IFWiki and Baf's Guide links (and the future of IFWiki)

For IFWiki backups: I think you should contact Carl Muckenhoupt (aka Baf). He’s got the server with the IFWiki and the necessary permissions, and he once told me on the ifMUD that he could easily set up a “cron job” to send a dump regularly.

I’ll send you Carl Muckenhoupt’s e-mail address by PM, bg.

Thank you!

Thanks! I’ve emailed him.

I know I should really do this on my own, and that’s why I haven’t brought it up, but one thing that would be really useful is including 2014’s (and after today, 2015’s) xyzzy winners on pages like ifwiki.org/index.php/XYZZY_Awards_(Best_Game . I look at these pages all the time. Again, I know I should do this myself, but I haven’t after a long time, so I thought I’d bring it up.

Update: The Baf’s Guide templates should now automatically send you to a snapshot of the page from sometime around May 1, 2012. I suppose it’s possible some individual links won’t have a snapshot around then, and maybe those will need to be fixed individually (because for them the nearest snapshot might be a year later, so you’ll get the “Baf’s guide is down” page). But if anyone sees this happening a lot, please let me know, and I can move the default date earlier.

Also, I think I’ve got the bot working. I’ll continue to work on this to see if we can replace dead links in a more automated way.

Glad to help.

I’ve linked to a survey about IFWiki in this thread.

That’s probably not a good approach because the data is changing over the years. I would prefer a continuous mining effort to a single one, some script that would keep the wiki articles at least partially fresh.

I don’t think having a giant pile of … (works) is a good suggestion, sorry. Categorization is one of the strong points of any wiki.

You’re implying that only the works entering the competitions are noteworthy, which is a very dangerous thought.

IFDB is just another wiki project. If IFDB pages are less a pain to keep up-to-date, we should think about making IFWiki even easier to add pages onto, not ditching these lists altogether just because there’s another more successful wiki.

Again, you want to kill off a part of a project just because there’s another one that’s more accessible to you. That’s not a good idea even in the short run.

You know why IFDB is better than IFWiki? Because it’s more automated and formalized. Instead of one giant text area it has a nice form to describe the game or a competition. It compiles all the lists and polls automatically.

IFWiki could do that too using existing extensions. This is not hypothetical: Russian IFWiki uses some of them already. And IFWiki can do much, much more - IFDB can’t hold the articles and can’t even do links between games.

I’ll just leave these two links here:

  • Semantic Mediawiki - provides autolists (list all the games by this author, all the games in this genre, in this comp…) - essentially Data Mining For Dummies
  • Semantic Forms - provides easy-to-use forms for pages. Think about having an IFDB-like form for describing new works.

I just remembered–it has been pointed out before that the captcha question asked of new users on IFWiki isn’t something that all IF fans will necessarily know the answer to. I’m in favor of this changing to something more widely known, though I don’t know what, or how such a thing gets changed.

In retrospect I worded this very poorly. My intent wasn’t to disallow people from creating works pages. (I don’t want to disallow any of these things we’re talking about.)

But maybe you’re also pushing back against the idea that not-yet-created works pages that have existing links to them should be a different priority level than not-yet-created works pages that don’t have existing links to them (or that have fewer existing links).

I do take your points, thanks.

Thanks!

Well, the previous captcha was another IF question but slightly more google-able, and spammers were taking the time to look up the answers, so we’re not just trying to outsmart bots here.

Wow, those are dedicated spammers. Begs the question, though, of how far you can go. Reminds me of all the copy-protection software that caused problems for the people who actually bought the game. In particular, I had to download a NoCD crack to even get Discworld Noir to play when I upgraded to Windows XP.

Also, it depends on what the captcha’s supposed to do. Is it trying to keep out bots or spammers?

(I also am really curious, what sort of spam were they doling out? Editing a Wiki is not quite the same as posting on a forum thread!)

I perhaps shouldn’t be commenting (I’m a casual user of the wiki, at best) but I’m in favour of the Wiki doing things that other sites don’t do - i.e. more in the way of theory and craft than comp listings which would be duplicated by IFDB.

One thing which I do like having on IFWiki is a list to all reviews. You can add any review to IFDB, but it calling them “Editorial Reviews” makes me feel like only reviews from institutions should be added, not your average review blog.

Infotater? (googles)

So that’s what you call those things! That’s a cool thing to have on the wiki.

And Google sent me to a wonderful site as the second hit.

Just wanted to write that IF Wiki has been quite valuable for something like “the latest version / correct version of the Hugor interpreter.” That info can be grabbed from my forum at Jolt Country but that’s not ideal.

So when it comes to where to grab tools, I do like what IF Wiki gives us. :slight_smile:

Regarding dead links on IFWiki…

Some dead links on IFWiki do not have any snapshots stored at the Internet Archive, so I don’t know what we are going to do about those.

But on wikipedia I ran across the idea of taking preventative measures against link rot by adding an Internet Archive version of the link at the same time you add a new link. An advantage of this is that, if the live link dies, you’ll know there’ll be at least one archived version at the Internet Archive. (You can request a new snapshot while the page is still live.*)

I’ve created some experimental wiki templates that will store both links. People don’t have to use them, but I thought it’d be helpful especially if you think the link you’re adding is likely not to stick around forever (e.g. a news article on a news site). Or if you’re adding pages using a script.

This is what the templates look like right now:

{{link|url=original-link.com|archive=archived-link.com|Text}}

When the link dies, just change “link” to “dead link” and it’ll point to the archived link instead. (But the original url will still be there if you need it for some reason.)

You can see some examples here:
ifwiki.org/index.php/User:Bg … te_samples

If anyone has any ideas to improve these templates, or knows a better way to deal with this, please let me know.


  • There are bookmarklets that you can add to your browser so that you can quickly find or request a Wayback machine snapshot by clicking a button. Or you can do it the traditional way, by going to the Wayback Machine website.

IFWiki update:

* We have a working script that can check for dead links. I have not yet set up a way to replace the dead links in an automated way (and I’m not sure of the best way to do it, considering that different links might require different approaches) but identifying them is now quite easy thanks to some existing MediaWiki tools that Oreolek pointed out.

* I’ve been continuing to work on my Python script for collecting information on individual works from IFDB. It can now cross-check the IFID and TUID numbers, and those were the two elements of game information that I was most concerned about the accuracy of. It now also collects external review links from the IFDB page. Works from the most recent IFComp, Spring Thing, and XYZZYs (that did not already have a page) now have their own pages on IFWiki.

  • There were hundreds of old Baf’s Guide links on IFWiki that did not use the Baf’s Guide link template. This meant these links did not get the auto-redirect-to-an-internet-archived-version-of-the-url feature that I’d added to the template. But by using the previously mentioned MediaWiki tools, I’ve been able to convert many of these old links into template format, so you will be auto-redirected to an archived version. (This is still in progress, and there will no doubt be links that don’t get caught and need to be fixed by hand for various reasons).

* There are now templates for live external links and dead external links, both which use the same arguments. These allow you to store both the original url and an internet-archive snaphot url in the same template. While these can be used for any external link (that doesn’t already use a special template), I see them as most useful when linking to sites that are not already archived or preserved by the IF Community: news sites and personal blogs, for instance. If you generate a Wayback Machine snapshot while the site is still live, you know it’ll be there later.

* There is now a template for author commentary/postmortem/making-of articles. Pages using this template for author commentary links will automatically show up in the Author Commentary category so people can easily find them.

  • I have, unfortunately, not managed to get in touch with Carl Muckenhoupt. I have no new information about the possibility of backing up IFWiki.

EDIT: Corrected some typos.

this is pretty amazing!

Thanks tremendously for the effort involved.

Congratulations for your great work, bg! :smiley:

What I’ve done is a drop in the bucket compared to what other contributors have done over the years. But thank you. :slight_smile: