Wiki pages - (edit) at Wikispot

[joeyeti]

ORIGINAL: CyclopsSlayer

Thank you! I frequently use the wiki for references and any update or extension is more than appreciated.

Glad I (and the other past contributors) can help!

[joeyeti]

Added some bits on the Front page (separated Colonies an Planets to separate pages)
Filled in the basic stuff to Planets, combining in all the various planets/stars/gas giants etc.
Added a few intra-links here and there between pages

[Sawelios]

Any chance of Wiki reanimation?

[Damiac]

If the wiki isn't coming back, this thread really should be unstickied...

[joeyeti]

Hi guys,

I am not promising anything, but I may have found a new free wiki hosting. Wikispot converted to an educational portal in the recent year and disabled the use of non-educational pages. They allowed me to export the whole Wiki into a huge XML, so I will try to import it into the new wiki host.

EDIT: This is not possible (pending an answer from the Wiki hosting site yet), so I will most likely go page-by-page and add the stuff back in gradually.

I am not sure if I will have time to update the wiki myself afterwards, but I hope to find some in the future - Distant Worlds at least deserves that!

How you might help, you ask?

Currently, to keep things organized, I would like to oversee the recreation of the previously established content myself. BUT, you can help as well with that with other tasks! Stay tuned, will update you later today...

[Damiac]

Oh! Well that's a surprising turn of events!

This game would benefit SO MUCH from a wiki...

I didn't think I'd ever use this little guy... but you deserve it [&o]

[AVN]

ORIGINAL: Damiac

Oh! Well that's a surprising turn of events!

This game would benefit SO MUCH from a wiki...

I absolutely agree that this game would benefit much from a decent wiki.

[Hattori Hanzo]

a new Distant Worlds wiki would be great [X(]

[joeyeti]

Guys, following up on what I said earlier - a way you could help until I am able to fill in the Wiki to the state it was before:

Converting the Galactopedia MHT pages into DOCX and then to ODT (LibreOffice). As far as I know there is no single-step way to do this, hence you need to save the MHT from Word into a DOCX and then for instance use the batch converter in LibreOffice to convert all those DOCX files into ODTs.

This would really help speed up my work.

That way I can check the files in LibreOffice, adjust any odd font colors etc. and then export them directly to Wiki text which LibreOffice supports. As said I am entering the Wiki pages one by one, so have to check them as I go.

Thx again!

[joeyeti]

Guys, a small update - I have sent the XML file to the wiki admins and they will try to import server-side (we shall see if it works). It would help if at least the images could be imported, but even if this does not work, I will slowly rebuild the Wiki.

Meanwhile I am going through the pages and converting the different syntax (the previous Wiki did not use a 100% MediaWiki syntax, but rather their own tweaked engine). Tables are the worst, but I found out I can use the visual editor on MediaWiki itself to paste the text with tables from Word/HTML, then view the source of that and copy it to the DW Wiki page editor.

One important question - the previous Wiki contained a (yet incomplete) portion of the Galactopedia as a direct facsimile from the game, apart from the regular pages - in effect the "regular" pages were often copies of the Galactopedia entries, which were then enhanced, rewritten or updated further. Do we want to replicate Galactopedia here as well, or would it basically be double work? Should I rather import the Galactopedia pages as "regular" pages, so that they can be enhanced and updated further?

[Uncle Lumpy]

IMO, yes, post everything.

[AVN]

joeyeti

First of all I have never seen the previous wiki, so I don't know what it contains or have any idea of the quality of its contents.
Secondly the number of people who can/will contribute in updating the wiki is very limited (based on the activity on this forum).

So prioritizing is IMO important.
I think it's best to start with publishing the information you have from the "old" wiki.

Once that's done gaps/omissions can be noted and worked on.
Also a discussion what should be done further is much easier if we can see what there is already.

Anyway just my 2 cents on this.

Edit : In case you think that reproducing part of the Galactopedia (the not updated version) is too much work I think you should leave it out. We can visit it in the game and having it available online doesn't add much if anything at all. In case the is no updated info of a Galactopedia page then it can be useful to have the Galactopedia page available as starting point for giving further information. But again this is something which can be added later.

[joeyeti]

Thx all!

The wiki address is:

https://distantworlds.miraheze.org/wiki/Main_Page

It is still very crude in content and only a handful pages are in, so this is just to give you a glimpse of how it looked like on the old one.

Currently I am restoring the images from the old wiki (found a way of extracting the Base64 strings from the XML dump and converting them to images on a webpage - slow, but basically the only way that I could find after much searching). There has not been a reply yet from the Wiki admins if they tried to import the XML dump or not, we shall see.

Please note I will be on vacation till 03-August, so there will be no activity there.

[joeyeti]

HI guys,

just to add to the above:

There are many pages that were already completed on the old wiki vs. what is currently viewable on the new one. I do not have the list here (only on my home computer). A good reference would be the saved state of the old wiki on the Waybackmachine:

https://web.archive.org/web/20150324183 ... Front_Page

When you click through those pages you can see the old wiki. Not sure if the Waybackmachine robots archived all the pages in their latest state, but most of the completed ones (if not all) should be viewable.

So at this stage I would like to restore those pages myself, to keep things organized - not that I don't want help with that, but just to keep it consistent for myself (and to know where I left off and what still needs to be done). I hope I can accomplish this by mid-/late-August. After that the ring will be open

As said I will be off for 10 days, so will resume the work early August again.

[Hattori Hanzo]

Dustant Worlds new wiki added to my main bookmarks: thank you Joe [:)]

[BlueTemplar]

Bump !

So, what's up with the 2nd wiki - I guess it's dead too and we only have now the "write-protected" copy of Internet Archive versions ?

("Pingback" to this discussion about manuals & wikis : fb.asp?m=5023867 )

I'm kind of surprised, I know of older and less popular games than DW which still have (more or less) working wikis...