It used to be that IFWiki was one of the main places to find links to IFComp reviews while IFComp was going on, but in recent years, people have started using spreadsheets for review links, so there may be less of an incentive now for people to create the competition page on IFWiki right away.
It would be good if those review spreadsheets (or the information from them) could be uploaded somewhere (IFWiki? IF Archive?) for safe keeping, if they are not already.
I think IFWiki is weakest in terms of (game-related) content despite the MediaWiki software (with appropriate extensions which are lacking on IFWiki) lending itself perfectly to a huge user-contributed database.
Probably the various copyright licences would be a problem in combining them all, unless the emperors of the various empires were to agree to join forces. For example, CASA says every contribution remains the copyright of each contributor, but if CASA just became part of the IF Behemoth then I doubt the contributors would object. I imagine it would be similar for the others. I vaguely remember that the IFWiki copyright policy woolliness was never really resolved.
Though it would create a single point of failure, which seems relevant as I couldn’t get IFDB.org to load just now!
I agree that it would be nice to merge CASA and IFDB, if not by actually merging sites than at least at a user-level by increasing interlinking. I briefly took on a project to go through most of the CASA materials and add links to them in IFDB, as well as a lot of new listings, but then I became too busy, and it fell by the wayside. I’d like to return to the project at some point. Things like your walkthroughs and maps really do a lot for preserving the memory and accessibility of the 80s/90s scene. I think it would be nice if IFDB more proactively hosted user-uploaded content in the way that CASA does, because over time links break, and since few bother to go through pages updating dead links, a lot of good information may become permanently lost. Given that IF Archive exists as a long-term file storage and doesn’t seem to have any aspirations to become a robustly user-facing experience, perhaps it would be nice to decrease the burden of uploading user-created content by opening up IFDB itself.
I know CASA has more of a specialist focus, but IFDB’s suite of user curation tools make it relatively trivial to host a big-tent approach. Individual diversity of interest doesn’t necessitate a fragmentation of facilitation resources.
As for IFWiki, I wonder if people could clarify what they want from IFWiki that doesn’t exist on IFDB? Better author splash pages with more links? More information about creation tools? The ability to host more generalized essays? These seem more like feature requests for IFDB than a mission statement for maintaining a second platform.
The SSL cert renewal failed. Thanks for mentioning it – we’re checking into it.
IFDB is highly customized to describe games. It is bad at anything that is not games.
IFWiki has a lot of information about IF history. (History of Infocom. History of various competitions – this is not the same as lists of games that were entered! History of the Golden Banana. That sort of thing.)
IFWiki also has information on non-game software like interpreters, development tools, etc. You might say “Oh, just start creating IFDB pages for these things!” but it’s not that simple. For these sorts of entries, you don’t want a list of “reviews”; you want a single page of factual information. (What features it supports, what platforms it runs on, the release history, etc, etc.)
Once you commit to having pages of factual information, you need the other appurtenances of a wiki, such as hyperlinks and an edit history.
I think it’s reasonable to expect that there should be an IF Wiki in some form.
But as it is, the list of engines isn’t updated regularly.
Yeah, organizing volunteers to keep entries up to date is its own ball game. (Applies no matter what site the entries appear on.)
I see two issues:
For #1, I don’t see a solution, unless somebody says “we’re shutting down X; everybody go over to Y now.”
For #2, I think this is mostly due to a lack of volunteers, but also due to a lack of visible governance. I think some folks want “permission” to post stuff on IFWiki, and especially to delete outdated material. But it’s not even clear who you’d ask, or how. So outdated material never gets deleted.
Another issue, in relation to updating IFWiki, is the duplication between it and the others – the game pages with content that’s available elsewhere – get rid of those pages, focus on what a wiki is good at (as described by Andrew above), and there might be more people willing to work on what’s left.
(I still think that a wiki would be great to replace everything but that’s just a pipe dream.)
It does seem like there are things that could make it easier or more appealing for people to contribute to IFWiki.
I’m summing up ideas that have been mentioned so far, and adding a few, some of which have come up in past conversations about IFWiki:
Installing wiki extensions/tools to make it easier to edit (I’m guessing the person hosting the site would have to do this?)
Narrowing the scope of IFWiki, to make it more achievable to keep it up to date
Clarifying the focus/purpose of IFWiki, so that people understand the point of maintaining it at all
Deciding how to handle the overlap between IFWiki and IFDB
Changing the “magic word” question to something easier for IF newbies
Solving the copyright questions, so that people don’t worry their contributions may ultimately be useless
Organizing a larger group of volunteers to work on maintenance. When there are only a few, it can feel like your efforts are a drop in the bucket, or that people don’t care, and people get burned out.
More visible governance
Better communication
As a contributor (and one of the admins) on CASA, I would say that our focus tends to be on parser-centric games, mainly the original older style ones. The content is very much a reflection of the interests of our community. Some contributors really concentrate on the map/solutions side. Others, like myself, like to focus on the research and information side of things. It’s a good place to discover random old adventures, particularly those that very few people have actually played.
I personally see CASA as a very distinct site and wouldn’t want to see in gobbled up by an entity that has a lot less focus on the type of games that I myself enjoy. It’s very much a space for very traditional 1980s and 1990s text adventures. We do spend a lot of time researching titles to correct a lot of the incorrect information that is out there.
One possible path is to set up cross-site indexes. That is, add the CASA ID to the IFDB database entry for a game, and vice versa. (CASA currently has a “search on IFDB” link but this just searches the title by name.)
This is not a small undertaking, of course!
There is a difference in approach that doesn’t really justify the time it would take to add manual links on CASA to IFDB pages. IFDB often has multiple entries for a game we classify as a single entity on CASA. A “search for title by name” should technically show these variants.
I think I agree. I don’t expect CASA or IFDB would or should shut down any time soon.
I am curious to know about examples of that.
IFDB has a notion of “Adaptations” which are listed as separate games, cross-linked, e.g. IFDB has separate games for Zork and Zork I, noting that Zork I is an adaptation of Zork. But CASA seems to do the same…?
This is always true. IFDB entries don’t match up with IFArchive entries one-to-one. IFDB entries don’t match up with CASA entries one-to-one. It’s an iron law of librarianship, I think.
You can still make it mostly work if you want to. As I said, it’s certain to be a lot of work. So I’m not arguing for it; just pointing out the possibility.
I imagine someone visiting IFDB might like to know if there were hints, solutions, etc. available for a particular game. Could there be an easier (automated, maybe?) way to add links on IFDB to those resources at CASA?
Just to be clear, I think replacing IFDB/CASA with a wiki isn’t even something to wish for. At a minimum, we want a thing where people can post reviews, and search/sort for games with good reviews. No wiki I’m aware of offers functionality like that (and certainly not IFWiki).
The whole idea of wiki software is to collaboratively edit the data, but you absolutely wouldn’t want to allow anyone to edit someone else’s reviews. The whole idea of a review database is contrary to the idea of what wikis are/do.
I can’t imagine any of the self-organizing IF communities wanting to agglomerate in order to create an IF knowledge base with the scope of the entire genre.
But there does need to be something like that, because there are social science and media courses encouraging students to try their hand at IF. Whatever that impetus is, it needs to consider resourcing some supporting material.
Apologies if this happens already, should I not be aware of it.
I don’t think there’s an easier way. Let me elaborate on Zarf’s suggestion to “set up cross-site indexes.”
If you want to automate copying links from CASA to IFDB, you fundamentally just have to know which pages on CASA correspond to which pages on IFDB. That’s a “cross-site index.”
But how would you know that? It’s plausible that an initial attempt at a cross-site index could be automated by doing an approximate (“fuzzy”) match on titles and authors, but there would be a number of questionable cases and/or missing matches that we’d have to manually fix up. (Not to mention the issue @8bitAG brought up, where sometimes there are multiple IFDB pages for one CASA page, and probably vice versa.)
If someone had that data, or was willing to compile it, it seems plausible that we could store it in IFDB. It could look kinda like the “Baf’s Guide” links in IFDB. Older games that had an ID in Baf’s Guide have a “Baf’s Guide ID” section on the IFDB game details page. https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=ju778uv5xaswnlpl “Baf’s Guide ID: 255”
IFDB could have a “CASA ID(s)” option, which could have an ID (or more than one ID?) for cross-linking to CASA. Similarly, CASA could list the IFDB ID(s) (TUID[s]) for games it tracks. (Or both! But then both would need to be updated. It’s certain that if the data appeared both in CASA and in IFDB, that the databases would contradict each other some day, and someone would have to sort that out.)
And the task of keeping the ID mapping(s) accurate would never end… as long as new games appear on CASA, their IDs would have to be cross-posted to IFDB and/or vice versa.
Once we could know confidently which CASA pages exist for which IFDB games, a tool could then add IFDB “download” links to CASA solutions and maps. Note that this tool would also need to run forever-ish, updating IFDB as new solutions/maps appeared on CASA. And the tool would need to be able to detect whether a CASA link had already been posted to IFDB, to avoid posting and re-posting the same link multiple times.
As Zarf says, it’s a lot of work.
But, if you’re reading this, maybe you think you could do it more easily? Well, none of this strictly has to be done inside the walls of IFDB, or CASA. Anybody is allowed to post links to CASA on IFDB, so anybody could maintain a mapping of CASA IDs to IFDB IDs on their own computer, in a spreadsheet or whatever, and then post the links yourself.
And you don’t even necessarily have to post the links by hand. The IFDB API allows you to automate posting links.
You can get a full backup of IFDB on IF Archive. I don’t know how you’d get a list of all CASA pages; maybe you’d have to automate crawling CASA…?
Maybe it’s easier than I think? But don’t say I didn’t warn you…
To address one or two questions about. The CASA policy is to have a single page/entry for a “game” that includes references to all the various versions and remakes of that adventure. Other sites often have entries for different versions of the same game, e.g. the BASIC original, the TADS remake, a later Inform reworking. So it’s not a one-to-one mapping.
(There are instances when we have multiple entries for games… particularly in complex cases like the many games derived from Colossal Caves; however, if anything we’re moving towards less entries per game rather than more… I’ve been spending a lot of time this year researching the fascinating history of many BASIC text adventures that started out on early platforms, such as the TRS-80, and then ended up with uncredited, and often differently titled ports, on other systems)
I’m still not completely sure why a topic about a completely unrelated site, IFWiki, has morphed into one about “harvesting data” from CASA. I don’t own or speak for that site, but as a user/admin, I’d hope anyone would have a formal conversation with Jacob at CASA before they go about hotlinking CASA content.
Perhaps, a focus on the original topic would be in order? If you wish to discuss the development of CASA then you’re perfectly welcome to come and chat to the team over in the forums there.