That’s an easy observation to come to. I bought the domain, installed mediawiki, made a few pages, then publicized it. David Welbourn took it and ran, loading it with a ton of information and regularly updated for years. I hosted it for many years, then baf (Carl) agreed to host it.
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Interesting! To be clear, is baf paying for monthly hosting for IFWiki today?
I assume so. I’m out of touch, so don’t really know what’s going on. I know he shut down Baf’s Guide in lieu of ifdb. It would probably be a good idea to move it to a server controlled by the IFTF.
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It’s still a shame Baf’s Guide was shut down as, when researching, I often find interesting snippets of information on archived copies of those pages that just aren’t documented elsewhere.
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Are you, at least, paying annually for the ifwiki.org domain? (Is the WHOIS data correct that you still own it?)
I just noticed something. Why is this topic in Competitions in the first place?
EDIT: Ooh, one of the admins has moved it to General. That’s better.
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Because it began with the OP noting that games and results from recent IFComps/Spring Things hadn’t been added. The scope has crept way beyond that now, I agree.
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Yes. It renews on December 28th.
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If comprehensive backups are put on the archive, then that does open up the possibility of clearing out not just sections of articles, but whole pages.
Is David Welbourn still one of the most prolific editors? His opinion matters a lot then on what direction to take the wiki.
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There’s been some discussion going on at ifwiki about the game pages. Right now I think things are moving in the direction of changing the way game pages are set up to allow more freeform text.
I’ve messaged him.
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There are 11,433 games on IFDB and 3,583 games on IFWiki. Even though the wiki has the technical potential to do everything that IDFB does (as I understand IFDB), I don’t think IFWiki should even try to catch up, or add games for the sake of adding games. (If that were the aim then a script could be written to export from IDFB and import straight into IFWiki.)
I think the aim should be to have game pages on IFWiki only if they are genuinely interesting to read as articles, and the “data” side of things should be covered by IFDB and CASA links. At the same time, deleting uninteresting game pages is not on the cards. The answer as @bg says seems to be to work on a new framework for game pages. That should encourage the creation of interesting pages rather than pages for pages’ sake, and the improvement of existing pages. This is linked with the question of upgrading the software.
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Revisiting this question:
If we were to go the route of de-emphasizing game pages on IFWiki, one question becomes, what do you do when a game is mentioned on IFWiki?
What would you want to do about mentioning games that don’t have pages yet? Are you still thinking there should be minimalist pages for those, or would there be an external link to IFDB each time the game is mentioned, or…?
If we do have minimalist game pages, I agree it’d be convenient to automatically pull that information from IFDB, or from the latest IFDB database info that is available from IFArchive.
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My take is we should upgrade to the latest, then create an object that pulls game basics from IFDB and is not editable on IFWiki. That object can be added to any page someone wants to make for a game, so it’s optional. IFWiki should be about added value and not about the “data”.
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Yes I think that makes sense. I don’t expect all 11,000-odd IFDB games will be mentioned in wiki articles so it shouldn’t be a huge task.
If the IFDB website could provide that then I am sure it could be included within wiki pages as you suggest.
That sounds right. IFWiki does have a lot of interlinked “Works”, “People” and “Authoring systems” pages, based on categories, and it must be hard to resist the temptation to make it exhaustive!
I’m not sure what basics you’d want, but we currently have a little Open Graph card embedded in <meta> tags, usable anywhere that supports OG tags (including Facebook, Twitter, and this forum).
If you paste https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=aearuuxv83plclpl into a forum post, it will expand out like this:
I bet it would be possible to include a card like this in a MediaWiki.
The obvious things missing there are the author(s) and release date. (And maybe ratings.) OG only allows authors on certain “types” of content, currently just articles and books. So we’d have to use article:author or book:author to include an author there, neither of which feel quite right.
That looks like it has potential. I’m not an expert but I think returning stuff in JSON format is common for APIs (like in this MediaWiki API query). Would you be able to implement something like that for IFDB?
Right now, there’s a standard infobox for games on ifwiki, for example: Counterfeit Monkey - IFWiki
(Some of that info I don’t think IFDB actually keeps track of.)
There’s more info here about what info IFWiki users most wanted to see on a game page, when I ran a survey about IFWiki in 2016:
Items that got the most votes (more than 50% of voters) were:
IFDB link
Title, Author, Release Date, Platform/Authoring System
Review Links
Award Icons
So, besides title, author, and release date, you may also want to include authoring system and/or platform. And of course it should link to IFDB.
I’m not sure if it’s possible or makes sense to try to auto-import review links.
I wonder if it’s possible to automatically get the award info and somehow display the award icons using that?
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For what it’s worth, IFDB has an API already! Check out https://ifdb.org/api/index, in particular the https://ifdb.org/api/viewgame API. https://ifdb.org/viewgame?ifiction&id=aearuuxv83plclpl returns an XML description of the game.
There’s a lot missing there, though. Awards don’t show up, no dev system, no reviews (neither “external” editorial reviews nor “internal” reviews written on IFDB). But I see no reason why that material couldn’t be added.
It would be nice to have a JSON version this API; that’s a filed bug. https://github.com/iftechfoundation/ifdb-suggestion-tracker/issues/3
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That looks great. That XML could definitely be used on a wiki page 