Template talk:Wiki status

Edit history

This template was created from the existing table at Category:Wiki Status. For its edit history, please see here. --Hoof Hearted 13:58, 2 January 2012 (PST)

um, wow, nice work!! ~~ MarkDilley

Thank-you :) Are there any other languages which need to be added, or any other amendments? --Hoof Hearted 03:37, 3 January 2012 (PST)

Dead vs Inactive

Dead, maybe the action for dead wiki is to make the template inactive, not really needing inactive as a stage... not sure, will ponder, look forward to your thoughts on it. Best, MarkDilley

Aha - I didn't want to make any drastic changes – but yes, I agree, we have un-necessary duplication. Category:Dead currently has 270 articles, and Category:Inactive currently has 860 articles. I would personally prefer that the Dead category be kept; as Inactive has the potential to be confused with Category:Dormant. In terms of templates, we currently have both Template:Wiki dead and Template:Inactive – 'Wiki dead' renders a page better than 'Inactive' – the least preferred one can be redirected to the other. Which ever way you wish to proceed with the 1000+ affected articles, you'll need to create a bot account to process all the changes :p --Hoof Hearted 12:16, 8 January 2012 (PST)

It doesnt look like this has been resolved yet. The English descriptions for "dead" and "inactive" are still identical, whereas in other languages they are seemingly differentiated. A better description of inactive appears on the Category:Inactive page: "An Inactive wiki is a wiki that was once Active but can temporarily not be connect to; or, displays an error." (although "connect" should read "connected"). I think "temporarily" is the key word here, although in reality this can probably only be presumed. --thedugganaut (talk) 15:26, 14 September 2012 (PDT)

Wikis that partially shut down for other reasons: "Goal Abandoned"

What about wikis like Libertarian Wiki that disabled editing for other reasons besides reaching their goal? In that case, the wiki shut down because a couple of users copied the content and created their own forks, and the owner decided his wiki was superfluous. However, he kept it online in case anyone else wanted to do their own fork. Another example would be RationalWikiWikiWiki, which shut down because it was decided that dealing with censorship was more trouble than it was worth. Editing and even viewing by non-logged-in users was disabled (for the sake of appeasing those who objected to its content), but the site was kept online for the sake of allowing users to retrieve their content.

I think these should fall into a "Goal Abandoned" category:

Wiki Status comparison table
(scroll down past the table to see the list of wikis in each category)

status name	description (en)	description (fr)	Beschreibung (de)	descripción (es)	beskrivning (sv)	詳細 (ja)	说明 (zh)
Goal Abandoned	archive: there is content, but no activity because the wiki mission has been abandoned	archive: il y a du contenu, mais aucune activité car la mission du wiki a été abandonnée

Leucosticte (talk) 20:05, 11 September 2012 (PDT)

Interesting train of thought . . . I quite like this idea, though I'm not sure I like the 'GoalAbandoned' name . . . maybe just 'Abandoned'. I'm very much aware of another wiki which was abandoned (due to a threat of legal action over an alleged infringement of a specific British law - the site owner got the jitters, and pulled the plug). Let's see how this idea progresses. Hoof Hearted • talk2HH 13:58, 12 September 2012 (PDT)

There have also been wikis that were accidentally abandoned because the owner vanished, either because he died, went to jail, or was otherwise unable to get to a computer. Libertapedia's owner was absent for 14 months, during which time one of the sysops took over, kicked off a bunch of users, protected a bunch of pages, and conformed the site to his pro-eugenics views. I think there are actually quite a few abandoned wikis out there, although I'm not sure where one draws the line between a site owner who is simply extremely inattentive and one who is totally gone. A lot of site owners neglect their wikis to some degree or another. Mises Wiki's tech support sucks; reported glitches remain unfixed for months sometimes, but the wiki is part of an otherwise vibrant website.

By the way — maybe we should just call it "inactive" and move the wikis currently in the inactive category into the "dead" category? That way, the inactive category can actually have some usefulness. Leucosticte (talk) 02:58, 13 September 2012 (PDT)

I think this 'Abandoned' has a real prospect. We must really wait for out esteemed leader (along with the rest of the admin team) to have their say though.

Regarding the 'inactive' vs 'dead' - there are problems with both - and I don't think we have reached a satisfactory resolution. Mark prefers to use Template:Tl, but this has (IMVHO) disatrous consquences (it basically strips out all categorisation from the former infobox). And the Template:Tl template is very untidy. Hoof Hearted • talk2HH 13:47, 14 September 2012 (PDT)

Big gap between dormant and active

Where does one draw the line between dormant and active? There are some wikis with not much activity other than a continual battle against spam. They keep the spam down but don't accomplish much else. This chart has no middle ground between dormant and active, though; there are a lot of wikis with low, but greater than zero, activity. Leucosticte (talk) 23:43, 13 September 2012 (PDT)

I would say Category:NeedsLove. I've been using this for wikis which have little or no 'constructive' editing, but have occasional 'maintenance' edits to delete spam. Does this seem ok to you? Hoof Hearted • talk2HH 13:54, 14 September 2012 (PDT)