@faraday said in How should we (as a community) handle MediaWiki:
@Chime The Wikidot API is somewhat limited and requires you to have a Pro account (currently about $50/year).
They clearly have more business sense than I do. Alrighty.
For Evennia, making a MediaWiki integration might make more sense, since it's geared more towards advanced users. But since Ares is intended to be a "MUSH In a Box" turnkey installation, MW just isn't suitable. It's too much of a PITA to set up and configure and maintain (in my experience).
I'm going to need to do my homework and look at Ares and Evennia in more detail, it sounds like.
@surreality said in How should we (as a community) handle MediaWiki:
I strongly recommend looking closely at Semantic Mediawiki specifically.
Thank you for reminding me. I peeked at it years ago and it seemed like a great direction to go but wasn't really fully implemented at the time. Might be exactly what I'd want to get the most out of MediaWiki...
On the user/wiki-admin side, it allows for a lot of things that aren't standard in the box with mediawiki, and to the best of my knowledge are not in wikidot at all either.
Yeah, even my Mechanipus mw setup had a bunch of extensions installed (some custom) and a lot of config tweaks.
Forms are a big one for a number of reasons.
Yes! Yesyesyes! I'm very glad you see this.
I suspect there are a lot of important data-entry things with forms that can be useful even for games with no automatic integration; i.e. DPL views and the like that pull form-submitted data to generate code to paste into the MUSH.
Direct is better, but even manual stuff can be a big timesaver.
They make things much easier on non-wiki-savvy users, for one; it's possible for a user to create a page without a single shred of code know-how with them, and templates can be made fairly easily for just about anything the game needs. (I've been working up some basic ones for things like grid locations, player pages, etc. similar to the ones on BITN's wiki, and when the generic versions are ready I want to have them up where they can be grabbed and shared.) It's possible to enter specific instructions for every step of the process, for every input on the form, with as much or as little information as players or staff may need to ensure the information is correct, useful. It helps ensure it's easy to understand what to do, how to do it, and why it's needed (or even if it's needed or optional). And this is all without needing to know a single thing about wiki code on the player (or data entry staffer) end.
I've seen a large proliferation of copy-pasted DPL queries that don't make much sense, because people tried to move things between games. It's a good idea though, and making that work safely and cleanly in a game-independent fashion as a separate project (think Sandbox Globals Project, but for MediaWikis serving MUSH communities) would probably be a good idea.
The extra bonus for forms is that it's possible to set up lists of default allowed values that will appear in the template; while that sounds little, it can be big for things that the MUX expects to appear in a very specific way. Whether something is 'Circle of the Crone' or 'The Circle of the Crone' can make a big difference code-wise, for instance; if it's set with a drop-down rather than entered manually, it's always going to be consistent and there's no need to remember how it's supposed to be done. (Because nobody always remembers. It always gets screwed up somewhere, some time. )
Yep.
I am also not sure if wikidot uses/allows the use of DPL or not at all. DPL is extremely useful to create auto-populating listings throughout the wiki that massively reduce the need for constant direct human maintenance.
DPL is fairly powerful and critically useful. It's also really ugly and difficult to explain to people. Sanding down those corners and making it accessible in standardized fashion to non-technical game owners will be important.