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The new wiki - how to fix it?

tingo

tingo

Veteran Member
Joined
Aug 12, 2009
Messages
1,521
Location
Oslo, Norway
I thought this could be a thread for discussing how to get the new wiki in shape (like a real wiki, right now it is quite a mess).
First: what happened t the pictures? How can we view them?
Second: how to get Categories working again?
 
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We actually shouldn't be too far from where we need to be. The main issue is that front page. The old categories are lost (I think) and it requires an Admin to go in and create new "namespaces" which are the VaultWiki equivalent. The two that exist now are the "VCWiki" and "Special" that you see on that front page.

Once we've got the categories we can move existing articles into them.

I'll have to dig around on the pictures. I had thought they'd come through but when I just looked it's the filenames without the image. I should still have access to the old wiki space and may be able to retrieve the images and host them somewhere until they are re-integrated.

I realize that it's going to take work to rebuild the Wiki and I'd like to thank all of those helping in advance. We'll come out the back end with a much nicer and much less spam prone repository than we had before so it will be worth it. :)
 
Hi,

Perhaps as admin you can put a message on the front page of the Wiki, I got a small shock when I tried to find an article and thought all the pages had got corrupted, and it took me some time to find a page I edited, only to see in the history all edits are now all shown as by 'Erik', and then found this thread which put my mind at rest.

Maybe you could add a link to a forum thread explaining about the changes to the Wiki,

Keep up the good work btw - vintage-computer.com is a great website. Will it ever need funding from users, or take advertising maybe?

Regards,
John
 
1980s_john said:
Perhaps as admin you can put a message on the front page of the Wiki, I got a small shock when I tried to find an article and thought all the pages had got corrupted, and it took me some time to find a page I edited, only to see in the history all edits are now all shown as by 'Erik', and then found this thread which put my mind at rest.

Maybe you could add a link to a forum thread explaining about the changes to the Wiki,
Click to expand...

Probably a good idea. It's on the list for when I have time. :p

I do need to go in and fix up the Wiki front page to add the categories we used to have. I also need to dig into Wiki user rights so I can maybe create some Wiki admins 'round here.

As for the articles all being attributed to me, that's not what I intended but since I ran the import my user account was associated. :(

1980s_john said:
Keep up the good work btw - vintage-computer.com is a great website. Will it ever need funding from users, or take advertising maybe?
Click to expand...

So far we're running well on the revenue generated from the Google Adsense advertising. Hopefully it stays that way. :)
 
I don't want to detract from the excellent work that clearly goes in to this site, but for me the new wiki format is a major regression - it just doen't seem to provide any advantage over mediawiki. I've also had great difficulty finding anything. The loss of indexed Google links is a negative outcome too.

Sorry for the negative feedback on this but I felt that as it's not working for me currently, perhaps it's not working for others either.
 
It seems like the allthough the categories does work now, having them defined in the title of the articles makes it very uneasy to link between them.

All the images have also dissapeared, and all Wiki-tables have to be converted to BBCode-tables manually; which is some work nobody wish to do.

And it seems like we're already gotten one spam-article on the new Wiki, allthough not of the same kind as previously.
 
At the risk of being unpopular, could we revert to mediawiki and require accounts to be approved?
 
pearce_jj said:
I don't want to detract from the excellent work that clearly goes in to this site, but for me the new wiki format is a major regression - it just doen't seem to provide any advantage over mediawiki. I've also had great difficulty finding anything. The loss of indexed Google links is a negative outcome too.

Sorry for the negative feedback on this but I felt that as it's not working for me currently, perhaps it's not working for others either.
Click to expand...

The MediaWiki had a few disadvantages not the least of which was that it was a spam magnet.

I'm not sure what you mean by indexed Google links...

per said:
It seems like the allthough the categories does work now, having them defined in the title of the articles makes it very uneasy to link between them.

All the images have also dissapeared, and all Wiki-tables have to be converted to BBCode-tables manually; which is some work nobody wish to do.

And it seems like we're already gotten one spam-article on the new Wiki, allthough not of the same kind as previously.
Click to expand...

Please report the spam articles as you would any spam post(s.) Yes the articles will need to be reformatted and no, nobody has yet really started down that path...

I'm not sure about the linking.

pearce_jj said:
At the risk of being unpopular, could we revert to mediawiki and require accounts to be approved?
Click to expand...

I didn't have any easy way to do this which is one of the reasons I switched products.

In the end the new Wiki format isn't ideal, but having it integrated with the forums and having the ability to manage and moderate it in conjunction with the forums is a definite improvement.

I've been very pressed for "free time" recently and that doesn't appear to be letting up any time soon but hopefully some other folks can jump in and help clean up.

In the end I think we'll see a significant improvement in the overall experience once the existing content is fixed and the wiki is properly configured...

(If anyone wants to take a peek at the VaultWiki site they've got docs and forums there and, hopefully, solutions to most of the issues we've got. It's easier for me to find time to follow specific "do this" instructions than to hunt for them...

Sorry for all the hassle, but I couldn't keep the worlds spambots employed any longer.
 
I think the first thing we need to get fixed is the index page. Right now you click on a sub category and it comes up as a forum with the most recent edited or commented on entries on the top. This makes it impossible to actually find something.

I can't see a way to actually build said index, but I have not dedicated that much time to it.

Editing the actual articles is pretty straight forward, and will just take a bit of time to get it worked out.
 
MediaWiki can be configured to prevent anonymous editing easily - although accounts would be seperate to VC accounts unless some central user DB (LDAP?) was in use also. Have to a look here.

Re google - search for XT-IDE Wiki then follow the top link - this leads to "invalid route requested". As said above it's near impossible to find anything as it is presently unfortunately!
 
pearce_jj said:
MediaWiki can be configured to prevent anonymous editing easily - although accounts would be seperate to VC accounts unless some central user DB (LDAP?) was in use also. Have to a look here.
Click to expand...
The mediawiki setup that we had didn't use anonymous editing, all editing required new accounts. The spammers just create new accounts as they go along. I don't know if email verification had been enabled on the wiki we had, but in any case that makes no difference at all (I speak from experience here).

They try everything. On another forum the spammers started working hours after the (relatively obscure, non-announced) forum started. In addition to spamming the forum with posts they also fill their user page with spam links, and for a time they always set their birthday to today's date so that the forum would show all those users (with links) at the front page, with the 'today we congratulate..' message. And when you ban them the account doesn't go away, and there's at all times one 'welcome to our newest member' link at the front page. Which leads to a page with link spam.

After moderating one of those I've noticed that 99% of the spammers have IP addresses originating in Latvia. In addition to that I've found a few from Ukraine, and one from Germany.

-Tor
 
Account creation can be blocked either via mediawiki itself (localsettings.php) or another option might be to block access to the user registration pages at reverse proxy layer. Of course either way it would require manual admin account config, but would that be such a huge load given the 'obscure' nature of the site? Or perhaps it could be scripted from the forum based on 10 posts or something similar.

Just thinking out loud really, thanks for engaging on this!
 
Speaking only for my self:
Well,I'll admit that the (perceived) "setback" we had when switching wiki system took some of my motivation for working on the wiki away. It also didn't help that the new wiki engine uses different codes for markup. I did some cursory research on VaultWiki before the switch, but I wasn't prepared for just how different it is. My own fault, for doing so pitiful research.

Still, I plan to take another stab at the wiki this autumn / winter.
 
I personally think that the new Wiki will be better than the last in the long run, but it will take some work.

I intend to look into fixing some of the articles in the the not too distant future.
 
I spent a lot of time deleting the spam from the previous Wiki. I also did quite a bit of editing of the articles.

We need the accountability of having the same forum name used by the Wiki. Unfortunately, VaultWiki treaks a Wiki like another forum, and it's completely non-standard. I'm quite irritated by it as well.

We'll get past this, and overall it will be better.
 
Erik said:
We actually shouldn't be too far from where we need to be. The main issue is that front page. The old categories are lost (I think) and it requires an Admin to go in and create new "namespaces" which are the VaultWiki equivalent. The two that exist now are the "VCWiki" and "Special" that you see on that front page.
Click to expand...

Hi,
I found the VaultWiki user guide here:

https://www.vaultwiki.org/books/User-Manual

I thought this link would save others having to Google it.

Regards,
John
 
I'm just confused by the underlying assertion that 'it will be better' - how? If VaultWiki is better, why don't wikipedia use it? What functionality will it provide that mediawiki doesn't? Are we as a community better equiped with skills in VaultWiki markup than MediaWiki markup? Is the search capability better?

And anyway, the whole concept of a front page, beit category or whatever, goes against the way in which wiki information spaces are constructed, which is outside of traditional page or file boundaries and driven instead by search and link.

IMO the decision to change the software from the standard wiki engine was not the correct answer to the problem at hand. Sorry to be blunt but I feel it needs to be said - in the three months since VaultWiki has been deployed, less than a handful of very minor updates have been made.
 
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So it seems there is little interest in this. However whilst setting up some other stuff I noticed a new (to me) MediaWiki extension that could be of interest - Nuke, to mass-delete pages recently added by a user or IP address. Also LDAP integration.

I've also had some success with putting nginx in front of sites and implementing geoIP filtering. This offers great flexibility, for example can restrict access to login page based on geoip (redirect to search for example).
 
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