Wiki discussion

[wavewright62]

  I admit to knowing next to nothing about what's under the bonnet of these things. Some links are to SSSS pages, but some stuff (like pictures) is loaded directly into the site. There also seem to be some styling bits. How will these fare?
In general, is there something I can help with, to prepare for a more seamless migration?

[JoB]

I admit to knowing next to nothing about what's under the bonnet of these things. Some links are to SSSS pages, but some stuff (like pictures) is loaded directly into the site. There also seem to be some styling bits. How will these fare?
In general, is there something I can help with, to prepare for a more seamless migration?

... I guess I should add a larger perspective to all this first. The SSSS Wiki has been created on the Wikia platform, nowadays Fandom, a hoster offering free wikis. That happened at roughly the same time this forum was created, and you used to see the same people active on both.

However, while the entire forum including SMF is maintained by ourselves, major updates of the Fandom platform happen whenever it fits Fandom's interests. They have a history of going for market share and support for mobile clients, by forcing major updates upon all the wikis on their platform, which invariably turn out to not be as hassle-free as stated, and turning a deaf ear to the complaints of many existing users about all the stuff that suddenly works worse, slower, or not at all with the specific wikis these users are invested in.

Do this kind of thing often enough, and the wikis that do not have a large user base - because they're nascent, or "genuinely small" - will just give up, seeing that "fix Fandom's updates" eats up all the manpower they can muster, and would rather use to work on improving their wiki. Which is what I think happened to the SSSS Wiki. With limited manpower, you want stability and low maintenance from your underlying platform, not a constant hunt for top-of-the-line bells and whistles that are too unwieldy to use yourself.

So, what's happening right now is that Fandom is forcefully rolling out yet another such update (to get the former Wikia/Fandom and Gamepedia "worlds" onto a single, up-to-date software base), and the only thing to do in the short term is to keep an eye on the breakage ensuing for the SSSS wiki, and try to fix what we can after the fact.

For a more long-term perspective, the SSSS wiki has been "orphaned" (creator's account turned inactive) for a long time and we're locked out of certain possibilities due to that. (One particular example is that the wiki pages' top bar used to have a paler orange for a background, rather than making the "W" of the logo:

almost invisible.) From the POV of Fandom, The Thing To Do™ is for someone to step up and "adopt" the wiki - thereby re-acknowledging that we want to continue seeing it hosted by Fandom, and subject to their update policies.

Spoiler: MHO • show

That's a commitment that the entire user population would have to back, which it apparently can't, due to lack of resources. I've decided quite a while ago that if and when Fandom breaks the SSSS wiki beyond repair and it turns out that nobody but myself is willing to "adopt" it, I'll do so by moving it to an entirely different platform, rather than continuing to bother with Fandom's antics. Preferably by merging it with the forum, so as to consolidate both onto the same server(s) and into a single user population, but that is not for me to decide, of course.

Closing note: I know that there's currently a bunch of stuff where user input ought to be fixed; namely, split the Table of contents into arcs as announced, edit the latest links on the Table of Special Pages to use the ComicPage template (the different font color being the visible consequence), etc.. Those are not Fandom's doing.

(... whereas the now-missing icon after ComicPage links is. That was not yet the case when I made my last post here ...)

[wavewright62]

Closing note: I know that there's currently a bunch of stuff where user input ought to be fixed; namely, split the Table of contents into arcs as announced, edit the latest links on the Table of Special Pages to use the ComicPage template (the different font color being the visible consequence), etc.. Those are not Fandom's doing.

(... whereas the now-missing icon after ComicPage links is. That was not yet the case when I made my last post here ...)

I created the links of Special pages from the end of Adv. 1 forward, and really struggled with trying to figure out how to get the link formatting for Adv. 2 in line with the Adv.1 format (having the default url point to sssscomic2) and just gave up in the end. I couldn't find the ComicPage template.  Getting links on the page was more important to me than having them look consistent. 

[JoB]

I created the links of Special pages from the end of Adv. 1 forward, and really struggled with trying to figure out how to get the link formatting for Adv. 2 in line with the Adv.1 format (having the default url point to sssscomic2) and just gave up in the end. I couldn't find the ComicPage template.

... ah, would you look at that. The Special Pages offered still contain "Uncategorized Templates", "Unused Templates", "Wanted Templates", and a new "Expand Templates" tool, but not an outright list of templates anymore. Joy. Guess we'll have to make do with Unused Templates and the new "Most Transcluded Pages" listing ...

Edit to update: The "All Pages" special page now has a namespace selector that you can use to list only the templates.

How to actually work with templates depends on which editor you're using. Personally, I prefer the "Source Editor", where throwing in, say,

Code: [Select]

{{ComicPage|2.345|Best of Sigrun}}should invoke the ComicPage template and yield a link to adventure 2's page 345 with the text "Best of Sigrun".

Last I checked the "Visual Editor", the user would announce his intent to insert a template (button? typing "{{"? don't remember offhand), would get to select the template (from a list? typing the name in? ...), and then get a popup with as many input fields as the template allows parameters (two for ComicPage, see above for order/purpose).

... and I'll be darned if I have the foggiest why, right now, only the first two invocations of ComicPage on the Table of Special Pages display the purple arrow ...

(Looking at the link list at the top of my User Page, it seems that they pulled the list of all templates, the whole of the "Insights" functionality, and certain statistics readouts ...)

[wavewright62]

Wa-hey, great stuff.  I was using Source Editor, so never got to see prompts or anything pop up. I am just schooled enough to follow an existing format, and enough to know the (tiny) limits of my knowledge.  I will try some modifications based on your disambiguation strategy when I am next using my laptop and not my phone.
Will that tell me where to upload images and how to properly cite the image's url, or should I continue leaving that alone? (Referencing the Adv. 2 outfits, for instance)

[JoB]

I was using Source Editor, so never got to see prompts or anything pop up.

Yep, when using the Source Editor, the only place where something's hopefully going to pop up is your imagination. Though IIRC the Source Editor does highlight the syntax it recognizes with different font colors ...

Will that tell me where to upload images and how to properly cite the image's url, or should I continue leaving that alone?

... I have to admit that editing pages complete with adding new images is something that I prefer the Visual Editor for. (Or maybe I should say "preferred", it's been quite a while.) One reason being that the popups are quite helpful for that, because you're actually editing three objects at once (page with text, the file with the actual image, and the description text thereto) while the Source Editor deals with only one at a time; the other being that positioning, resizing etc. an image on a page with text flowing around makes WYSIWYG worthwhile.

Having that said ... I notice that you cannot display an image's "info page" anymore unless you're logged in. Nice jump scare, Fandom ...

(Also, the problem of my(?) browser often only displaying the first two or three images on a page extends beyond the arrows following a link ... WTF?)

Next try: Having that said, the images on the SSSS Wiki tend to not have an actual description (like a Wikipedia image would, a la "photo of Kastrup's waterfront from due East, taken with a TuuriCam 0815 and ASA Harðardóttir film, at 31-Apr-2012 17:43 local time" yadda yadda). They should have a license / copyright note (so as to cover our legal rears), which will automatically add them to the "LicensedMedia" category for technical purposes, and one thematic category (just so that the per-category listings of pages and images are proper; we don't yet have enough pages and images that we're forced to work with sublists, though).

Technically, both license and category go into "the description" (text file), like this (copied straight out of the Source Editor):

Code: [Select]

== Licensing ==
{{Permission}}
[[Category:Characters]]but the categories are easier to edit with the special clicky-box at the end of the image's info page, rather than starting the full-blown editor.

As you can see, the licenses are, again, ready-to-use templates; "Permission" indicates that we obtained explicit permission from the copyright holder to use the image on the wiki, and covers all of the SSSS comic artwork, as Minna has given us blanket permission in the early days of the wiki. (The templates also contain the magic for the automatic "LicensedMedia" category.)

Every now and then, Fandom updates the cached results for certain "complex" searches, in particular, the list of images that have not been categorized. Another special search lists the images without a license note - technically, "images that are not in the magic 'LicensedMedia' category".

(If someone were to upload an image and add only a copyright notice, these two lists would still fail to notify me of the missing thematic categorization, but that has not happened so far.)

The single "root" category of the SSSS wiki's tree of categories is "Browse" (original Wikia default), with the "thematic" categories collected under Browse → Content → SSSS, and an extra ... → Non-SSSS for, e.g., ARtD material.

(Yes, the "tree" displays are unwieldy to navigate. Once you have an idea of the hierarchy, it'll be faster to find / select categories from the "flat" list ...)

[JoB]

I recently came across this announcement, where Fandom (the provider where our wiki is hosted, originally Wikia) speaks about their motivation for recent changes and the ones they plan to do next. Please note how it's about furthering their brand from top to bottom, while announcements in past years said things like "better accessibility on mobile devices", i.e., some benefit to the individual wikis/fandoms.

It's no secret that I ceased to be happy about Fandom's updating (and how it puts a huge workload on a limited fandom manpower like ours, just to keep fixing the breakage after each) quite a while ago, but with this announcement, I'm getting serious doubts that the permission Minna gave us way-back-when does still cover such a development.

So ... any ideas/suggestions how to proceed from here?