Editing the IFWiki / List of Z-machine interpreters

Where does this leave the IFWiki? It’s still there moldering away.

Have you visited IFWiki lately? There have been some major updates in the past few years. But if you see anything out of date, feel free to edit!

IFWiki’s new database of authoring systems, interpreters, and other software - General / IF Community Resources - The Interactive Fiction Community Forum (intfiction.org)

IFWiki Events database - General / IF Community Resources - The Interactive Fiction Community Forum (intfiction.org)

IFWiki has a new event calendar! - General / IF Community Resources - The Interactive Fiction Community Forum (intfiction.org)

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I’d prefer to say “ticking along” :slight_smile:

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I’d been holding off doing anything major on IFWiki for quite a while now, until the approach to game entries was agreed, but I do plan on trying to start returning to update and add entries for my particular niche soon; especially as I’ve paused any work on CASA until/if the database issues there are resolved.

One thing I do think would be worthwhile is attempting to capture some of the community legwork that is actually done here on these forums in the form of IFWiki pages.

Certain topics come up time and time again (so would seem ideal to have the resources gathered together as a page on the wiki).

And there are threads like this which could be used to create great Wiki pages…

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That can be the main effort for 2024 (but on a different topic or, more likely, topics!)

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I have. My necropost was prompted by my attempt to update List of Z-machine interpreters - IFWiki because at least the entry for Frotz is way out of date. When I selected the “edit” function, I see this:

==General==
<table border=1>
<tr><th>Name</th><th>Version</th><th>License</th><th>Programming language</th></tr>
{{List of Z-machine interpreters|List of Z-machine interpreters/General}}
</table>


Here is the equivalent information from the new database:

{{#cargo_query:table=Software
|fields=_pageName=Name,Status,Version,Date,License
|where=Format HOLDS "Z-code"
}}

There’s nothing to edit there.

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Ideally we’d like to kill off the original content of that page and just rely on the database. We should add an explanation to that page of how to update the database. But essentially you’d click on the relevant page link (eg Frotz - IFWiki), then click either the “Actions - Edit with form” menu item or the “Edit this infobox” link (eg Edit Software: Frotz - IFWiki).

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This explains how to edit the ‘new’ database-driven bits of the page, which is indeed not obvious.
However, as far as I can tell those are basically up-to-date, if a bit vague; they say Frotz is stable, the current version is 2.54, and is available for macOS, Linux, and ‘Other’.

It’s also not obvious how to edit the older tables (which contain a superset of the information in the database-driven ones that come from the Frotz page), and those are more obviously stale (talking about Frotz 2.44), as well as being first on the page.
These are populated using a complicated system of template pages, whose content is transcluded with syntax like {{List of Z-machine interpreters|List of Z-machine interpreters/General}}. That’s why you can’t see the wrong info to fix it when editing the “List of Z-machine interpreters” page.
To see these , look at the bottom of that edit page (below the text box you edit in) for an expandable “‣ Templates used in this preview:” item. Click to expand that, and you get a list of pages whose content was transcluded into this one, which you can go to and edit.

templatelist

In this particular case, the template structure is a complex and fiddly pseudo-database thing. Long story short, the wrong data which you want to fix lives on Template:List of Z-machine interpreters; edit that, and the fixed data will appear on the original page (possibly after some caches have expired / been purged). (However, you can’t preview what it’ll look like on the original page without saving the template page, whose own preview isn’t very useful.)

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Thanks for that.

Coincidentally I’ve just added an opening paragraph to List of Z-machine interpreters - IFWiki which states:

The original content of this page is based on a complicated template system which makes it hard to edit. We now have a software database, and eventually would like all the information here to be transferred to the database. To edit a database page, go to the relevant wiki page (e.g. Frotz) and select the “Actions - Edit with form” menu item or the “Edit this infobox” link).

And a reply on the talk page at Talk:List of Z-machine interpreters - IFWiki stating:

I’ve added an opening paragraph to the page. I agree that the tables should be in the source code of the page - feel free to move them - but in the long term we want everything to be on the software database, so probably the focus should be on adding information to the relevant pages. If you would like new database fields, you could suggest them here. Jonathan (talk) 00:51, 5 January 2024 (UTC)

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Split from: Updating IFWiki

If this page is no longer being actively maintained (I haven’t checked all the individual templates, so I don’t know when the information was last updated), maybe there could be a note saying so, and the page could be archived?