WikiIndex talk:Community talk

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Template:TOCright This community talk page is a space to ask a question when the question is not directed towards a individual person but towards the whole group; or if you don't know who to ask here at WikiIndex. A similar page with similar purposes is WikiIndex talk:Community portal.

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Expression error: Unrecognised punctuation character ","

I think this must be caused by something in the categories I added -- or perhaps a template I accidentally altered? I can't figure it out: Wiki Name. Anybody? thanks, Clarissa Caldwell 14:03, 19 August 2008 (EDT)

Fixed. I removed the comma in the article count. --Ciencia Al Poder 14:48, 21 August 2008 (EDT)
Ahhh, he was the culprit! Thank you Ciencia, appreciate it. Clarissa Caldwell 18:52, 28 August 2008 (EDT)

rel nofollow on links to wikis

I noticed a page on this wiki that points to one of my wikis. I noticed that the page on this wiki is full of my keywords in the text, meta tags, titles, etc.. I support the idea of this wiki wanting to be a central point for a listing of all wikis, and initially I wasn't too upset about your using the name and keywords of my wiki on your site.

But on further examination, I discovered that your link to my wiki is done as rel="nofollow". This tag causes spiders and indexers to ignore the link, so my wiki gets no benefit in return for your use of my information. Is this fair?

Essentially you are profiting by the existence of my wiki, along with having my keywords on your site, without giving my wiki the benefit of a real link from yours.

I understand all the reasons for using rel="nofollow" to prevent wiki spam. But there are creative ways to selectively drop the rel="nofollow" on links that you want. I think with your use of keywords and titles and names of other wikis, the least you can do is make sure they get a real link in return.

Not sure I understand this "But there are creative ways to selectively drop the rel="nofollow" on links that you want." - If we have done this to try and prevent wiki spam, how would we do it otherwise? No disrespect is intentioned, so thanks for bringing this issue up. Best, MarkDilley
I do not know if MediaWiki can support this out of the box, but here's how I've dealt with these issues: My wikis implement a whitelist of sites that can be linked to, and a regular expression black list of sites that can not be linked to. My wiki implements the whitelist as a list of sites that are linked to directly, and sites not on either the white or black lists are linked to through a redirect script. My wiki refuses to render any URL matching a regexp in the blacklist. Users see nothing in that spot on the page, and admins see the page rendered with "BLOCKED URL yyy" at those spots... I know the whole issue of white and black lists is controversial, but I've found it to be relatively painless way of removing the payload for spammers. Combined with IP block list, and a captcha box for non-authenticated users, 99% of wiki spam is rebuffed before it even gets posted... For this wiki, my suggestion is that whitelisting could be linked to the page names, so that the link to a wiki would be without the rel="nofollow" on it's own page. Obviously this would require some custom code unique to this wiki. - Anonymous

We have decided to turn this feature off. 22-May-2006

Has nofollow been unintentionally turned back on? --71.202.61.146 04:16, 4 June 2007 (EDT)
Yeah, the default is on, I just turned it off again. Sorry! John 12:35, 4 June 2007 (EDT)

Renaming categories

How do you rename a category? I don't mean cutting and pasting text to a new page. You should be able to move the page and its edit history to a new location. I can't do it even if I copy the old page title to the move page URL. Can any admin do it?

I prepared to move Category:OddMuse to Category:Oddmuse, since it is Oddmuse accroding to its official website. I opened all the articles with the OddMuse category in new tabs, edited them, and then noticed that I can't move the category. Ouch. Tristram Shandy 18:10, 7 Mar 2006 (EST)

It seems no-one can move categories. Tristram Shandy

input requested on categorization (meta)

Category:Browse is nicely becoming smaller. One outstanding issue is that we need a new category for articles related to the whole wiki community that aren't meta to WikiIndex, but sort of meta to all of wikilandia. Books, OptOut, Weblogs, What is a Wiki etc. Any suggestions? TedErnst | talk 18:52, 15 Mar 2006 (EST)

Category:Wiki Language?

Should there be a distinction between wikis that are bilingual (e.g. WikiIndex-English & French), multilingual (e.g. Wikimedia Commons-multiple languages used within the same wiki), and multiple languages (e.g. most Wikimedia Foundation projects, such as the Wikipedia, that have versions in different languages [as subdomains in the case of Wikimedia projects])? User:BlankVerse | talk 00:44, 27 Mar 2006 (EST)

I just created Category:Deutsch as a redirect to Category:German. This works in the sense that if you click on the Deutsch link under the categories at the bottom of the page you will go to Category:German. The problem is that any articles tagged with only Category:Deutsch do not show up under Category:German. After thinking about it, I am now changing Category:Deutsch to be a subcategory under Category:German. I think that is the better to do things. I'll also do the same thing with Category:Español. User:BlankVerse | talk 20:47, 29 Mar 2006 (EST)

Template:CategoryDiscussions

Help namespace

There is a "Help:" namespace. Should we start utilizing it? I don't mind moving all the pages in the help category myself. —User:Sean Fennel@ 14:51, 27 Mar 2006 (EST)

Sean, what pages do you think we already have that would go in to the Help: namespace, and by saying "we already have it" - you mean because the search is already set up for Help:? Best, MarkDilley

is mailedto a wiki?

I'm not even sure this is supposed to be public -- perhaps it's only a temporary experiment. Should we list it anyway? http://mailedto.com/wiki2/ --DavidCary 01:02, 29 Mar 2006 (EST)

David, I looked at it, and it looks cool, but I am not sure I get it. Please list it if you want. Best, MarkDilley
mailedto.com is just one of those spammy psuedo-search portal sites that hijack your search terms from other search engines and make you go through them. There's probably a name for that, but I don't know what it is. Anyway, it certainly isn't a wiki. [Just Passing Through] 68.166.37.234 16:58, 27 June 2008 (EDT)

private wiki advice needed

I have a friend that wants a private wiki for his business. I tried to help him set up Usemod and failed. He knows about and has used PBwiki and is worried about his data if they go under. Where should he go to feel secure about both his data not being seen and his data not disappearing at some point. TedErnst | talk 11:28, 4 May 2006 (EDT)

Does your friend want a free service or can they pay? MarkDilley

What he really wants is something at his domain so he doesn't have to pay, but since I can't seem to help him with that, he's looking at other options. Are there free options you can recommend? What about for pay? TedErnst | talk 17:18, 4 May 2006 (EDT)

Friend here. It needs to be secure. Trade secrets, personal info and such. I'd like to host it for more control if possible. Thanks.

In order of who I have known longer:

Also http://dreamhost.com maybe able to help, they have a one click install of a MediaWiki. -- MarkDilley

Thanks. I have no idea what to do once I arrive at these links. The last option is something you get if you sign up for a paid hosting plan? Howard

Update: Spent some more time. Socialtext links to a blank page. Confluence-- $1200 license-- no go. Wetpaint-- can't find the info I need to understand what I need to do, or how much it would cost. This is going way beyond the amount of time I can invest in this-- thanks for trying.

Howard, can we talk on the phone? I think that would be much better. Best, MarkDilley

check this wiki

Monket Calendar - this seems to be one software application within a larger wiki - help me out seeing what's up here? TedErnst | talk 18:22, 19 May 2006 (EDT)

Questions go where?

How do I know if my question goes on Community talk or talk: Community talk? TedErnst 11:44, 22 Jan 2006 (EST)

  • Community talk is the article descibing the page (and maybe decisions?), talk is where the action happens. Me thinks :-) MarkDilley
I've merged the two pages now, so problem should be solved. --Singkong2005 09:51, 30 August 2006 (EDT)

Mark, I would like to make the same proposal as the one in WorldWideWiki, but it seems that it is not possible to transclude anything into MediaWiki... (or to include HTML/Iframe). An other question is: Where is the rss feed? of WikiIndex. OlivierAuber 10:44, 22 Jan 2006 (EST)

Can we map the logos to wiki_url field, i.e. the main page? I think that images will draw people and their clicking getting to the image page is less relevant, but if that is the way it is, that would be fine! :-) MarkDilley

Yep. Pipe the external link to the full URL of the image. —User:Sean Fennel@ 14:48, 27 Mar 2006 (EST)

Thanks Sean, so we can hard wire the image to the front page of the wiki being referenced? If so, can you show me documentation? Best, MarkDilley

See what I did on TextMate Wiki. Sorry it took me so long to respond. I thought this page was on my watchlist. It is now. —User:Sean Fennel@ 15:29, 10 June 2006 (EDT)

social-ism

I can't type this word without the dash because the spam filter doesn't like cia-lis (without the dash). This is messed up! This should be it's own category but I can't do it! TedErnst | talk 17:50, 24 May 2006 (EDT)

technical glitch

Hello folks, I don't use watched pages very much. But I do on my user talk page, or did, way back when and I try to unwatch it. that doesn't work, every time I unwatch it, the next login, it is being watched again, any ideas? MarkDilley

I can only guess that that's a MediaWiki feature. If you don't use the watchlist, does having something on there impact you somewhere else? TedErnst | talk 14:04, 6 June 2006 (EDT)

No, just annoying! :-) MarkDilley

I'm sorry to hear you're annoyed, my friend. TedErnst | talk 17:11, 6 June 2006 (EDT)

In Special:Preferences there is an option to add every page you edit to your watchlist. You may want to turn that off if it's not already off. --Carlb 22:59, 10 June 2006 (EDT)

It seems that our user talk pages are always in bold, is that true? MarkDilley

Your own user page can't be un-watched. I think it's somehow connected to talk page notification. —User:Sean Fennel@ 00:56, 3 July 2006 (EDT)

OpenG

Is there a wiki for the G programming language? If one exists, I'd like to list it in the WikiIndex. I see what appears to be one using TikiWiki at http://openg.org/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=Whats%20New , but the big red warning at the top makes me suspect that it is going offline soon(?), to be replaced by a phpBB (which is non-wiki, right?). (Or do they plan to keep both running indefinitely, so people can use whichever one they feel comfortable with?). (G is the visual programming language used in Wikipedia:LabVIEW). --DavidCary 11:11, 24 June 2006 (EDT)

can't save edits to Wikis by response time

It looks like all edits are being blocked by the spam filter because the page contains the characters '. h t m l' somewhere., edits to THIS page were blocked because it contained the letters 'x x x', I changed them to 'yyy' -- Versageek 15:37, 30 July 2006 (EDT)

I didn't even know we had a spam filter. —User:Sean Fennel@ 17:49, 1 August 2006 (EDT)

WikiNode question

I recently put my wiki up Trendpedia and today I saw an article on my wiki http://trendpedia.elwiki.com/WikiNode and I am trying to figure out what the article is supposed to be. Since it was done by an IP and I'm not sure if they'll check back, I'm asking here. The thing is, it looks like a welcome message. I am not sure how to develop it. Is it supposed to be an article about WikiNode or WikiIndex? Why does it link to my wiki's recent changes and main page? ZealPalace 05:29, 22 August 2006 (EDT)

That was me. Have you had a chance to see anything about the WikiNodes network? WikiNodes are pretty cool, and allow you to show anyone the wikis that are "neighbors" of yours. So that page is just a generic template that I pasted in. It linked back to your page on WikiIndex so you'd know it was us. Feel free to change anything on the page, including the links to your RC and mainpage. Change those to the most important pages on your site and add links to the wikinodes of sites you consider to be your neighbors. Please let me know if you'd like to talk more about this. TedErnst | talk 05:36, 22 August 2006 (EDT)
I still don't quite get it, but I also think all of my wiki is lost. Please see my comment at Talk:ElWiki. ZealPalace 14:10, 23 August 2006 (EDT)

That´s a drag. TedErnst | talk 17:26, 23 August 2006 (EDT)

Well it's back up now without explanation. It's really hard to find a good wiki farm, I find, though. Editthis.info has a size limit. Wikia may cause you to lose control of your wiki at any time. The rest either give you a single page or are not MediaWiki. ZealPalace 21:29, 23 August 2006 (EDT)

Sitemap

I can't tell if WikiIndex already has a sitemap, but if not, I have been using this at Film-Flam with good effect: http://www.thinklemon.com/wiki/MediaWiki:Google_Sitemaps. Worth considering to improve your Google indexing. Dryguy 19:17, 22 August 2006 (EDT)

A sitemap is just a list of pages that are on a website (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sitemap). Google Sitemaps (http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/) is a service that allows you to tell Google where to find your sitemap. Doing so improves Google's ability to index your website, if the sitemap is in the right format. In my case, it has resulted in my site going from not being indexed by Google at all, to actually appearing as a result for certain search terms. The PHP script linked above can be installed by the site administrators to automatically generate a Google-compatible sitemap for a MediaWiki based website. As I understand it, this helps ensure that Google will find and index new pages on your site fairly soon after they are created. I would guess it can also help Google recognize the difference between a temporary connection problem vs. a page on the site that no longer exists. There is also the added benefit that you can use the Google sitemap tools to view statistics about what keywords are generating Google hits for your site. Dryguy 18:24, 23 August 2006 (EDT)

Hi. I think the idea sounds good, is it possible for you to start the process, or do we have to have an administrator do it? Cheers, MarkDilley

The php script has to be installed by someone with access to the server directory where the wiki resides, so wiki adminship probably isn't enough, I think you have to have ftp access to the server. Dryguy 18:44, 23 August 2006 (EDT)

Ok, I will let John Stanton know about it. Best, MarkDilley

We had a flatfile Google sitemap up until the last upgrade of MediaWiki and apparently it did not survive the upgrade :-) I just implemented the automatic xml version suggested above and it seems to work great! We will need to keep an eye on it because 1) it is not qualified for mediawiki 1.6.5 and 2) it takes a bit of time to generate the output (it found 7804 wiki pages on the trial run). You can see the output yourself at http://wikiindex.com/sitemap.xml.php (moved to http://wikiindex.org/sitemap.xml.php and may not exist any more) be patient because it takes several seconds to generate the output. John 12:13, 28 August 2006 (EDT)

Hi John, you may want to alter the SQL Statement by limiting the number of pages fetched (SELECT TOP 200 ... or the likes). That way only the last X edits will show up. Google will fetch the sitemap every 12 hours or so, therefore it'll only get the latest batch of updated pages. Of course find some values that'll work for this site. I don't know how many edits per day you're having here. Cheers Caspar/ThinkLemon. (Oh and if the MediaWiki database schema did not change from 1.5 to 1.6 it should work fine. Haven't tried it myself though. ;-))

Hi Casper, I'm going to keep an eye on it to see what the impact is before I change the SQL but thanks for the suggestion. The database schema had a significant change between 1.5 and 1.6 and that's what worried me but I tested it on my personal wiki and it seems to work fine. Thanks! John 14:57, 28 August 2006 (EDT)

search weirdness

When I do a search on "concepts", I see that #11 in the results is the page about the CTM Wiki.

If I type "ctm" or "CTM" into the search box, then bang on the "Search" or "Add" button, I expect to see that page listed somewhere in the results. Instead, I see a page that claims: 

"No page title matches" and "No page text matches".

Can we fix this bug? --DavidCary 22:07, 22 August 2006 (EDT)

It's a MediaWiki thing. Their search is awful and hasn't been worked on for a long time. I don´t believe we have the expertise among us to handle it. I'd recommend making a redirect from CTM. TedErnst | talk 17:00, 23 August 2006 (EDT)

By default you cant have a search string less than four characgters in length in MySQL. It's possible to change this setting however.

Unhelpful categories

What's the purpose of Category:Collaborative - Aren't all wikis collaborative? Likewise for Category:Information - aren't the majority of wikis for sharing information? I'd suggest that these should be deprecated. --Singkong2005 05:49, 30 August 2006 (EDT)

We're a bottom-up sort of place. We didn't decide on categories in advance. Each wiki is categorized (tagged) in a way that makes sense to the people doing the tagging, without regard to taxonomy (generally). It's only over time that we can start to see patterns, and then we can decide if any larger action needs to happen. In the case of the two examples you cite, I'd suggest that every wiki in those categories would need to be examined to see if those tags still make sense. A wiki about information theory might well belong in category information, but many of the wikis there might not be. Feel free to dig in to do this work! TedErnst | talk 11:05, 30 August 2006 (EDT)

Templates to group related topics

I've made a new template: Template:International development, and have put it on related topic pages. The idea is that when someone looks up one topic, they also see related topics (which only exist because people chose different words to mean the same or similar things).

It could do with a nice box around it. But next priority is to make one for the multiple sustainability/environment topics. --Singkong2005 09:45, 30 August 2006 (EDT)

We have a convention here using this syntax: {{related|RelatedCategory}} that we use to draw links between categories that are related. I bring this up because I can easily imagine wikis about hunger in Chicago or Toronto that have nothing to do with International Development. So while I agree with you that category hunger is related to category international development, to say that hunger is inside international development doesn't seem true to me. TedErnst | talk 11:10, 30 August 2006 (EDT)
Thanks - good point about hunger in Chicago etc. Will give it more thought, and probably change those pages to using {{related}}. --Chris Watkins/Singkong2005 talk 21:49, 2 September 2006 (EDT)

OpenID

Hi, all. I wanted to point out that there's now an OpenID extension for MediaWiki that lets people log into one MW wiki with an account from another wiki. I think it'd be particularly useful for a meta-community site like WikiIndex. The software is available from http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/extensions/OpenID/ in the MediaWiki subversion library, and I'd be happy to help get it installed. --Evan 11:22, 7 September 2006 (EDT)

There's a more useful page at mw:Extension:OpenID. I would love to help someone at WikiIndex install this software, step-by-step if needed. --Evan 14:20, 3 February 2007 (PST)
Would love to implement OpenID, as we discussed at RCC 2007, I've read over the installation page and it doesn't look too hairy. We do have a couple of issues that need to be resolved before we can go live with it, our .htaccess rewrite code quit working when we upgraded to MW 1.8.2 and changed hosts. I'll try to resolve our issues this week and start working on OpenID this weekend or early next week. John 09:25, 13 February 2007 (PST)

How are you doing hotlinking in mediawiki

On my wiki's article here http://wikiindex.com/Trendpedia well (moved to http://wikiindex.org/Trendpedia well) it's hotlinking my logo. I can't find how this happens. {{{wiki_logo}}} with three { and } instead of two is the only thing I see and that's in the wiki template, which is full of the three { and } things. Two is templates. So what are the three? I'm more interested in how this is done and what the three { } are above. I would actually prefer to keep the image hotlinked because it lets me test if I have hotlinks blocked, which I think I finally figured out how to do thanks to this site. ZealPalace 05:52, 9 September 2006 (EDT)

Sean Fennel is the one that probably knows the answer to this one. MarkDilley
Hotlinks can on some MediaWikis be made by just writing the URL. The {}'s are parameters in templates that allows the user to customize the template. – Smiddle / T·C·@ 14:01, 15 November 2006 (EST)
One caveat with hotlinking: As of MediaWiki 1.8, this appears to be turned off by default (although it can be re-enabled by system administrators by changing LocalSettings.php). Default in earlier versions was to replace any exposed link to an external image URL with the hotlinked image itself.
Perhaps hotlinks are falling out-of-favour on some sites as they consume bandwidth on the external site to which they link, as well as being prone to abuse as a means to link 'shock images' from wiki pages. --Carlb 14:13, 15 December 2006 (EST)

For those of you who function better in UseMod

The skin "Nostalgia" was designed to mimic UseMod, and does a pretty good job of it. I just found it in my preferences and was quite impressed. The only major difference is that the page title isn't a link to "What Links Here" a.k.a. BackLinks. — User:Sean Fennel@ 14:35, 9 September 2006 (EDT)

Broader wikis

I'm very enthusiastic about this wiki - connecting people with the right wiki is a great thing to do. Now, There is something which I think would help WikiIndex be even more useful.

The broader wikis, such as Wikipedia and Wikibooks, have a lot of material on most or all of the topics listed here. To really make the indexing complete, I think we should list:

  • Major topics on Wikipedia - this would mean a category which has an article of the same name, and which has a category on WikiIndex.
  • Wikipedia Wikiprojects (collaborations to improve groups of articles)
  • Bookshelves and books on Wikibooks

On a related topic: Perhaps it's also worth having an article which explains how the different wikis & projects link together. Or we could make a point of explaining that in the individual articles. For example, Appropedia is not for encyclopedic material, but rather is aiming to complement Wikipedia (not compete with it) by developing project pages, how tos, networks & collaborations, and allowing original research. --Chris Watkins/Singkong2005 talk 07:37, 15 September 2006 (EDT)

This wiki is a community effort, so if you've got a plan and want to set up an project to carry it out, by all means, do so. You are also welcome to join us for a Happening if you'd like to talk things over or present a specific proposal and have a chance to get real-time feedback. Or not. And just get to work! :-) No worries either way. TedErnst | talk 18:02, 15 September 2006 (EDT)
Excellent - will do this. --Chris Watkins/Singkong2005 talk 00:36, 21 September 2006 (EDT)
So ... you want to list each book on Wikibooks, each major Wikipedia topic, and each Wikipedia Wikiproject, as if it were an independent wiki? That sounds fine. --DavidCary 17:01, 17 April 2007 (PDT)

The Wiki Synergy Project

I've started The Wiki Synergy Project in my userspace. The idea is to encourage greater synergy between related wikis (particularly in sustainability & development, which are my main interest, and which overlap a lot). The idea is that when I contact wikis to talk about these ideas, I can link them to this page, which will explain everything. It will also provide a neutral place for people to talk about these ideas.

I'd appreciate feedback, and if anyone wants to join the effort, that would be great.

As I said, my concern is wikis on sustainability & development, but I'm sure the same issues apply elsewhere, so I'm keeping the project as as broad as possible. --Chris Watkins/Singkong2005 talk 00:37, 21 September 2006 (EDT)

question from 66.36.243.77 moved from off-topic places

Sorry for your time.... Why i can't see images on this resource? My Browser is: Opera. Thank you.

See also this response to the same question on Appropedia.
Let us know if this helps. --Chris Watkins/Singkong2005 talk 21:07, 10 October 2006 (EDT)

Feedback

There you have my idea. What do you think about it? Want to add your wiki? --Let's 12:02, 10 November 2006 (EST)

"BuildingControlsWiki"

On page https://wiki.ubuntu.com/InterWiki. I see a link to a "BuildingControlsWiki". Apparently, that page (including that link) was copied from http://moinmaster.wikiwikiweb.de/InterWikiMap. Alas, it appears that wiki has gone offline. Or perhaps it moved? does anyone know where? --DavidCary 01:12, 22 November 2006 (EST)

Category images

If it's not too server-painful, we can upload an image for each category, for example a French flag for Category:French, or a image of an iPod at Category:iPod. – Smiddle / T·C·@ 11:23, 7 December 2006 (EST)

If you're looking for flags, openclipart.org has a reasonably full set as public-domain .SVG's. Perhaps you could use those? --66.102.73.18 02:22, 15 December 2006 (EST)

Duplicate categories

We do seem to have many redundant categories, for instance category:game / category:games / category:gaming. These seem to often be being #REDIRECT'ed - not necessarily the best approach, as a redirected page still appears to be a blue link and therefore is prone to keep getting added to articles. Would deleting the duplicates entirely so that they become red links be more likely to discourage their recreation or re-use? The politics is, I presume, just a sideshow and the creation of multiple near-identical categories in most cases merely an accident, but I thought it would be best to ask here instead of trying to find a "votes for speedy deletion" tag for them. This is a community-created site, without a top-down determination of which categories we ought to be using. If you see duplication, feel free to clean it up. You can also use {{delete}} for an empty category that needs to be removed. TedErnst | talk 14:27, 15 December 2006 (EST)

Research and analysis collaboration?

Is anyone interested in working together to learn what is most effective or critical for wikis, especially attracting contributors? If so, please see the discussion at Wikia. Maurreen 15:06, 10 December 2006 (EST)

Changing username

If I want to change my username, should I just open a new account, or is possible (easy) to change it and keep the edit history, like I did on Wikipedia at Wikipedia:Wikipedia:Changing username? Thanks --Chris Watkins/Singkong2005 talk 00:41, 19 December 2006 (PST)

I just looked at the wikipedia page and they have a special page for "rename user" which we do not have. Is this some kind of extension? TedErnst | talk 22:35, 19 December 2006 (PST)
Yes it is. They have quite a few pretty nifty extensions there. — User:Sean Fennel@ 15:44, 20 December 2006 (PST)

As of 2013, 'rename user' is now installed. Sean, aka Hoof Hearted • Admin / 'Crat • talk2HH 04:39, 31 October 2013 (UTC)

Spam protection filter blocks normal editing

I just tried to edit the categories of a page (Appropedia) and got this message:

The page you wanted to save was blocked by the spam filter. This is probably caused by a link to an external site.
The following text is what triggered our spam filter: (shows partial url of Appropedia)

I couldn't even post this message until I removed the url in the message. This is obviously not working the way it should, if it blocks legitimate editing.

Obviously we want to stop spam, but it must be a different way - what about having the box with wavy letters that we have to type in, or a simple arithmetic problem (e.g. "75-2="), or something like that? And even that should only be necessary for anons or new users. --Chris Watkins/Singkong2005 talk 15:20, 27 December 2006 (PST)

CAPTCHAs are rather difficult to implement effectively, and really only stop spambots. I think (hope) I've created a whitelist and added that as the first entry. — User:Sean Fennel@ 16:05, 1 January 2007 (PST)
Spambots are the source of most of the wiki linkspam at the moment, and blacklists are doing a poor job of dealing with the problems as spammers are free to just register more domain names and hide behind a long list of open proxies scattered across the net. There is an extension (ConfirmEdit) available from MediaWiki's SVN that provides a captcha (or asks for the answer to a maths problem) - I've found it to be the most effective way to stop 'bots from posting anything with any external links. This would be the majority of rubbish pages with trailing /'s, /index.php/ or other nonsense in the titles. --Carlb 10:09, 14 May 2007 (EDT)
We use the wikimedia blacklist for most of our link spam filtering see: spam blacklist if your url appears in that blacklist you should probably notify them because many wikis use that list to control spam. John 18:53, 15 May 2007 (EDT)

It's been brought up before, but the blacklist makes it impossible to edit the entry on Encyclopedia Dramatica. I was only planning to update the statistics and the logo. Is there a way to whitelist ED such that the article can be edited by registered users? Dianoga 18:28, 19 December 2007 (EST)

Could I please get a local whitelisting for the site gargoyles.dracandros.com/ (with an http:// at the front). It's for the page on GargWiki. If this is not an appropriate place to ask about it, where should I go? -- Supermorff 11:58, 14 May 2008 (EDT)

RecentChanges.info

What happened to the RecentChanges.info blog ([1])? I followed the instructions on to add my wiki posting to Template:WikiSpotlight, but RecentChanges.info seems to have had no update since August 21, 2006! --84.155.249.44 10:19, 13 January 2007 (PST)

wikiindex.com

What's up with http://wikiindex.com/ ? --DavidCary 17:01, 17 April 2007 (PDT)

Don't know what happened there but I'll check it out John 10:27, 20 April 2007 (PDT)
Could you check this again? Thank you. --DavidCary 07:23, 20 September 2010 (PDT)

Images

Hm, what happened to the (formerly possible) hardlinking of logos? And what happened to some disappeared images like Image:LüneburgWikiLogo.JPG, are they lost? --Rh 23:21, 26 April 2007 (PDT)

As far as I know, it still works. As for that image, I'll look through the deletion logs and see if it's there. — User:Sean Fennel@ 21:15, 1 May 2007 (PDT)
Ah, something's linking to it as a wiki page rather than a file. Ping John on that. — User:Sean Fennel@ 21:18, 1 May 2007 (PDT)
As of MediaWiki 1.8, $wgAllowExternalImages = false; is the default. This can only be changed from the config files (LocalSettings.php). --Carlb 10:05, 14 May 2007 (EDT)
External images are re-enabled (part of the rebuilding process). John 18:32, 15 May 2007 (EDT)

Template signatures

Can we have those? – Smiddle/TC@ 13:13, 14 May 2007 (EDT)

Refresh me on the template signatures, what do we need to do? John 18:34, 15 May 2007 (EDT)
So that we can have very nice looking signatures that don't take up six rows in the edit box.

Example: You can have {{User:Smiddle/sig}} instead of 

– '''[[User:Smiddle|<span title="My user page"><font color="012e01">S</font><font color="113e11">m</font><font color="214e21">i</font><font color="214e21">d</font><font color="315e31">d</font><font color="416e41">l</font><font color="517e51">e</font></span>]]''' <small>(''' [[User talk:Smiddle|<span title="Talk"><font color="2e0101">T</font><font color="3e1111">a</font><font color="4e2121">l</font><font color="5e3131">k</font></span>]] • [[Special:Contributions/Smiddle|<span title="What I've done"><font color="01012e">C</font><font color="11113e">o</font><font color="21214e">n</font><font color="31315e">t</font><font color="41416e">r</font><font color="51517e">i</font><font color="61618e">b</font><font color="71719e">s</font></span>]] ''')</small>

– Smiddle/TC@ 11:50, 28 May 2007 (EDT)

Nothing technical would need to be done. Might as well set myself up one. — User:Sean Fennel@ 03:04, 31 May 2007 (EDT)EDIT: Nothing technical except allowing subpages in the "User" namespace. — User:Sean Fennel@ 03:09, 31 May 2007 (EDT)
Yeah, User namespaces have subpages turned on by default, guess I'll have to get with the program :-) John 10:28, 31 May 2007 (EDT)
In some wikis, these take up bandwith and stuff, so I were just asking. – Smiddle/TC@ 16:34, 31 May 2007 (EDT)

Open Call for Editors to Participate in Research Project

Hi there! My name is Jim Sutton and I'm undertaking research in the School of Library, Archive, and Information Studies, UCL, London. http://www.slais.ucl.ac.uk/

My research involves studying wiki usage, the reasons why individuals use wikis and the benefits/disadvantages of using wikis to create and manage knowledge. I'd be extremely grateful for any feedback you can provide as to your reasons for using/contributing to wikis. You can submit your feedback through my online survey so please feel free to complete this if you have the time. The survey is available at: http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/stqa7937/survey/

My research is being carried out jointly with Melissa Terras at UCL http://www.ucl.ac.uk/slais/melissa-terras/ . Her email address is m.terras (at) ucl.ac.uk .

I'd be extremely grateful for any help that you can provide. If you have any questions please let me know. I can be emailed at james.sutton (at) ucl.ac.uk . Thank you for your time! Sutton4019 05:56, 26 June 2007 (EDT)

A wiki for connecting with people locally?

I've often thought about a wiki that would help people to connect, by interest and/or location - e.g. search for geeks in Kuala Lumpur, yogis in Alexandria, knitters in Dallas or people in Sydney's inner west who are into green technology... Salsa in Sydney or Sydney Geek Events or Geek stuff in Australia. A bit like WiserEarth but unlimited in scope rather than just green stuff.

Is anyone attempting to do this? If not, it'd be good to start something - e.g. on Wikia Scratchpad. (I was hoping local.wikia was it, but it seems not.)

It'd be best to incorporate social networking stuff, to help finding people in one's local area. This is not a wiki's strength, but I think Wikia's making progress. What we'd really like is to be able to bring over or tie in networking stuff from other wikis. I've read snippets about improvements to social networking sites to allow people to transfer personal information. Then there's Google's OpenSocial. But what's still missing is a way to do a single search for people, on a single site. Perhaps as things get more sophisticated, Google's OpenSocial APIs will enable this kind of thing, or there'll be some other way of marking our personal pages on different sites (a bit like how CC license marks work).

Thoughts, anyone? Anyone else think this would be a massively useful thing? --Chris Watkins a.k.a. Chriswaterguy talk 00:04, 14 February 2008 (EST)

Chris, I have hopes that AboutUs will fill that niche somehow, but you are right, it is going to take a lot of work. Please point to Wikia's work on this. Best, MarkDilley

Hmm - I thought AboutUs was web-focused rather than local focused. Have you started to move in that direction at all, of the kind of thing I've been talking about, or is it something you've just been thinking about? Curious to hear your ideas. --Chris Watkins a.k.a. Chriswaterguy talk 09:26, 14 February 2008 (EST)
Have a look at WikiSocial --Matthias 12:45, 14 February 2008 (EST)
A wiki to help people connect sounds like a good idea.
You might be interested in these wiki, which take a few steps towards that ideal:
The Coworking wiki has one page per city -- I'm in Tulsa, so I check out Coworking: CoworkingTulsa.
Each individual wiki in Category:Cities is intensely locally-focused. --DavidCary 09:37, 18 September 2008 (EDT)
Recently some nice people from Code for America told me about LocalWiki -- is that what Chris Watkins a.k.a. Chriswaterguy is looking for? --DavidCary (talk) 19:16, 8 December 2014 (UTC)

Advice on choosing a wiki platform

Help, I'm a wiki newbie and am a little overwhelmed with all of the options. (My apologies for the horrible formatting, I'll eventually get the hang of it)

I'm writing a non-fiction book on love and dating and need to organize my research and allow select users to collaborate on the content. I will eventually open up the wiki to the public.

My wiki research indicates that Wetpaint or ScribbleWiki are my best options... but I don't understand the space well enough to know which to choose, or whether to explore other options.

Here are my needs:

  • Price range: Free would be nice, or under $15 a month
  • Usability: I'm obviously going to need a WYSIWYG interface
  • Bells & Whistles: I'd like 'em all. Preview, Section editing, email notification etc.
  • Domain: I don't need to use my own domain
  • Hosting: Someone else should host it, I'll just make a mess
  • Security: I need flexibility to control who is able to view and participate for the first few months, then be able to open it up.
  • Ads: I'd like the option of controlling some of the ad space. I don't need this right away, but it may become important. I don't mind other ads being on the page if they're not obnoxious and overly prominent

Any advice?

Don't worry about making the "wrong" choice. If you ever change your mind, it is easy to move content from any wiki to any other wiki.
I recommend starting a wiki on *both* your top 2 options, and making prominent links back and forth between them.
That way, if one is ever temporarily offline, people can immediately use the other one.
In theory, http://www.wikimatrix.org/ (WikiMatrix) should quickly steer you to the right choice. Have you tried their wiki choice wizard? How can we improve it?
I ran through it myself with the criteria you give above, and it gives me TooManyWikiEngines.
[tangent] Many newcomers to wiki think that WYSIWYG is absolutely necessary. However, other people feel that communicating and connecting ideas is the top priority, and current WYSIWYG wiki implementations make that unnecessarily difficult -- other, simpler ways to edit are better.[/tangent] --DavidCary 15:52, 18 September 2008 (EDT)
Anyone considering doing this may find the Wikibook: "Starting and running a wiki website" helpful.
Perhaps also the Wiki: RunningYourOwnWikiFaq. --DavidCary 23:15, 11 December 2008 (EST)

Wikipedia lessons

I was reading this article tonight and was wondering what this might mean for people who run their own wikis regarding legal issues. Thoughts? --LauraHale 23:18, 14 May 2008 (EDT)

Vandalism

Besides reverting, is there a procedure for dealing with minor vandalism, such as this? [2] --MarvelZuvembie 14:36, 26 September 2008 (EDT)

Spam reporting

Is there a central repository to report spam entries? I'd been reporting them on to an individual admin because I saw someone else do the same thing, but I don't want overburden that person. --MarvelZuvembie 14:40, 26 September 2008 (EDT)

Aha! It looks like you can use the {{delete}} template to bring it to the attention of any administrator who is checking that category. --MarvelZuvembie 16:13, 6 October 2008 (EDT)

Two wikis, one name

What do you do in the case where there is more than one Wiki with the same name? There are two wikis devoted to the Korean(?) FPS Blackshot, both of which use the moniker Blackshot Wiki. Both seem to be in development, without much content as of yet. Both are linked from Wikiindex article. Maybe I'll try to set up two infoboxes for the short term. --MarvelZuvembie 18:22, 6 October 2008 (EDT)

Hmm. This is bound to happen more in the future, so a formal policy would be a good idea.
Maybe a 'disambiguation page' might be appropriate for this sort of thing? You could have the disambiguation page at 'Blackshot Wiki' and have that page point to both of the wikis using the name. Then each wiki could have a disambiguation template on the top of the page that says something along the line of: This wiki has an identical name to at least one other wiki, for other wikis called <insert name> see the <insert name> disambiguation page.
Another way to handle this would be to have a link on top of both wikis that says something like: This is the Blackshot Wiki set up by <whoevermadethewiki>, for the Blackshot Wiki set up by <whoevermadetheotherwiki> see <whateverthelinkis>. That sounds more like what you have done for your short term solution. David Shepheard 09:50, 12 April 2009 (EDT)
In the case of Transformers Wiki, we set up a disambiguation page. This seems like a good solution. --MarvelZuvembie 16:41, 8 May 2009 (EDT)

Namespace Org/Re-org and general ideas

First of all, I'd like to say a general "hi" to the regulars here, I've been registered, but not really shown myself much. Looking around the wiki, I've decided that for the readers, unless they know their wikis exact name, it is rather difficult to find the wiki they're looking for. Also, if they simply wish to find a list of all wikis on the subject of "cooking", for example, it could be quite challenging. I may be new on the WikiIndex, but I do frequent various wikis across the net, such as UESP, ESWiki, Wikipedia, as well as owning a few private wikis, under the two aliases "Jacjohncoles" and "Game Lord". This means that I have a pretty thourough knowledge of how wikis work, both from the editor's point of view, and from the owner's point of view. To get back to why I'm posting this in the first place though. I'm not saying that the wiki is in a disorganized mess, but I am saying that it could, in my opinion at least, be done better. My suggestions to improve organization are the following:

  • Create seperate Namespaces for the three main subjects that WikiIndex covers. An idea for the Namespace names would be "Wiki", "Editor", and "Idea". This would give us a first step to splitting WikiIndex up into three seperate sections.
  • Once we have this, we can proceed further. Each Namespace could have a main page, such as "Wiki:Contents", "Editor:Contents", and "Idea:Contents". In these content pages, we could start with splitting up individual wikis up into sections. Seperate headers for different sortations, such as "Wikis by size", "Wikis by subject" and so on.
  • These contents pages, so that they can easily be found, could be linked to from the sidebar. An obvious place to put them would be under "navigation". Equally logical would be to create a new header, called "sections" or something similar.
  • The categories should probably be linked to from the contents pages. The Category Namespace is extremely valuable to the organization, as they represent an automatically refreshing list of whatever we wish to put there. The wikis themselevs are automatically categorized by the Wiki template. I'm not sure whether this is also done for Editors.

Further organizational ideas doubtlessly exist, but what I've layed out here should, I think, provide a first basis for the WikiIndex.- JacjohncolesTalk|Contribs 16:53, 22 October 2008 (EDT)

Hmm. I don't know if you actually need to add extra namespace to do this. I'd say that improvement on the main page, could point to some 'how to use WikiIndex' pages that show people exactly how to find wikis via categories or the search facility. Even if that involved adding a namespace, I don't see why you need to do more than have a single WikiIndex namespace with pages called things like 'WikiIndex:How to use WikiIndex', 'WikiIndex:How to use our search box' and so on. Although, having said that, I would have thought that most of the stuff I've mentioned should go into normal help pages.
What was the reason for your proposed 'Editors' namespace? Was that something that would be used to help find people with WikiIndex user accounts? If so, then I think that categorising users would help. But most users seem to have a very chaotic attitude to their user page, so I can't see how you could do that without getting people to put some sort of template on their page. I think that might lead to people visiting other people's user pages and telling them 'you have done your user page wrong'. I think that you would need to tread lightly in any attmpt to organise users into groups. Ironically, I got specifically asked to create my user name in the main namespace (instead of the user namespace), so it looks like someone has already decided to do the opposite thing to your suggestion. You might want to find out who decided on that policy and talk to them. It is possible that your 'Editors' namespace would be better done if people were moved back to the 'User' namespace that other wiki editors would expect to see them under. (The Search page is already setup to look for pages within the User namespace, but adding an 'Editors' namespace would create a need to reprogram the Search page.)
What is the Idea thing? Are you talking about general concepts that are not wikis? David Shepheard 09:38, 9 May 2009 (EDT)

articles?

Hi everybody. I've just signed up. Can one create an "article" here on say, Barack Obama, to use as a link farm to other wikis: e.g. Wikipedia article on Obama, Conservapedia article on Obama, Uncyclopedia article on Obama, et al? If not there where can this be done? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks Yartet 15:56, 15 December 2008 (EST)

I believe that everything is on-topic somewhere [3].
I would love for Mr. Obama to create a page at WikiIndex about himself, a page that would show the world that he is, in fact, one of the Category:Wiki People
However, the WikiIndex is intended to be a index of wiki.
Since Mr. Obama is not, himself, a wiki, nor (yet) one of the Category:Wiki People, I don't think it is really appropriate for either of us to create an article about Mr. Obama here at WikiIndex.
Until then, I think the best place at WikiIndex to put your list of links to wiki that have articles about Mr. Obama is in a "related wiki" section of the Obamapedia article at WikiIndex.
--DavidCary 16:49, 31 December 2008 (EST)

proposal

of a structure and naming scheme for wiki sites with multiple language versions: have a look here and discuss it before it gets a new recommended standard or so...--Speckmade 18:44, 29 January 2009 (EST)

Dead wiki URL taken over by cybersquatters

What should we do when we link to a wiki, but later we discover that domain name has been hijacked by cybersquatters? Please discuss at WikiIndex talk:How do you categorize a wiki that is no longer.

Site reviews

I recently admonished an anonymous user that this site is about indexing wikis, not providing one's own personal perspective about them. However, now that I look deeper into it, this rule exists in my head, not on WikiIndex. True, we don't typically provide a lot of subjective information about the wikis we list here, but there's really nothing saying that we can't. I brought this up to MarkDilley and he said that this is a community issue. So I'm bringing it up here on the Community talk page. :-)

Do we see usefulness in providing reviews or personal experience about the wikis we index here? If so, what limits (if any) should there be regarding this?

My personal take is that this could be a useful tool for site visitors. However, a review is only as good as the reviewer. I'd hate to see this site overrun by comments like "this wiki sux". Any thoughts? --MarvelZuvembie 17:09, 8 May 2009 (EDT)

One problem with this strategy, is that one of the places I've seen that has a 'review' of a wiki is Wikia. Wikia is a wiki farm, so the issues that have been brought up on that page relate to any future wiki that someone might choose to host on Wikia (or elsewhere), but they also relate (to a lesser extent) to every wiki that has the Wikia category added to it.
I think you get two types of information from a 'review':
  • 'opinions' which are personal points of view and might not be shared by other editors and
  • 'facts' which can be verified by citations that link directly over to some sort of feature.
I've got my doubts about the usefulness of 'opinions'. Everyone has their own opinions about things. If someone was to say that a specific wiki is 'too slow' then how am I supposed to decide how slow that is? But I think that facts (i.e. things that we can provide citations for) are much more likely to be useful to people. If something has a citation, I don't have to decide if user X has his facts straight. I can just surf over and have a look.
Wikipedia has a 'no original research' rule, and I wonder if a 'no original opinions' rule could be the best way to deal with 'reviewing a wiki'. Instead of having someone sit down and 'judge' the quality of the wiki, they could simply list a set of bullet points for the wiki's 'Pros and Cons' and link to external pages that give further information.
Some of the pros and cons of wiki farms apply to all of the wikis hosted on that wiki farm. You could (for example) make a template for Wikia (Template:Wikia perhaps) that lets people know that the wiki has various Wikia features (shared help, a single sign in for all Wikia wikis, community assistance at the central wiki, visiting admins who help fight spam, etc, etc). Descriptions of these features could actually be put on the Wikia category page, or alternatively, you could create a Wikia namespace (and have a page called 'Wikia:Shared help' that gives full details about how the help system works - or in this case does not work as it is currently broken). I'm not sure how this sort of thing should be set up, but it is something that could be cut down to an absolute minimum and then added to all Wikia wikis. (If it was done right, it could also add the Wikia category to the wiki in question.)
In fact I wonder if anything that is statistical could be something that should be put into some sort of template. If lots of wikis have advertising, then should Template:Wiki be updated to have a line that lets people know if a given wiki has adverts on it? Or would it be better to have additional templates (like you already do with Template:Size?
I also wonder if Template:Wiki should have sub-templates, that deal with specific types of wikis that have special requirements. For example, a number of wikis have been set up to deal with fictional worlds. From the point of view of fictional worlds 'canon' is a very important thing. Some people may be looking for an encyclopedia of canon and would not 'value' a wiki that contains stuff that is not from the canon of the original source. On the other hand, other people are interested in expanding that fictional world with fan-fiction and would not want to work on a wiki that did not allow them to add fanon material.
I think that specific bits of information, like the examples I've given, can be very helpful to someone who wants to decide if they should spend time reading or writing on an individual wiki, but if I just read that User X thinks that 'Wiki Y is brilliant or rubbish at doing Z', then that really isn't helpful to me. I think that things like the wikiFactor (which is an optional feature on Template:Size) are so much more useful than longhand opinions, because I can very rapidly compare two wikis and decide which one I prefer. Feautures like wikiFactor, put the reader in the driving seat and inform rather than preach. More importantly, things like wikiFactor (or the absence or lack of adverts) are things that can easily be translated from English into a ton of other languages - long winded opinions are going to cause translation delays. David Shepheard 08:50, 9 May 2009 (EDT)
I agree that any review info should be objective rather than subjective, but the question is about notability and fairness of certain "facts". For example, I (repeatedly) posted a "fact" in the RationalWiki article, that there was a debate about an issue on the talk page. Is it a notable fact? Is it fair to host or link to criticism of one without doing this for any competing wikis or wiki farm? When persistent editors make sure that their favored articles are free of certain "criticisms", is it fair to allow criticism in another article just because there is no one so driven to "protect" it? Lumenos 15:58, 23 June 2010 (EDT)
"By basic information, I mean facts which can be verified empirically (the link, the underlying wiki engine, the statement of purpose, # of pages, etc.). I differentiate this from people's subjective experiences with the wiki. [...] --MarvelZuvembie 20:34, 16 October 2009 (EDT)" Quote is from here and that is a more recent conversation. Lumenos 16:30, 23 June 2010 (EDT)

SizeBot?

I've seen a number of other wikis that have bots that go around and do minor cleanup jobs. Would it possible to create a bot that goes around and checks any pages that contain Template:Size? This template contains the size of the wiki, but also has a link where the new size can be read. A bot should (hopefully) be able to follow the link, look at the current size of the wiki and then update the number of pages back on WikiIndex.

Template:Size also features the wikiFactor, and I wonder if the same bot could also check this information. (Having said that, I know nothing about bot programming and it might be easier to have a second bot to do that.) A bot that searches for wikis that do not currently have a wikiFactor (and then searches the wiki stats to see if it can be added) could also be useful. I know that all wikis work slightly differently, but wiki farms (like Wikia) generally have the same setup on every wiki, so it might be easier to create a User:WikiaWikiFactorBot than a multi-wiki User:wikiFactorBot. But I would think that any automation of moving stats would help keep WikiIndex as up to date as possible.

If a number of bots could be created to do these minor update tasks, the pages the bots can not cope with could be added to some sort of 'Wikis that need manual patrol' category, and people could use that category to help find the pages that don't look after themselves. David Shepheard 09:05, 9 May 2009 (EDT)

I think that's a great idea. This seems like it would easy to do, but like you, I haven't used bots, so I'm only assuming. Anyone have any bot-creation experience? --MarvelZuvembie 19:45, 9 May 2009 (EDT)
Yes, I have. I will try to do something. Emijrp 02:00, 3 November 2010 (PDT)
I did it. Please, give bot flag to User:Emijrpbot. emijrp 11:58, 15 December 2011 (PST)

Non-English characters in PAGENAME

There are several wikis in Category:Wiki Korean for which the PAGENAME is written in Korean characters which cannot be reproduced on my computer. I don't know Unicode from a unicorn, but my computer can display a surprising variety of characters from different languages (Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, Thai, Hebrew, Arabic, etc.), but it has trouble with Korean and Burmese. I'm wondering if these pages should be moved to a new PAGENAME. I'm not trying to be English-centric (or Roman-alphabet-centric), notwithstanding that this site is already pretty much that way. But standing operating procedure seems to be to use the English name (an exonym) in the namespace and then add redirects to that page for the name in the native language (endonym). Alternatively, we could leave these articles as they are but add redirects using the Roman alphabet (assuming we can find a translation). I think I'm going to use that plan for now. I'm just wondering what would be of most benefit for our visitors. --MarvelZuvembie 19:43, 9 May 2009 (EDT)

Template:New Person

What is the purpose of Template:New Person? I also looked at the discussion page of that template, which left me even more confused. --DavidCary 10:10, 22 October 2009 (EDT)

visual wiki

Is http://VisWiki.com -- previously at http://VisualWikipedia.com -- a wiki, which therefore needs a WikiIndex article? Or is it merely a non-editable alternate "view" into Wikipedia and other information sources? (This is, of course, completely independent of the the Visual Language wiki Visual, which I'm trying to get back online ...) --DavidCary 21:57, 23 October 2009 (EDT)

Websites Wiki

Are you aware of http://websites.wikia.com/wiki/Websites_Wiki, Wikia's probable answer to the ailing ODP and the defunct Zeal.com? It follows a successful-looking German version.

It may start competing with WikiIndex soon. There are stirrings. You folks may want to see if you can come to some arrangement, perhaps involving reciprocal links on the basis that Wikia doesn't list any more wikis. Robin Patterson 07:52, 31 January 2010 (EST)

Hi Robin, I checked it out and it doesn't look very active - are you suggesting that people are amping up for major activity there? Best, MarkDilley

I'm looking for a speakeasy kinda wiki

What wikis are there, their lists, or categories where the people are cool, but also tolerant. Where I can do OR and POV's, upload regardless of some stoopid copyright guidelines, post articles regardless of notability, and upload pornographic images images of sexually liberated women (even stuff that might be hardcore -- but not too much like the ones at the video shops). I doubt Anarchopedia and Wikinfo would allow such, as worthy as they are. Would I be incorrect to assume that it would likely have, say, less than 2,000 pages and 10 edits a day? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks. 205.189.194.251 19:10, 31 March 2010 (EDT)

Dump or backup

Hi all. Before starting to participate in this wiki, I would like to know if there are public dumps or backups. I mean, I like to have copies of the free licensed projects where I collaborate. I don't like when a fantastic projects disappear in a data disaster. MediaWiki contains a script for generating dumps. You can read more about this here. Regards. Emijrp 02:30, 3 November 2010 (PDT)

I'd check with Mark Dilley. --MarvelZuvembie 17:49, 4 November 2010 (PDT)
Any updates on this? emijrp 02:31, 5 April 2011 (PDT)

I have made a backup of WikiIndex. It is here with some other wikis. I used a software I developed which extract the data from Special:Export. Enjoy. emijrp 14:39, 10 April 2011 (PDT)

Missing wikis

Hi all. What do you think about wikis which disappear? I think that every year a lot of wikis are deleted or get offline. I saw a few years ago how most of the wikis available in the ScribbleWiki hosting were lost forever. How can we avoid this? A lot of wikis are free licensed, and nobody cares about getting a copy or backup. That is incredible! Emijrp 09:57, 3 November 2010 (PDT)

That's an interesting question. What should the lifecycle of a wiki be? Were they meant to last forever? I didn't realize just how many wikis there are until I discovered WikiIndex. Having now shallowly observed several hundred wikis, in my opinion, not all of them deserve to live forever. And clearly, some were designed with a limited-time purpose, not to be relevant a decade later. But I take your point, a lot of good information and hard work can be lost if site owners or hosts are careless. The best advice I can offer to avoid this is for people to plan their wikis carefully. --MarvelZuvembie 17:48, 4 November 2010 (PDT)
As a specific example, what happened to http://de.wikiindex.org/ ? It is mentioned at WikiIndex:FrequentlyAskedQuestions, but today it seems to be offline ? Did anyone grab a backup before it was too late? --DavidCary 15:20, 1 February 2011 (PST)

Where to highlight a Q&A site about wikis?

This question was asked on the Welcome talk page.

Thanks to MarvelZuvembie for posting that (above). Here's the blurb:

I have, together with some others, put together a proposal for a wiki Q&A site called WikiSpeedia. The goal is to provide help and community for experts and moderators across a variety of wiki platforms.

I think this could be of great benefit to MediaWiki user's and other people with a passion for sharing information, whether publically or behind company firewalls. Here's my question: where can I highlight this where it will be effective but not draw disapproval? Note: there's no money involved so there is nothing to sell except a free exchange of information. Thanks in advance for any advice. --Mark Robinson 04:14, 7 November 2010 (PST)

A site that discusses wiki, even if it is not a wiki itself, is on-topic for us to talk about it here at the WikiIndex. I think the simplest approach is to promote it the same as we promote a new wiki -- create a page for it, add it to the top of the list of new wiki on the home page, etc. Even though, at the moment, WikiSpeedia is merely one page proposing a site, and so technically not yet a wiki.
p.s.: Is there a category that means "wiki-on-wiki conversation is on-topic", so I can tag WikiSpeedia and MeatballWiki and CommunityWiki.org and MediaWiki.org and other appropriate pages here with that category? --DavidCary 09:30, 1 February 2011 (PST)
A central web site for everything related to Wikis is extremely necessary. I just found WikiIndex today and it looks like the best place for that. Too bad that it took me more than 1 year to find it... One weakness at Wikipedia is that it doesn't have a web forum. The Village Pump is good, but far from good enough. It's practically impossible to follow an idea posted weeks ago (there are archives for each day - for example 2007 November 24). That's why a forum is required. A forum for everything related to Wiki. On a forum it is possible to write on the same thread even after weeks, months and years from the last post, coming with a creative and valuable answer or idea. The forum should have sub-forums for mediawiki and for other wiki engines, another one for wiki farms, another one for wikis by category, another one for ideas for new wikis where people can search for partners to start new wikis with, another one for technical hep, and so on. For example, I need to translate a template like this: wikipedia:Template:Columns-list to my own wiki and I don't know how to do it. Many other mediawiki users need some basic templates for their wikis and they don't know how to get them. That's why WikiSpeedia can be so helpful. It's extremely important to have a central hub for all wiki users and experts. WikiFan 20:34, 1 November 2011 (PDT)

New lists

Hi. I have added some semantic properties to {{Size}} and now these rankings are possible: List of wikis by number of pages, List of wikis by wikiFactor. Semantic MediaWiki extension is powerful and WikiIndex is not using all its power. emijrp 12:16, 15 December 2011 (PST)

Is it possible for you to intengrated size and wikiFactor into the wiki template? Best, MarkDilley

New WikiProjects at MediaWiki.org

Greetings! There are two new WikiProjects at MediaWiki.org I thought folks here may be interested in:

As an initial activity, utilizing the model set by Wikimedia staff Internet Relay Chat (IRC) office hours, MediaWiki.org's WikiProject Extensions is presenting our first MediaWiki Workshops for developers (volunteer and staff). Preparing extensions for MediaWiki 1.19 will be held on 13 January 2012 at 19:00 UTC in IRC (#wikimedia-dev).

This IRC workshop will be an opportunity to find out about changes in MediaWiki 1.19 that may require revisions to extensions or skins. Also an opportunity to ask MediaWiki developers questions regarding extension development.

Everyone is invited to attend. Developers interested in serving as "extensions" or "MediaWiki 1.19" experts are encouraged to signup as participants at: mw:Project:WikiProject Extensions/MediaWiki Workshops#MediaWiki 1.19 Experts

If there's continued interest / demand, MediaWiki Workshops will typically last one hour, and happen no more than twice a month to present trainings, hold discussions and collaborate on community or WikiProject Extensions projects. Facilitators host the session to introduce any presenters, determine the order of questions, and generally helps to keep things going. Time of day will vary in order to offer people in different parts of the world the opportunity to participate. Future topics will likely include MW.org documentation, ResourceLouder orientation and workshops similar to our inaugural chat to prepare for each MediaWiki release.

More information: mw:Project:WikiProject Extensions/MediaWiki Workshops

MediaWiki.org's WikiProject SysAdmins will also likely host similar MediaWiki Workshops to help third-party wiki system administrators. Stay tuned for more information, and chime in at: mw:Project:WikiProject SysAdmins/Ideas

--GregVarnum | talk 18:17, 5 January 2012 (PST)

Biased editing here

In sections of the the Category:Wikia "Skins" through "Criticism" there are among other things clear bias in many places. "Until recently, people who understood how to use preferences could choose which skin they used, but even this choice will now stop." ... Will now stop? Proof? Isn't this biased comment past tense too? People came here during the change of skins and used this page to vent. Most people didn't leave Wikia as new wikis are started everyday there. It is a silly opinionated section made to get back at wikia and to promote other wiki services. Devilmanozzy (talk) 23:10, 18 August 2012 (PDT)

I dont' see anything wrong with anything there. Monaco was the default, it was more customizable than monobook, monobook cannot be the default skin, it was frustrating for some, statistics are wikias, monaco was liked as people complained about losing it, there was a lot of opposition to oasis and many sites and users did leave. Nothing there is a lie or biased in any way, if its true and complete it cannot be biased - Monaco - true, customizable - true, no default - true, frustrating - true, stats - true, complaints - true, opposition - true, leaving - true. And the reason most people didn't leave wikia is because they were mostly oblivious to how much wikia controlled their work and used them for money, that is also true as evident by wikias use of ads and the fact that they have banned people who spoke against them. Escyos (talk) 23:19, 18 August 2012 (PDT)
Currently I'm a wikia user (since 2008) and you seem by your profile to be anti-wikia. Perhaps a third party is in order. Devilmanozzy (talk) 23:26, 18 August 2012 (PDT)
I am anti-wikia, they have proven themselves to be untrustworthy and unwilling to listen to those people who made them as big as they are - as evident by the changes you removed and then put back, I am not the only one. Anything can be claimed as bias by either side, its pointless arguing over these things. I'll just go back to editing the many much better wikis that I operate independently and on Wikkii and you can go back to editing the childish excuses for wikis on wikia.....there see that right there is bias from your opinion but not from mine. Escyos (talk)
Wikia continues to have such a large market share because no worthy competitor has arisen to claim that market niche. Wikia's management has had the luxury of slacking off and not adhering to high standards because people have nowhere else to go, unless they want to deal with the learning curve and other costs involved in creating and maintaining one's own MediaWiki installation. A lot of people who want to create collaborative sites just aren't very technically-inclined.
If MediaWiki were as easy to administer as, say, WordPress, it probably wouldn't be such an issue. Unfortunately, attempts to modify MediaWiki to mimic what has worked well for WordPress and other CMS'es didn't end well. We still are not at a point at which, say, use of mw:Extension:Configure is the default. Leucosticte (talk) 00:49, 22 November 2012 (PST)

3rd opinion

Both of you raise interesting comments and observations, and both, to a certain extent are accurate and valid. Personally, I have no axe to grind against Wikia or indeed any other host or wiki farm, but I do think that it is perfectly acceptable to detail failings and criticisms against any host - providing that it is submitted here as a form of commentary, and more importantly, that it is fair, reasonable and accurate. However, IMOVHO, I do think that Wikia have questions to answer - around many aspects of its operation, including advertising, and malicious code it hides. And whilst it is very true that new wikis are frequently being created on Wikia, the amount of wikis which have been abandoned on Wikia is startling!

To the specifics of this section - what may be one persons 'enthusiastic' effort to express the 'warts and all' truth - may be seen by another as bias, and vice-versa. Providing that commentary on WikiIndex is fair and accurate, it should stay. We won't tollerate personal attacks, nor blatant profanities or other inflamatory language. Interestingly, checking its history , I see no edits from the one who has been accused of bias, namely Escyos, and based on the version as of this timestamp , I find no reason to call the article biased. I do concede that this earlier edit , which was current for when Devilmanozzy raised his concerns, may not have been ideal - with the perception of favouring the criticism section over other content.

In light of all what is said above, please respect each others' rights to free speach. Happy editing to all, best regards, Hoof Hearted • talk2HH 09:52, 5 October 2012 (PDT)

How wide is our coverage, compared to what is out there in the wikisphere?

I notice that according to wikipedia:Wikia, "Wikia hosts several hundred thousand wikis". Of course, WikiIndex only lists a small fraction of those. I wonder how many of those several hundred thousand were test wikis and the like, and were abandoned almost immediately? My guess is a lot.

Anyway, I suppose we can operate under the assumption that any wiki that nobody bothered to list at WikiIndex probably isn't all that important. The significance is that whatever wikis aren't listed at WikiIndex aren't going to end up in the interwiki list, unless I do a separate run to grab that data off of Wikia and other wiki farms. Whether that would be desirable given the potentially high rate of useless Wikia wikis is another story. It might hurt the interwiki map project to clog up the list with a bunch of items pertaining to low-quality wikis. Leucosticte (talk) 00:43, 22 November 2012 (PST)

Article length

WikiIndex:Creating New Articles says, "An 'article' is a snippet of information about a given topic." That suggests the articles are supposed to be kept pretty short. What article length are we going for, on pages about individual wikis? Special:LongPages shows the longest article is the one about WikiIndex itself, at ~14,000 characters. That one's length probably shouldn't be taken into consideration, since it's a multilingual page. The next longest is RationalWiki (en), recently forked from Template:RationalWiki, at ~11,000 characters.

Should 11,000 characters be regarded as pretty much the maximum, and optimal for providing enough information but still being short enough to read and navigate comfortable for many users? So then, if anyone wanted to add content to such an article, he would need to remove something less important from that article. It definitely limits how comprehensive such an article could be. http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Conservapedia weighs in at 53,000 characters. wikipedia:Wikipedia is 197,000 characters long. Articles definitely could include a lot more information, if that were what we were going for. Leucosticte (talk) 07:16, 8 March 2014 (UTC)

I've updated WikiIndex:Creating New Articles. I personally don't think we should set an arbitary character limit -- if a wiki has an 'interesting' history which could support a lengthy prose, then by all means include it. Obviously, any unnecessary waffle, if found, can be trimmed. Sean, aka Hoof Hearted • Admin / 'Crat • talk2HH 09:16, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

To what extent is WikiIndex intended to serve as a meatball wiki

WikiIndex:Creating New Articles says, "Most of the articles created in this WikiIndex wiki will be about other individual wikis. Please refer to WikiIndex:Add a Wiki for further information. Other very limited topics are also appropriate, about wiki people, wiki terms, wiki ideas, and how to use this wiki. Please be restrained in adding such peripheral material."

I notice that we don't actually have a lot of pages in Category:WikiConcept and Category:WikiIdea. To what extent is it actually encouraged to add these kinds of pages? There's a lot that one could write about wiki-philosophy, wiki norms, etc. However, I don't want to do it if it'll be frowned upon. A meatball wiki is basically one that "describes the general tendencies observed on wikis and other on-line communities; for example the life cycles of wikis, and people's behavior on them." To what extent are you cool with hosting that kind of content? Leucosticte (talk) 07:31, 8 March 2014 (UTC)

If clear standards are developed, I could assist in applying them. The problem with hosting deeper content, opinion, judgments, etc., is that it can rapidly spin out into massive debate. It can be done, but it takes protective structure. As an example of how we were able, on Wikiversity, to handle what could have become a massive content dispute, see [4]. The overall presentation is neutral, and anything controversial or possibly controversial is on attributed subpages, with explicit attribution, not merely attribution through history. It can help, somewhat, if editors engaging in this are not anonymous. Anonymity fuels and enables seriously antisocial behavior. --Abd (talk) 14:11, 8 March 2014 (UTC)
Anonymity also enables free speech (by reducing the potential for real-world consequences) and discourages ad hominem attacks (by making it harder to link an on-wiki identity to a user's off-wiki affiliations, interests, etc. and use that information to accuse him of conflicts of interests with regard to his on-wiki contributions). It also can enable users to get a fresh start, which is sometimes good and sometimes bad. Leucosticte (talk) 20:57, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

Citations

Are citations of sources for statements made in articles encouraged? E.g., if you say "xWiki says y" is it good to give the URL, so that people can verify your claim? I've been citing sources inline like this.[5] Of course, we don't have mw:Extension:Cite, so there's no pretty way of doing it, currently. Leucosticte (talk) 13:08, 8 March 2014 (UTC)

We have no requirement for citations, but if anyone feels the need to include them, especially if it supports a contentious statement, then by all means just add it as a basic inline url. Sean, aka Hoof Hearted • Admin / 'Crat • talk2HH 19:11, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

Request account - real name

In Special:RequestAccount, I noticed that I had to provide my real name. Just wanted to know - is my real name revealed to the public, or is it only visible to sysops? After all, what goes on a MediaWiki website stays on a MediaWiki website. 99.247.115.190 21:38, 1 September 2014 (UTC)


I suggest to clarify this here: WikiIndex:Terms of Service

  1. Is the filling of the field RealName optional?
  2. Who will get to see it, when filled?

Manorainjan (talk) 23:25, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

I have no idea, the request account was an anti-spam measure. ~~ MarkDilley
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