Someone with technical expertise would need to volunteer to handle operations for IFWiki, under the auspices of IFTF. (That includes launching the new site, keeping it up, maintaining backups, etc.) For IFDB that was me, but I’m not volunteering to do that for IFWiki.
The current site owner would need to agree to do a transfer.
IFTF would have to agree to do the hosting.
In particular, what we don’t have is an IFTF “technical team” who could just absorb additional sites. Zarf definitely did essential work here, setting up the machines and certificates and helping with stuff I don’t have credentials for, but he kept his involvement limited; he only agreed to do it because someone volunteered to be the point person.
Regarding #2, that was a challenge for IFDB. Folks nagged MJR on and off for years about this, and then he finally agreed to do it at the end of 2020. He said in October at that time that he wanted to transfer the site “urgently,” so we prepared to accept the transfer right away after that, but then we nagged him monthly for another three months just to get the files he already had on his machine. (Once we got the files, it was another month before we were ready on our side to do the transfer.)
It’s not even clear to me who’s hosting IFWiki right now. WHOIS indicates that Dave Cornelson owns the ifwiki.org name (which is a separate matter from paying for hosting the site); he presumably at least knows who’s paying for hosting, if it isn’t Dave himself.
The big requirement for adopting the service is getting together an active group of wiki editors and contributors – people who are modernizing the wiki and keeping it up to date. That’s the problem at hand. I think that this thread is making a good start at that, so let’s focus on that for the moment.
Here’s an interesting aside from @David_Welbourn from back in 2013 on the wiki:
Back in the day, I was resisting having article pages for games at all, because I felt that was the purview of Baf’s Guide. I wanted IFWiki to say things about IF that Baf’s Guide couldn’t: the features of IF games, such as ask/tell conversation, pathfinding, compass roses, the parser, colour usage, ASCII art, etc. Every game page I have to create takes me away from even thinking about working on any of that.
Don’t worry, I’m not arguing for deleting them all now! I just found it interesting to see that this debate isn’t a new one at all.
He said as much in the thread I linked to above (when I quoted bg).
That’s probably a good idea. I think it was always implicitly allowed, because of the relatively small size of the community, where it can’t be taken as given that there are enough uninvolved bystanders to fill in the blanks.
Also, the generally sober, factual, list-oriented style was and is probably a decent safeguard against crass self-promotion.
Nothing wrong with informing people about your contributions to authoring systems, games, reviews/articles, testing and so on.
I was always under the impression that @David_Welbourn started IFWiki and @DavidC currently has ownership, although I could be wrong on both counts. I have no idea who pays for the running costs.
IFWiki is a great resource. I am happy to help with contributions to content, but I don’t want to be involved with the technical side of things related to hosting, software updates, backups and so on. Obviously, any changes in that area would have to be discussed with the current owners anyway.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
