer using Wikia to the more basic Wiki system the board is using, but at the same time it seems futile to start duplicating efforts and ending up with two Wikis doing the same thing (although at last count there were three or four Middle-earth ones, and there's at least two WoT ones).

I suppose what I'm asking is the doability of switching to Wikia, porting over the good articles and redoing the bad ones (there's a shedload of dead links on the existing one as well, from where we moved them over from Wikipedia). At the same time we do lose the convenience of people being able to use their Westeros.org logins to use the Wiki and keeping the image situation under control could be an issue, much moreso for ASoIaF (where there is tons of great art people will be tempted to put up) than for WoT (where there's not much about).

Why not? Can't we add profile images to each character like Toweofthehand?

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Posted

Unless I'm mistaken, Wikia uses MediaWiki, just as the ASoIaF Wiki (and Wikipedia) do. Not very familiar with Wikia, though. Perhaps they have a lot of standardized templates in place.

Obviously, the content we have falls under the same license as Wikipedia, which ought to mean it's also transferable to Wikia if people want to do that. I think the link to the forum is a useful bonus here, though, so I'd hope people would see value in adding content to and maintaining the ASoIaF wiki. Still, up to folks to decide. :)

I'd be happy if anyone with some wiki experience would be interested in stepping up to take on roles as "senior" editors, template creators, and so on.

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Posted

All the Wikia sites had a bit of a facelift a few months ago and now seem to act a bit differently to Wikipedia and the Wiki here, with better search engines and automatic identification of links to already-existing articles (i.e. when you type in say [[Wes...]], 'Westeros' immediately pops up as a suggested link along with 'Westerlands' and other possibilities). It also has no problems hosting images, and having created and uploaded 56 maps to the WoT Wikia last week, I know this for a fact :)

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Posted

As I see it, the problem with the ASOIAF wiki is just the lack of contributors. We always were a small comunity and contributions became more and more scarece. I guess it's just lack of interest/too much laziness. And too many people devoting all their efforts to a) copy from the wikipedia without creating new stuff, or B) patrolling those who copied from the wikipedia without giving credit.

And while I understand the reasons behind the non-images policy, we should upload a logo asap. This ugly flower on the main page gives a very bad first impersion, and I've never liked the tullys anyway.

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Posted

Oops. Forgot that we never came up with a logo. :P Should be corrected now, at least for the Ice and Fire skin at the moment. Just something basic, we're planning some general redesigning after we get IPB upgraded when IPB 3.0 is out.

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Posted

As I see it, the problem with the ASOIAF wiki is just the lack of contributors. We always were a small comunity and contributions became more and more scarece. I guess it's just lack of interest/too much laziness. And too many people devoting all their efforts to a) copy from the wikipedia without creating new stuff, or B) patrolling those who copied from the wikipedia without giving credit.

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Posted (edited)

Yeah, being told that I couldn't copy pages that I had created in the first place from Wikipedia to the board Wiki even though that's the point of it, and it was something allowed with guidelines by every other Wiki I'd been involved with, was seriously off-putting.

After this laudable experiment has ran a few years I repeat my recommendation to focus on improving Wikipedia. Wikipediaâ€™s page rank is a fact, and contributing to a visible project is a strong incentive. In particular, I am sceptical about the idea of starting another wiki, because I see little reason that such an initiative should not fail for the same reasons as the â€œboard wikiâ€.

I may be wrong, and can be proven wrong my contributing to such an initiative. So please do that.

Edited by Werthead

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Posted (edited)

Didn't realize that images were that important to people. Hrm...

Well, I know Amok did give permission to reuse his portraits, I suppose, and I know there's properly licensed maps and such... So, why not I suppose? We'll see what's needed to enable local uploading and image display.

It needs to be made very, very clear that images must be suitably licensed for use on the Wiki, though. We have way too many people in the community to endanger the site because some overzealous fan uploaded a bunch of unlicensed art from FFG or Komarck or whoever.

ETA: Nevermind about being able to upload Amok's images. I see that Wikipedia users removed them, noting that he failed to give the kind of license required for the Wikipedia license. Since we use the same license, until such time as Amok provides a license in accordance with those terms, Amok's images won't be allowed.

Edited by Ran

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Posted (edited)

Well, I know Amok did give permission to reuse his portraits, I suppose, [â€¦]
Edited by Happy Ent

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Posted

Possibly some of the Wikia stuff is because they're using a later MediaWiki as a base for their own version, not sure. In any case, will see about getting us upgraded over the next day or two to 1.14.0, which is the latest stable branch. :)

From what I can tell, image uploading should now be available, but someone else'll have to confirm that as I've admin rights and can't be sure if that's why I see the upload option. We have not turned on the "upload from URL" option, just to make sure people are really sure about uploading something -- they'll have to download it to their computer and upload it from there.

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Posted

Oh please, not this again. Iâ€™ve spent many hours removing Amok images from Wikipedia many years ago.

Amok has never released his images under the Gnu Free Documentation License (GFDL). And I donâ€™t think heâ€™ll ever do that. (If he did, you and I could produce a calendar using his images and charge money for it without paying him a nickle.) Amok merely gave permission to use his images for non-commercial purposes (such as Tower of the Hand).

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Posted

From what I can tell, image uploading should now be available, but someone else'll have to confirm that as I've admin rights and can't be sure if that's why I see the upload option. We have not turned on the "upload from URL" option, just to make sure people are really sure about uploading something -- they'll have to download it to their computer and upload it from there.

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Posted (edited)

Thanks for checking, Wert. Will puzzle over the help a bit more to figure out how to enable it for regular users. :)

ETA: _Think_ I've got it fixed now. Not certain.

Edited by Ran

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