Any interest in a wiki?

[Duskfire]

As part of my plan to play and check out Angband and many of the variants, I was curious about whether a wiki exists for the *bands. The only one I have found is the barely touched outdated "wikia" one with only 29 entries (and I gather that it's not possible to "delete" a wiki from that site).

I know that DCSS, Dwarf Fortress and Nethack have extremely thorough wikis, so I'm a bit surprised there is not a better one focusing on Angband and its variants.

I can't afford to maintain such a site currently on my own, but would love to add content. I don't claim expertise in wikis, but it would benefit the *band community much more than just taking lots of notes that sit on my own hard drive.
Is there much interest in this type of project? What would need to be done?

[Therem Harth]

Probably a good idea IMO. ToME 2 used to have a wiki, and it was a great resource (except for the stupid spammers).

[Nick]

I think it's a great idea. Currently there exist the development wiki at rephial, and there is also facility for wikis at Github, and there's the Angband section at roguebasin; I don't think any of these are what you're thinking.

Options seem like:

1. Find someone to host a brand new one;
2. Use the wikia one;
3. Set up one at Github, possibly at the work-in-progress variant repository.

I don't know where one would start with 1, I don't know how people feel about wikia, and I find the Github wikis a bit unintuitive. So I suspect I have added no value here

[Duskfire]

It looks like MediaWiki is the most likely software to use, and is used by 3 other roguelike informational wikis. I'm going to do some more research, and find out what's involved in setting it up. I won't actually set anything up until I get feedback from the forum of course, but knowing more information about procedure will help.

Maybe someone can contact the creators of Nethackwiki and ask them questions about how they got started. I've never made a wiki before, I just want to contribute in a non-coding way to a very interesting yet neglected group of games.

[Duskfire]

Nick, I've looked over the wikia one. I really do NOT want to revive it. I'm certain there are much better options now. As my last post should make clear, what I had in mind is something along the lines of the Dungeon Crawl or Nethack wikis, except focused solely on Angband information, including all active and some stable/dormant variants.

I don't think using Roguebasin would suit, since it really isn't intended for in-depth information about any single roguelike group.

The development wiki at rephial seems a mix of developer info (not what I had in mind) and a user manual, which does need adding to, but is not exactly what I had in mind either.

If the Github variant repository can also host a mediawiki, yeah, that could work. I certainly don't want to dictate anything, I'm obviously new to the Angband community.

[Duskfire]

I just came across Wikkii.com. Perhaps some of you could check it out and see if it's suitable. Certainly seems an improvement on wikia.

There's also this page in Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wiki_hosting_services

[Nick]

Pav may have some advice. I'll ask him.

[myshkin]

The development wiki at rephial seems a mix of developer info (not what I had in mind) and a user manual, which does need adding to, but is not exactly what I had in mind either.

We have two ideas (thanks, Magnate!), either of which seems feasible to me:

• Refactor the existing trac.rephial.org wiki so that it has a player section and a development section. This will require some work (edits to the top-level page, plus porting over content from rephial.org and other places), but has the benefit of getting wiki contributors to sign up for trac IDs, and thus creating some synergy with things like ticket submission. (Hint, hint.)
• Install Mediawiki on the server that hosts trac, and set up a separate service on, say, wiki.rephial.org.

I am willing to do the installation work in the second case, but I think the first is my preference.

[Derakon]

I'm inclined to agree that a single wiki would be preferable. If nothing else, there's some overlap between what players want to know and what devs want to know; no sense replicating that information across two wikis.

[Nick]

1. Easy to look stuff up
2. Easy to add stuff to

All other considerations are secondary (well, tertiary).

[ekolis]

Yeah, a single wiki would be better - maybe the dev stuff could be hidden via CSS applied by a user preference, or some Javascript like the inline footnotes on tvtropes...

[Magnate]

Yeah, a single wiki would be better - maybe the dev stuff could be hidden via CSS applied by a user preference, or some Javascript like the inline footnotes on tvtropes...

One simple way is to prefix all the dev pages so that the index looks like this:

Classes
Combat
dev/NewEgos
dev/Policy
dev/ToDiscuss
Paladin
Tunnelling


... etc. That should meet Nick's first requirement while remaining fairly simple.

[ekolis]

Well, I was thinking that you could actually mix dev and player content on the same page, if you used CSS or Javascript to hide the dev content from players who don't want to see it. That way you wouldn't need to bounce back and forth between 2 pages, though you would waste a bit of bandwidth transmitting undisplayed content.

I wonder if wikis have a feature where you can set a user preference, and then hide or show content server-side based on the value of that preference? Almost sounds like a permissions system, which you'd think that any wiki worth its salt would have, but the difference is that any old user can toggle the preference; you don't need to have an admin do it for you!

[Derakon]

That sounds like too much effort, frankly. What does that really gain us over just having the dev-specific content on a separate page? If you really want to refer to both bits of content simultaneously, we've had tabbed browsers for what, 15 years now?

[Magnate]

That sounds like too much effort, frankly. What does that really gain us over just having the dev-specific content on a separate page? If you really want to refer to both bits of content simultaneously, we've had tabbed browsers for what, 15 years now?

ekolis's suggestion is incredibly cool though! If I can find out how to do it, I'll try it on a page and see if it works.

Just for general info, we're currently looking to see if we can replace trac's internal wiki engine with something more people like (e.g. MediaWiki) - that would give us the best of both worlds.