User talk:Rexidos
Recommendations for the wiki's future
Here I have some suggestions to improve the wiki.
Zavoda index
I recommend incorporating the Zavoda index into the wiki in the form of a "Publication history" section similar to Iggwilv#Publication_history, although with entries in the form of a list rather than in prose, and including page numbers. This can be done with a one-time script.
This would, as a beneficial side-effect, create around 10,000 new stub articles for which there is not currently a wiki entry. These stub articles would serve as a basis for future editing.
This would replace the existing Zavoda database. Rather than consulting or adding new entries to the database, users would instead read or add updates directly to the relevant wiki page. It would obsolete the need for #get_db_data and #urlget, which pose potential security or performance issues (e.g. users can run arbitrary queries on the database).
Example
For example, for this Zavoda index entry:
Achmed Raisul [C7][NPC]
I9 - 16,33
A script would either parse this text or read the Zavoda database, and create the following page:
{{stub}}
'''Achmed Raisul''' is a character of the World of Greyhawk. They are a 7th-level cleric.
==Publication history==
===AD&D 1st edition===
* I9 [[Day of Al'Akbar]] p.16,33.
{{zavoda-credit}}
Citation format
Some time ago, Wikipedia moved from the Bibliography format to inline References, the latter being clearly superior in that it links individual sentences or paragraphs to specific pages in specific sourcebooks, making sources easy to fact-check. Bibliography or parts of it are retained by some pages as a "Further reading" section, which is a separate second-level heading (i.e. the header type with the underline, same as ==References==).
I recommend the Greyhawk Wiki adopt this approach. An exhaustive list of sources would be provided by the "Publication history" or Zavoda index, while a smaller, curated recommended reading list can be provided in a "Further reading".
I also recommend moving away from the Chicago citation style in general. It makes sense when citing academic papers, where it's necessary to provide the author's name, publisher, publisher's city, etc, in order to uniquely identify the work. It's less important in Greyhawk where an editor can write "Living Greyhawk Gazetteer p.66" and be unambiguously understood by the audience.
Long-term concerns
As with the Canonfire wiki before, the primary challenges I see the Greyhawk Wiki facing are technical and contributors, in that order.
From a technical perspective, I'm aware that reliably maintaining web servers and web applications in this day and age is much more difficult than establishing them. The recent outage is a good example of this.
This may be a controversial suggestion, but I recommend merging this wiki into the Greyhawk wiki at Fandom. This would fundamentally eliminate time, costs, workload, and risks associated with server maintenance, freeing up contributors to work on tasks like writing, editing, and wiki policy.
I see the advantages and disadvantages of such a merger as follows:
Advantages
- Fandom, as a large company, has professional staff handling server and wiki administration. The entire technical side of managing a wiki will be handled automatically, and for free. Consider that HostGator was unable or unwilling to fix the GHO wiki when the migration ran into difficulty; Fandom staff are quicker and more willing to resolve technical malfunctions. Consider also how much time and effort has been spent just making the GHO wiki functional, which could instead have been directed toward wiki content or other works.
- Despite GHO's best efforts, the Greyhawk wiki at Fandom still has superior SEO, as is almost always the case with Fandom wikis.
- With two wikis on the same topic, there is duplication of effort. It's more efficient to combine our efforts.
- The same person is currently the admin of both wikis, so at the top level there will be no need to submit to any policy change.
Disadvantages
- Fandom serves ads. This can be easily defeated with adblock. You also can't serve your own banner ads on Fandom.
- The wiki would no longer be part of Greyhawkonline domain. While it could link to that domain, it would not serve to boost the Greyhawk Online brand to the same extent. I feel it would still be beneficial to the Greyhawk community overall.
- You cannot change the default theme, although it can be customized to a substantial extent.
- Fandom cannot install extensions freely. This is mainly an issue for #get_db_data and #urlget, but the most important features are still there by default (e.g. references, Lua).