Subject: As I said, I do think we need to move, and WikiTide seems to be the good choice.
Author:
Posted on: 2023-11-05 19:23:47 UTC
I'm not sure how much I can be of help, but once the move is underway I'm willing to spare some time to help with it.
Due to reasons outlined in this thread, some of us have come to the conclusion that our wiki can no longer stay on Fandom, and needs to be moved to a new wiki farm. This can also allow us to get previously cut articles reinstated. I cast my first vote and suggest Telepedia, which is the most permissive wiki farm I've found and it also allows good visual designs.
NotAracham is a representative of WikiTide who has graciously offered to answer any questions we have about the wiki farm here on the Board. Their intro post is here, but I wanted to start a new branch of this thread for them where it's more visible.
First, I've asked them to share some of the same information that's already been explained to me and Linstar via Discord. I found it most encouraging!
~Neshomeh
Thanks again, Neshomeh, happy to help condense down some of what we've discussed elsewhere.
While it's true that WikiTide as a service is a relatively new entry compared to the other players, we are by no means new to the wiki space. Our volunteer team and board of directors has had presence on and volunteered for several farms beyond just Fandom and Miraheze, including pre-acqusition Gamepedia, the Miraheze predecessor Orain, and its predecessor TropicalWikis. We've seen farms grow and fall for several reasons - disinterest, lack of resources, technical issues, interpersonal conflict or worse: morph into hyper-capitalist entities we had no interest in continuing to associate with.
Given that wealth of prior lived experience, we took a long look at where things went wrong with each and decided that rather than reacting to a sudden downfall, we had an opportunity to build something with a solid foundation from the start. Our key learnings:
It's from there that we developed the working model we've implemented today, with great success. Instead of the perpetual fundraisers of past platforms, we have in WikiTide an advertisement-free, free-to-use hosting service that grows in a deliberate and manageable way that keeps pace with our budget. Between community contributions, donations of excess profits from our companion paid service (WikiForge) should it become necessary, and our pursuit of not-for-profit status for WikiTide, we are fully confident (and have been proved correct thus far) that our approach to financing WikiTide will allow a resilience to grow with our community and keep any tendrils of capitalist overreach far, far away from our core service.
We are smaller, by design. By being more selective with the scale and scope of hosted wikis, we can ensure that we devote our time, funds and attention more equitably and provide a higher level of experience to those who choose to host with WikiTide. No member of the WikiTide volunteer team is paid to be there (even members of the board of directors), we're simply folks that believe quality wiki-hosting is a public good and should be maintained as such. It's our intent to be transparent as possible, so please feel free to ask any additional questions you may have.
--NotAracham
Just wanted to say thanks for stopping by and telling us more about WikiTide and its history!
(Also, in specific technical questions, can y'all import dumps taken by the wikiteam archiver?
We have the ability to import XML backups (which wikiteam has some of and Fandom staff can generate on request), as well as image dumps in the form of zipped files or similar.
We can't scrape archive.org snapshotted pages, though. Happy to dive further into specifics where needed.
It's a luxury that I'm happy our smaller scale affords us. :)
...it seems to go into some detail on other wikis.
I've put together a brief Google Forms survey to make it super-easy to register your opinion on this discussion.
There are 6 questions, only 3 of which are mandatory. Please respond when you have time. There's no rush (just, y'know, don't leave it until next year), and I want a response from everyone.
~Neshomeh
Hello! I meant to update y'all on this sooner, but this weekend I was sitting for an adolescent labradoodle that demanded pretty much all of me, so here we are.
As of today, the survey has responses from 27 people (myself included). There are still a few folks I know are more or less around, but haven't answered, so I'm not closing it yet.
You can view all the results in spreadsheet form here. To sum up the mandatory responses, in descending order:
I consider myself a...
* Discordian - 20 (74.1%)
* Boarder - 15 (55.6%)
* Wiki editor - 8 (29.6%)
* Lurker - 7 (25.9%)
* Non-PPCer with PPC friends - 2 (7.4%)
Should PPC Wiki leave FANDOM?
* Yes, at some point. - 13 (48.1%)
* Yes, as soon as possible. - 10 (37%)
* No, the problems don't outweigh the risks/headache of leaving. - 2 (7.4%)
* I need more time to think about it. - 2 (7.4%)
* No, FANDOM is fine. - 0
For those who want the math, that's 23 (85.1%) for a general Yes, and I'll note that hS hasn't done the survey, so for accuracy we should really count 3 for a general No.
If we had to move, where do you think would be best?
* I don't know - 16 (59.3%)
* WikiTide - 8 (29.6%)
* Miraheze - 3 (11.1%)
* Other - 0
Since some of you felt it should be left up to people who are active on the wiki, and I'm curious how the results from that contingent break down, too, here are the answers from just the 8 people who consider themselves wiki editors (myself included):
Should PPC Wiki leave FANDOM?
* Yes, as soon as possible. - 4 (50%)
* Yes, at some point. - 2 (25%)
* No, the problems don't outweigh the risks/headache of leaving. - 2 (25%)
* No, FANDOM is fine. - 0
* I need more time to think about it. - 0
That's 6 (75%) for a general Yes.
If we had to move, where do you think would be best?
* WikiTide - 5 (62.5%)
* I don't know - 2 (25%)
* Miraheze - 1 (12.5%)
* Other - 0
I'll note that of these 8, one didn't give a name, but doesn't appear to be a duplicate (ETA: and isn't Linstar, who tested the survey for me before I added the name question). One I'm quite unfamiliar with (Sogga aka VestaServal), but they're relatively new. One is not Yuki, despite how active you've been on the wiki lately and the fact that you started this thread. Are you sure you're not a wiki editor? {; P
~Neshomeh
From this, I think we can say that the general consensus is that we should move off Fandom, at some point, to TideWiki.
-Ls
[I wrote this before opening the spreadsheet]
Like, at least 50%of recent edits are yours.
-Ls
...can we re-instate links to adult badfics then?
WikiTide has a section in the Terms of Use called Links, which states:
WikiTide has not reviewed all of the sites linked and is not responsible for the contents of any such linked site. The inclusion of any link does not imply endorsement by WikiTide. Use of any such linked website is at the user's own risk.
IMO, that's a strong point in their favor!
However, for legal reasons they may still have qualms about linking to anything that could be considered pornography, especially involving underage characters. The exact line between "a story that has underage sex in it" and "child pornography" is one that they (and we) may not care to test. It's something else we can ask them if they say they'll have us at all, I guess.
~Neshomeh
Having done some preliminary poking around about Miraheze, it looks like there was a bunch of issues in the middle of this year that led to the project announcing a shutdown (before it got passed to a different set of volunteers that still want to be involved).
It seems like that's all in the past but ... it seemed worth noting.
(I also found out about WikiTide which is apparently from a bunch of ex-Miraheze people)
They seem to have educational topics foremost in mind for their service, but they also have a category for fandom-related wikis, so that's heartening. Their Terms of Use seem favorable, too.
It definitely seems like Miraheze has a solid plan to move forward from what seems to have amounted to a lack-of-communication problem, though, so we shouldn't write them off just yet. We'll have to look at the pros and cons of each.
~Neshomeh
They don't allow fanfiction or fanon content.
--Ls
You can't host your actual fanfiction stories there or have a wiki dedicated to recording headcanons as though they are canon. Since we don't do that, I think we'd be fine.
~Neshomeh
"Thanks for reaching out, we're discussing internally and will get back to you with more questions/determination in a bit. Interesting concept, but it definitely is on the cusp for a few of our current prohibitions. 🙂"
So... I guess we'll see?
--Ls
"After chatting with the others, we're glad to offer you a spot at WikiTide, should your community choose to migrate here." They also are willing to change their fanfiction policy to include us.
As for explicit stuff, they don't want the wiki descriptions themselves to be graphic (unless trying to be educational), but are okay with linking to things.
--Ls, summing it up.
They're cool with us discussing R-rated stuff in academic terms (e.g. to say a sex act took place in a fic, educating a reader about a story's content), but a wiki article shouldn't go into graphic detail about what was done. Extra-especially as concerns minors.
But yes, linking to fanfics (including missions) with explicit content seems to be okay.
The person we spoke with also said a few pages on adult topics are probably fine, ideally if they include education such as "how to write this thing well."
(Also I want to share that Ls was very helpful in providing details I didn't think of while losing my mind with nerves about Having An Important Discussions With A Third Party On Behalf Of The Community, haha. Good show, sir!)
~Neshomeh
Thank to you both for taking this delicate job on yourself!
By which I mean, any misgivings I have are mainly anxiety to the tune of what if we didn't look around enough, what if there's something important we missed, what if I secretly have no idea what I'm doing, and so forth.
At the same time, I can't think of any real reason not to go with WikiTide.
So, barring any rational objections, it should be fine!
I am going to demand more of a community response on this decision before action is taken, though. It is a Big Deal to relocate the chief information repository of our community. Do we need to make a poll or something to get engagement?
~Neshomeh
Since moving images is generally harder than moving text, will we have to re-upload pictures we’ve contributed? Agent mugshots, for example, or cast photos on the wiki page for such-and-such a series? I don’t mind having to do that, would just rather know in advance.
Because yeah, re-uploading could still constitute a big effort.
~Neshomeh
Help:Migrating to WikiTide § Importing on WikiTide
Most of this makes sense to me, but I confess the part about extensions and content models goes over my head. I don't know if we are using any, or if so, which ones. This is flagged as likely to break things if we mess it up, so I will endeavor to learn more about it. If anyone already understands, please let me know!
~Neshomeh
...So long as the policies are amenable to us.
I still consider the Wiki to be extremely important and definitely don't want it to go away. It's effectively the central repository of PPC information at present.
It's been an unusually busy week, and I just couldn't get around to watching that video before last night. But also, I could tell from some of the post titles on this thread that my stance of "moving too hard though, let's just not bother" had already been way outvoted, so it seemed kind of pointless. But I guess if most of the community is willing to make the move, and the WikiTide folks are explicitly willing to have us . . .
And as I always say on such posts, I'll help where able, but I really am getting more and more wiped out by work lately, so I don't have a lot of non-sleep time at home to work on fun things . . .
—doctorlit is sad another element of July's PPC legacy is disappearing
You haven't been way outvoted yet, because only a handful of people I know to be active have said a single word in this thread one way or the other. For all I know, the prevailing opinion might well be "I don't care about the wiki at all, it could be deleted entirely and I wouldn't notice."
I'd much rather hear people say "change is hard and I think it's fine to stay where we are for now," because that's at least a feeling of some kind about it.
So, I think I will make a poll. That way no one has the excuse of a message board allergy, at least. It may not happen today, but the rest of this week I have the time and the interest.
~Neshomeh only gets salty about total apathy, not valid opinions.
Because the issues are... they have too many ads (this is the internet, it's all like that), and they didn't let us keep the smut pages (oh nooooo), and they didn't let us keep the real people pages (but what we have now is better). Weigh that against the need to learn and build an entire clone (it will not be a simple copy and paste job, there will be things that break), the massive risk inherent in putting your eggs in a new, small, niche basket that might just break at any time, and the fact that... like... sooner or later the new place will also be capitalist? Because society is? There's not really an escape from that.
But like doc, I think this thread is abundantly clear that moving will happen. So eh.
hS
For example, to me the McDonalds case is a clear deal-breaker for staying on Fandom - it wasn't just filling the wiki with ads, but they literally edited a wiki's front page, without even asking the admins, to turn it into basically a giant ad by itself throwing out any useful info it instead had.
Now, it is quite unlikely for something like this to happen to a niche wiki like ours, but there is the possibility. I wouldn't want to wake up one day to see the front page suddenly say something like "The Protectors of the Plot Continuum is one of the domains ruled by the Multiverse Overlord" and not being able to fix it back because Fandom got a bunch of money from the studio who made a movie about fighting said Multiverse Overlord and they thought it would be a fun way to advertize to imply the villain really is now ruling all fictional universes...
Another hing I fear is, considering Fandom has become pickier with what we make wiki articles about AND their increased focus on profits, one day we see or wiki closed because Mr. or Ms. Suemary, parent of little Suemary who discovered that their little fanfiction has been sporked with us, is threatening legal action for slander and Fandom thinks "oh, it will be cheaper to us to axe this little wiki which isn't earning much in the way of revenue than to fight them or other angry parents in court"
They don't hesitate to purge wikis - as I said, they purged mine about Mai Dire Fine/Wings of Canon/The World Without Authors without even telling me. I didn't receive a warning that the wiki violated this or that rule, or that it wasn't notable enough. I didn't get a "hey, we removed this wiki of yours because it looked small and abandoned" mail afterwards. Nothing. Hours of work just went poof. Considering the path they're headed, with their shift of focus from wikis to this fandom social media thing, I dread the day when it will be the PPC Wiki the one on the chopping block because it isn't from a recognizable enough IP and so it is not profitable to host it.
To me, it looks like it won't be a matter of if, but of when, why and how, and I believe we should act in advance to not find ourselves in an emergency situation like that time we had to move the Board.
First off: it's absolutely awful they did that to your wiki. It's wrong. I know very well what it's like to have stuff you've worked on for ages just randomly deleted by a webhost, and it's absolutely grim.
I don't feel like either of those are actual imminent threats for the PPC Wiki, though. There's a world of difference between us and either a single-person, single-series wiki on the one hand, or a major international company on the other. I just... don't think it's going to happen.
And like I said: if it's free, then you're the product. The old Board was free, and existed so we could provide ad clicks. The current Wiki is free, and for the same reason. The new Board is not free, and yes, I sometimes worry about what if the person who owns it ups and leaves. My website is not free; Neocities has a free tier, which is deliberately limited to drive you into paying for more. (I'm actually paying because I desperately want them to stay in operation; the internet needs a new Geocities.) Wikipedia is free, and enormous enough to subsist on donations and grants.
WikiTide? "100% free wiki hosting. No ads. Powered by a non-profit." Miraheze? "an ad-free and community-centric wiki hosting platform". But both of them still exist in a world deep in the throes of end-stage Capitalism. They have to have money. So either they will come up with some way to monetise their wikis - or they will start charging for something - or they will just randomly shut their entire service down on little to no notice. Fandom is at least a stable platform where we know the problems. We can't say that for the newbies.
hS
His is probably more comprehensive than the one I got from FANDOM, but mine at least includes all text-based pages (which I believe includes namespaces like User, Talk, and Template) and their edit histories. If the whole thing got nuked today, we could recreate the majority of the content as it was as of the most recent backup.
I can certainly commit to updating my backup once a month, at least; I don't reckon there's usually enough major activity to warrant more frequently than that, but correct me if I'm wrong!
~Neshomeh
You can scrap this idea if it seems like too much work 😅
But if I had been so skeptical about everything, I would've never posted my stuff anywhere - and I believe Wikia (now Fandom) might've been just as fresh and wide-eyed as, say, WikiTide at the time the PPC Wiki was originally made?
Sure, WikiTide might go bad. Might disappear. What are the chances of that? We don't know. What are the chances thet Fandom will delete our wiki on w whim? We also don't know.
But we know which one of them is in a downward spiral right now. I'm not saying we jump ship right now it's a task that needs time and planning, as Nesh said. But at the same time we cannot hide our heads under the sand and say "Where we are is bad, but since it's effort moving and others might also be bad let's not bother".
It was 4-5 years old when the PPC Wiki was created. Meanwhile WikiTide is 5 months old, which is the same time that Miraheze had to issue an official notice that it's not shutting down, promise.
Fandom runs off ads; it wants things to stay up so that it can stick ads on it. There's a whole segment of this thread devoted to how we could possibly persuade them to take the Wiki down if we move. Miraheze and WikiTide are running on donations - the Wikipedia model, except that Wikipedia has the critical mass to make it reliably sustainable.
The difference between the Wiki and a personal site to post your stories is a big one. After Webs and Google both let me down, I have a full backup of my website. If Neocities goes down, I will still have everything for when I find a new host. The same can never be true for the Wiki, because there's not just one editor, and Nesh isn't going to log in every week for the rest of time to take a copy. If the wiki service hosting it suddenly collapses, we will lose it. From my perspective, that means we need to keep it on a stable site which has lasted long-term, and that means Fandom.
~
Look, I don't know. I didn't even want to be in this conversation, but Nesh said people needed to contribute. I don't really care if it moves, it'll probably be fine, and if it's not we'll rebuild it. I don't know.
hS
If that would help with the discussion.
-Ls
Hi all, this is NotAracham, member of the joint WikiForge/WikiTide board of directors. Thank you to Neshomeh and Linstar to reaching out to us regarding a potential move, It's been very cool to learn more about the PPC + its history and operation over the past few days.
Changing hosts is a big decision, we're glad for the consideration but don't want to start things off w/ folks feeling like they were forced into a choice with incomplete information.
As such, I wanted to make myself available for any questions y'all might have about the WikiTide service to aid in reaching a decision in either direction. Feel free to ask away, I'll be happy to answer what I can.
I must admit it feels strange to have someone from a Board of Directors take such an interest in little old us, haha. It's very kind of you to give us your time!
I think it would be great if you shared what you and Agent (a name which has amused me from the first, by the way!) explained to us in the Discord about WikiTide's founding ethos and financial strategy. Since this branch of the thread is getting a bit leggy, though, I'll make a new reply to the original post where it and your response will be more visible, and invite others to ask their own questions there, too.
By the way, in PPC Posting Board tradition, please accept this virtual bumper sticker as a welcome present. ^_^
~Neshomeh
Thanks again for your consideration. Part of our intention with being a smaller wiki farm with more intentional growth vs 'growth at all costs' was to afford us the opportunity to have a more direct and personal approach w/ the onboarding of new communities, as opposed to just letting folks thrive or fail on their own. We feel it's a better approach for building an engaged global community on our platform in the long-term and hope to continue it going forward. :)
Will try to consolidate what we discussed above, thanks for creating a new post towards the top for it.
I don't have any particular question right now (I'm one of those already sold on the moving), but there is a sort-of-related question I'd like to make, if you don't mind.
Basically, one of the reasons I am so adamant on moving the PPC Wiki to a different space is because I had a fairly bad experience with Fandom some time ago. I have written quite a bit of things over the years, with my PPC works being only a fraction of it, so I had at one point attempted to make a wiki to better organize the "lore" as I realized it was difficult for people to "get in" in my works - to the point even my current collaborators are struggling.
Fandom erased said wiki when it was still early in the making, without warning and without notice, so I'd like to know if a wiki about my works in particular (currently clocking 500k+ words, and the closest cathegrization it can have is "massive multiverse crossover fanfiction"... I mean, some of it is a PPC spinoff) is allowed on WikiTide? While it is unlikely to see much traffic from readers, it would surely be a big help for my current cowriters.
Congratulations! Do let us know if you have any questions on initial setup, our discord sever is full of helpful folks for most onboarding questions you might have.
I'll make sure to pay a visit if I need help, but so far I think I'm managing well enough. Now I just have a lot of pages to make...
There are just a couple pages on it right now, and they're not even complete. It will take at least until the end of this week to make it reach the point where it has a meaningful amount of stuff on it.
Rest assured that sharing a link here once it is something worth mentioning was already in the plans! It just needs some time.
And I'm sorry to hear about the content losses incurred due to Fandom's continual purges in pursuit of perfect SEO. At this time we haven't fully removed our topic-ban on fandom/fanfiction content, but have given opportunity for existing communities and creators to pursue an exception review. Based on the substantial existing set of content you mention, I think you may have a reasonable case to be made for an exception -- more details about the exception process can be found here
To expand a little on why a topic ban even exists at WikiTide:
Given that we're a volunteer-run organization without the resources (in terms of both people and money) that a Fandom might have, it was decided that we'd need to be more restrictive on certain types of communities that could cause excessive volunteer workload or costs for us based on prior experience, hence the exception review process on those we identified in the first round.
And I'd like to apply for an interview to better discuss the matter. But here are some of the guidelines I would give myself for such a wiki:
If possible, I would like to be able to allow only selected people to do edits on the wiki. That should help with both vandalism and making sure only accurate and proper content is posted on it, as I mentioned it would be used not only as a place where readers could "fill themselves in" on things without having to sift through a 500k words saga from the beginning again but also as an easily available and most importantly reliable source of informations for my collaborators. For example, one of them already created a character directory to try to help with keeping track especially of minor characters, which is one thing that would easily translated to a Wiki page.
I would try to keep the number of images hosted directly on WikiTide to a minimum to reduce server footprint - no galleries, and only major characters would get more than one image if that is necessary (for example, main characters who were kids during the first story but are adults after the time skip would get two to depict their "now and then" appearances). In fact, if WikiTide supports images being hosted externally, I do have several of the images I need already uploaded on a Wordpress blog I nowadays mostly use for "lore" and "behind the scenes" posts and so I would not use WikiTide's own hosting space for those, and in fact I could still keep uploading them on Woirdpress in the future too. Anything that could be easily Googled starting from the information of the Wiki page wouldn't get an image, of course, unless it is really major and/or really specific, since as I said its use as a "lore repository" for the authors is primary.
I hope this is a good starting point for an exception?
Thanks for taking the time to detail out your thoughts + some background on your planned topic. I think your existing plans for both content and moderation absolutely fall into acceptable territory, and our permission structure would absolutely allow you the level of control over editor rights that you're proposing.
I need to call it a night, but regarding the images/storage consideration I mentioned: The biggest concern to us is primarily those that would attempt to use our service as a file share, uploading large amounts of image content that doesn't get factually used in the wiki. This was enough of a problem on previous hosts (our worst resident used over 300GB for mostly-unneeded images!) that we've even written such a provision into our content policy. That said, we're pretty lenient in this area, many wikis range from as little as 5mb to a couple gigabytes without raising our concern, so the use case you suggest seems both fine and within expectations.
As WikiTide is a platform that operates its wikis on shared resources, we only ask that you be conscientious of your usage and work with us if your expected wiki-related file storage needs are getting beyond ~5GB to work out a plan to limit impacts. --NotAracham
For the record, on Wordpress I am currently using only 5% of the alotted 3Gb I have (so around 150mb) - and on Wordpress I had been much more liberal with image usage than I intend to be on the wiki. It helps that I tend to use PNGs at reasonable resolutions, I guess.
I had a game wiki I wanted to migrate off fandom that had several image-heavy sections and was afraid the storage usage might be a problem... turns out the whole thing only totaled up to around 200MB. Sounds like you're well within bounds then.
You never know how many people might be unwilling to say something because they haven't seen anyone else say it yet.
~Neshomeh
Just taking a moment to lay out my personal feelings more clearly here...
I haven't felt entirely comfortable on Fandom since... pretty much since it started calling itself Fandom. The fact that they've become such a highly commercialized space makes me believe it's not where our non-commercial community wiki belongs. While they were still leaving us to our own devices, that was fine, but now they've shown their willingness to take unilateral action on any wiki without prior communication. I no longer feel supported there, and it turns out lots of people on other, bigger wikis feel the same way.
Hence, I want to investigate our options and make a plan ASAP.
But I want it to be a well-considered plan that has overwhelming support behind it in case we need to fight with Fandom to let us go. We can't have that if two active admins don't actually want to (and a third is entirely willing to have her arm twisted).
I'm personally not willing to jump until we, an actual majority of people who spend time in PPC spaces with wiki admins very much included, are prepared and committed to see it done, regardless of how many of us think it's a good idea. If that means waiting until we're forced, that's fine with me. In the meantime we can continue to make backups regularly and I can educate myself on the technical stuff I don't currently understand.
~Neshomeh
We're in no rush right now - and that gives us the time to make a good plan, looking into our options I'm planning on having a look at WikiTide's moving guide you posted during the weekend, I would've done it already but this week I have the bad shift at work so my free time is limited until the end of the workweek.
I haven't actively adminned for... years, probably, and I'm only "active" in that I made some pages for some of my agents recently. You'd be best to choose a replacement if/when it moves.
hS
I think the original wiki admins were chosen (by July?) on the basis of "these are people who already have some authority and we trust them not to break things."
We should at some point reevaluate based on who actually wants the job. But not now—not this month, for sure. {= )
~Neshomeh is very attached to the job.
I'll admit I haven't really kept up with the arguments for moving/not moving too closely - it's been one have of a last while and I've still got a few days of chaos ahead of me. (whee work and planning moving and so on)
I did a few bits of research here and there about whether we could move and how moving would work (which is why I ended up finding a script to pull all our images) and looking into some of the potential hosts in a very cursory way, but I haven't really taken the time to evaluate if we'll want to move off of Fandom, especially since that'd involve breaking links all over the place and search engine ranking hits.
But, if nothing else, this has led to recent archival copies of the wiki as of a few days ago being generated, which is good.
I'd be happy to see more discussion play out here, since it looks like we've got some useful viewpoints on both sides.
To me personally, the fact that two out of three PPC Wiki admins have now said they're not really on board is a major factor to consider in itself. I don't feel we can afford to have us divided on this.
Plus, since I'm not exactly eager to take on the mountain of hassle moving entails even if I think it's a good idea, any resistance at all from anyone sure is persuasive toward waiting.
More discussion with more voices and more time to think would be very good, this is why I've been pumping the brakes on actually doing anything from the get-go, thank you.
~Neshomeh
I'm not sure how much I can be of help, but once the move is underway I'm willing to spare some time to help with it.
Though I'd want to make sure they'd de able to import our archives (also, I went and grabbed an XML archive including history and all the weird namespaces, like File:, just in case)
I said this above, but so it's here too, it may not happen today, but the rest of this week I have time.
~Neshomeh
I can get in their Discord, too, if it would help for them to speak to an admin?
~Neshomeh
Also, from what I've heard, Miraheze is having trouble with getting new wikis out, so there's that.
--Ls
Let's not forget about moving the Plort wiki too.
-Ls
Or at the least backing it up. It is functionally an archive at this point, Plort having been silent for years, so I'm not sure we need a shiny new live version if the current one remains intact. But I should make sure it's backed up, yeah.
(Thankfully the images are mostly various clippings of the maps, so no issues with bothering to download all of those.)
hS
Having less ads and restrictions on what we can put on our wiki is definitely a better option, though I do understand that moving the wiki will be quite the undertaking. If we do decide to move, I will fully support it.
I personally believe Miraheze is the best option if we do move.
can we have some sort of spoiler formatting?
Regarding fandoms, people trying to avoid spoilers know to steer clear of articles and fanfics about them. Plus, our wiki has no need to go into great detail about any particular fandom, so spoilers can be minimized or avoided altogether.
Regarding PPC works, people who follow a spin-off closely enough to care about spoilers are probably reading the stories as they come out anyway. I tend to believe we're deluding ourselves if we think anyone is so passionately engaged a spoiler would upset them, though. Heck, knowing more about what a particular story is about may generate interest instead. In fact, I myself confess to often reading people's comments on a PPC story before deciding to read the story itself. >.>
That said, if there's a strong call to have spoiler formatting available for various uses (including, e.g., Blacklist content, NSFW content), I'd do it. But either way, I'm not implementing anything new until we're well settled on the future home of the wiki.
~Neshomeh
Explain it like I'm an adult hustling to earn enough money to pay my rent and I don't have time to keep track of everything that's happening on the wiki anymore. {= (
~Neshomeh
and when one such page is converted into a mission page, other pages for Sues in that same mission should probably be merged with it. This page for "Elemental Crystals" was formerly an individual Sue page for Elvira, now it covers both Elvira and Silavren, so I suppose this Silavren page isn't needed anymore. I'm considering turning them into redirects.
Making them redirects makes sense to me. It's reasonable that someone might search a Suvian's name to find the story they featured in.
~Neshomeh
It will require decisions that are thought through, not made in the spur of the moment, and the execution of those decision may take quite a while. Level-headed consideration and patience are necessary.
That said, I agree that moving is a good idea, and I think Miraheze is the logical choice. It's well established, and as far as I can tell it will let us keep doing our own thing more or less as we have done.
Telepedia doesn't sound like a good fit to me because it seems to emphasize curated content, and I don't care to have a third party between us and our articles. We don't need a "partnership programme" to help us create a "polished and professional wiki." We're not that important. {= P
The good news about that is there's a chance Fandom won't mind us leaving at all. However, sunsetting the current wiki is still a big deal. Lots of external links would be broken if we just up and deleted it, not all of which are under current members' control. We might want to see if we can be included in the Indie Wiki Buddy extension, though we may be considered too niche.
I still wonder if it wouldn't be best to request the current wiki be deleted before we even start a new one, just to see if they'd do it. Obviously I'd back up the current version first; I've done it before.
I also wonder if we couldn't force their hand by restoring all the articles they objected to. Dare them to take action. {= P We could do that whenever we're ready.
Failing that, we could throw a few salvoes at their SEO by pruning the highest-traffic pages (e.g. Citrus Scale) from Fandom and having them only on the new platform.
These are just a few preliminary thoughts. I'm gonna need a while to really come to terms with this, and I would really love to hear from the more technical-minded folks who may have more insight into the pros and cons of other prospective wiki hosts and what we'll have to go through to actually undertake a move.
~Neshomeh
Assuming for the moment that we're going to Miraheze, they have helpful information on moving a wiki to Miraheze, including specifics about moving from Fandom.
They note that images are not included in the XML dump I can get from Fandom, so we will likely have to do all image downloads manually. {= / I'll state now, anything non-essential is likely to get left behind in the process (and that may not be a bad thing).
I don't exactly know what they mean when they say we "may provide Miraheze with image dumps from your Fandom for us to import." Can someone explain how to create an image dump?
I expect the process is likely to be similar for anywhere else we might choose, too.
~Neshomeh
And then as long as write down filenames and URLs, it feels like there'd be a way to chuck that data at the new wiki folks for a mass import.
Might be worth asking or Googling to see if there's a nice clean way to do it?
Their Terms of Use state that "[You agree not to] use any robot, spider, site search and/or retrieval application, or other device to scrape, extract, retrieve or index any portion of the content."
We'll probably need to assemble a team of individuals who can divvy up image downloading (and possibly re-uploading) duties. I am so not prepared to contemplate actually doing this right now, it can wait.
Re. chucking data at the new wiki folks, turns out reading more of the page explains how to do that for Miraheze. ^_^; It... looks like it would be another manual slog, if I'm understanding it right? {= /
~Neshomeh
The Internet Archive's people (see https://github.com/WikiTeam/wikiteam ) managed to get a backup of Fandom (back when it was Wikia) in 2020 and it looks like they've got some nice scripts for this exact purpose
I'm entirely willing to take one for the team and point an archiver at our stuff. Worst they could reasonably do is block my IP or something ... if they even notice a small blip in the logs from a scrape
That I've run the archive team's wiki dumper and archived all of the images off the PPC wiki (along with their descriptions)
From a preliminary inspection, I didn't actually run into any issues (all the images seem to have the image file type)
So ... that's something, at least.
(As an adendum, I hit one error
2023-11-03 21:38:10: File May.jpg at URL https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/ppc/images/d/d4/May.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20190411120124 is missing
but one in around 2100 isn't bad!)
I also didn't even need to log in for this - the Fandom wiki hosting still has API access
Let us know if they throw you in the Bog of Eternal Stench for your trouble. {; P
For the record, I've just gotten a new XML database dump of all current pages, including their history. Will do so again right before we take any drastic action, but at least this is more current than my last one from March.
~Neshomeh
Using good ol' right click and Save As.
I'd say to put crosslinks to the new wiki over articles but... I'm pretty sure Fandom hates that and might stop us. Which is unfortunate.
They'll allow it for about two weeks. And then they'll delete them and strip any admins who had anything to do with it of their admin powers.
~Neshomeh
Annoying, but good to know. Especially the part about not damaging the original wiki. Might put paid to the "withering" idea, unfortunately.
But again, we might be small and unimportant enough that they don't care, especially if we're very selective and don't rush.
~Neshomeh
We're niche - incredibly so, to the point I am more worried about Fandom suddenly nuking our wiki as soon as it becomes convenient more than I'm worried about them not letting us close it.
Let's face it, a wiki like ours doesn't move much traffic - and the page about, say, the Sunflower Official has a similar weight on their servers to, say, Sakura Kinomoto's on the Cardcaptor Sakura wiki while likely not providing even a hundredth of the latter's traffic to them.
Of course, when it comes the time, there's a few tricks we can use to "go under the radar".
They also seem to nuke very inactive wikis, which may have had something to do with that. But unfortunately, we have enough spam that I don't know if that would happen.
They also don't allow their wikis to be locked, so that might just mean that whoever tries to make all pages un-editable would just lose admin status.
Also, while I'd guess they would be okay with it, Miraheze requires that you request your wiki, so the staff must approve it.
I think leaving admin rights in the hands of a couple anonymous accounts (such as Nesh's) might be a good idea, though hopefully we'd have at least a couple different people with access.
--Ls
There are user accounts for "Sunflower Official", "The Marquis de Sod", and "The Kudzu", which belong to no one and for which I happen to have the passwords. They were made to deliver automated/boilerplate messages (and also a bit of RP). They can be shared between a few of us as needed.
There's "Sub Rosa", too, but unfortunately I don't have the keys to that one and I'm not sure who would.
(And there's also "The Fittonia", but that is a bot account registered to me, so not helpful for this purpose.)
~Neshomeh is amused at being mistaken for hS.
I'd like to see how niche it actually is.
--Ls
We do have some analytics data, which I'm told is "shared as a courtesy for our administrators and should not be re-shared without permission."
...
Congratulations, by the power vested in me as a PPC Wiki admin, for the purposes of this discussion you're all honorary PPC Wiki admins!
So anyway, in the last 30 days from today in UTC:
There's more information on the page, but I think this is everything pertinent to the current discussion.
I'm no analytics expert, but I reckon this backs up our suspicion that they won't miss us at all, especially if we decide the Citrus Scale is no longer relevant to our wiki. {= P
~Neshomeh
Given the number of visitors, I'd guess they're all or almost all current PPCers. So, yeah, we wouldn't be missed.
I do have to wonder, then why on earth Citrus Scale is so viewed. Who the heck is looking at that page over a thousand times?
--Ls
I can see from our Recent Activity feed that the My Little Pony page ranks so highly in part because of some recent troll edits and reversions. I suppose it's quite possible that regular people have visited the wiki using the same IPs in the past, or that the same trolls have been around using other IPs and Fandom somehow knows this(??), but it's a bit sus.
What baffles me is that the Citrus Scale page has been the most-viewed page (or well up there) as long as I can remember—I didn't check at all before naming it in a previous post, I just know this for fact. Somehow we're the best explanation of it on the web, I guess? {X D
I wonder if one or two of those "returning visitors" aren't Google bots or some such, doing sorcery for the algorithms?
I don't know exactly how sites tabulate page views (or "sessions" on various devices/browsers, another set of stats ranking in the thousands), anyway.
~Neshomeh
We also have a link from the Know Your Meme page with a picture of said page, so... that's something, I suppose.
I don't exactly have any technical answers either, so I'm not sure about the views.
--Ls
but what's with the 2 weeks thing? 😵💫
that in the event of a fork, at least some will stay with Fandom, and they don't want their pages, which make them ad money, deleted, even if there's an alternative.
--Ls
(Okay, that was badly phrased.)
Like, "Hey, we are the PPC Wiki Community, and we have unanimously agreed to remove our wiki from Fandom. Please comply."
In theory they should have no argument against that. In theory.
~Neshomeh
My biggest worry would be if they don't delete it, and the wiki somehow ends up in the hands of a disaffected anti-PPCer.
Not that that's likely to happen. I think at worst, we would have to designate one community member to look over the "old" wiki. Again, no idea how likely this is, but...
--Ls
I have an interlude and a mission in the works, and they'll be announced om the board, but they will not be indexed on the wiki, since I'm temporarily ceasing wiki activity until further notice. The prospect of our wiki being ruined forever impacts me greatly, and can lead me to make impulsive decisions, and I am sorry and will accept any punishment if I'm causing anyone trouble surrounding this issue.
I'll happily read your mission, but there's no need to worry about indexing your it. You can always do that later, depending on what happens.
--Ls
It seems to be more of a TV and video game thing: "Wiki+ is the FREE, official wiki partnership programme from Telepedia to connect television studios and game developers to their communities. "
--Ls
… and even a wiki on real-life criminals (but they're called real-life villains which is a major yikes).