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.
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. 
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! 
What I’ve done is a drop in the bucket compared to what other contributors have done over the years. But thank you.
Another IFWiki update: I still have not been able to get in touch with Carl Muckenhoupt–it may be that the email address I have for him is not current.
However, according to David Cornelson, Carl Muckenhoupt may already be backing up IFWiki. Since I didn’t see an IFWiki subdirectory in the info directory at IFArchive, I assume that means whatever backups are happening are not getting added to IFArchive. I don’t know if it makes a difference to people whether IFWiki backups end up on IFArchive or not.
I’ve been told Carl (Baf) is active on ifMUD, but I’m not on ifMUD. If anyone who is (or anyone who is in touch with him at all, really) would be willing to confirm with him that there are indeed backups of IFWiki happening, it would put several people’s minds at ease.
Also, I noticed David Welbourn has been adding lots of new people pages and making other updates on IFWiki. There’s been a lot of activity lately!
Well, in an e-mail from Carl Muckenhoupt in 2006, he told me he made frequent backups of Baf’s Guide (and that he should do the same thing with IFWiki – I don’t know if he did), BUT those backups were on the same machine as the website itself. Maybe that’s what David Cornelson meant? But that wouldn’t be enough to put my mind at ease, I’m afraid: if Carl’s machine breaks down, or if there’s a fire or another disaster in the house where the machine is, the IFWiki and the backups would be lost! That’s why it’d be safer to also have backups elsewhere on the Internet, for instance on the IF Archive, which even has mirror sites for more safety.
Great!
Hmm. Well in that case, I’m not sure where to go from here. Does anyone have any ideas?
It looks like it is possible to create a backup without shell access. I think this means that anyone can back up the wiki, even without Carl Muckenhoupt being involved.
I don’t think I want to do this myself. But apparently it can be done:
Here’s the link to the help page at MediaWiki.
Thanks!
Yes, thank you!