Wikis are amazing, and I think its a great idea you have started one here! I understand that there is a good period of time when multiple people will have to do lots of work with data entry to make it the wiki we would all dream of, I dont have time to help :( but props to all those who have the time and are willing. I added my society to the society page mostly to see how it would work. Ive run a couple of basic mediawiki installations for my soc as well as the society I started out in and so I understand (barely) the basics of editing and administrating. I fear the way (at least the society page) its set up may cause you problems down the line. As the page(s) grow and more and more data is entered esp. in lists, the chance for someone to screw it up grows exponentially. I am not sure how entropedia works or what custom plugins etc. they use, but the ability to add a single line to a list without effecting the rest of the list is very valuable. The time to setup the structure is now, not after a lot of data is already entered and will have to be re-entered because of changes. This is all way over my head but for your wiki to become successful and productive it cant just compete with entropedia but surpass it at all levels. This means that everything (items, weapons, armor, tools, mobs, etc...) be sortable and easy for the average joe* to edit without fear of screwing the whole mess up. (or even worse not fearing and actually causing the damage) I would love for your site to succeed and become my one-stop-shop for all my forum, wiki, pm, trade, etc.. needs. But be careful that you don't settle for just having those options, they must be more than competitive with not just the competition, but also the user base of the competition. GL and have fun :) narfi *no offense to anyone whose real or virtual name is joe
Thanks for your reply, much appreciated. I've been trying to find a way to add filters and other useful items into the wiki, and frankly, I am baffled at seeing how little documentation or integration there really is on the platform. The modifications we made so far have all had to be made manually, and required extensive testing and research to get right. Even something as basic as ensuring the toolbar reflects the one on the official wikipedia page was not documented anywhere, so I blogged on my techblog how I did it. Importing the traditional helpfiles has some basic instructions, but they are extremely basic, too. I tried asking how to add a decent third-party control to the wiki, but that led to absolutely nothing. I'm frankly reaching a point where I suspect that without a financial investment, it just will not be possible. Entropedia uses ASP, where a gridview is standard functionality. Gridviews enable it to do what it does, and I also suspect they have their own datamodel, which might be the reason they have certain problems. Either side will have its pros and cons. Our pro is we use standard wiki, but at the same time, that has its drawbacks (some of the stuff you mentioned, plus the horrible documentation). As a reply, our stuff *is* sortable, and if you mess up an edit, it's darn easy to rollback. Anonymous editing is disabled on wiki, and I believe that because we offer various integrated functionality (auction, yellow pages, wiki, and more coming), people will think twice before trying to troll the individual options. They might try (and some have already), but it's more work for them to try and get a cheap laugh by abusing one part of the forum than it is for us to remove it, and block them from using all the features, and our hope is that the platform we provide will be complete and functional enough to surpress such urges. With that said, we have little to no experience with wikis, but osme of our users have, and we hope they will notice crucial limitations, and offer their expertise in making things more managable. On top of that, we can offer some other programming tricks or excel templates to make certain huge lists more managable and autmated. I'm looking into that, but cannot promise anything on it.
I was looking on your wiki yesterday (checking out the maps you recommended) and couldnt find a link back to your main site. Checking now I see that there is a small link next to my login name but it is out of the way of where my eyes are looking normally on the page. I think it would be useful to have a link at the top of the sidebar, but see you have (wisely) locked it from public editing. http://www.entropiaplanets.com/wiki/MediaWiki:Sidebar narfi
Hey Narfi I was the one telling VF to put the link up together with the other links. I could not find a way to set in a link in the top menu at the left. Most of us are Wiki noobs and are 'trying our way' to set things up :) Dunno if VF can move it over there - he will prob see this when he wakes up ;)
You can see the code for the other links on the sidebar look something like, wiki_page|page description you can use this same format, except substitute the url for the wiki_page Example of what you may want to use: ht tp://entropiaplanets.com|Entropia Planets (without the space between the 't's) If you want to really get into it you can check out the manual, http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Interface/Sidebar#Customize_the_sidebar have fun with it :) narfi
Yes, i made the other codes. THe problem is, you need it to be in a box - you can't just make it as a link as the one in the top menu bar. Which is what I wanted. I tried to avoid putting it into a box (or at least not having a box that needs a headline, because you obviously can't link in the headlines .. or???? Thanks :)
If you want to add an external link in the sidebar linking back to EntropiaPlanets.com you need to format the code in the sidebar as follows: Using the normal [noparse][[http://insertlinkhere]][/noparse] wiki code will make it throw a wobbly
