- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Today I was looking at some ways to get wikis for games that are very in depth offline for personal use. Wiki.js was one of the more prominent results so I looked into it. I’m no HTML pro, but I do know a few things, enough to make it look decent enough for my own curiosity and usage. I just wanted to share with others who might be interested in something similar!
I absolutely love the layout and how easy it is to move stuff over. Once I made the default theme dark, it was game on. I have spent the last 3 hours moving bits and pieces from the wikis I was interested in over to it. Give it a try!
I’m hosting it through the Apps feature in TrueNAS Scale. Not exposed to the internet. On TrueNAS, I set it up ACL (permissions) with a preset one that I made for quickly giving myself access to anything for my file browser.
THANK YOU to all the devs and anyone who has supported this project. Excellent piece of software!
Neat, I’ll need to look into this. I’ve learned how to clone fandom wikis, but haven’t found a good way to “rehydrate” them into a usable wiki, maybe there’s something here.
I’ve added a screenshot to the main post of what it looks like after I did a reformat of the content from the Stardew Valley Wiki. I highly recommend it so far!
Fandom uses MediaWiki just like Wikimedia projects do, and that also means it uses wikitext rather than markdown. MediaWiki is especially nice because 1) it’s something prolific editors are already familiar with, 2) it has a great WYSIWYG editor called VisualEditor, 3) it’s basically guaranteed to be rock-solid, 4) it has good support and documentation, 5) wikitext is portable to functionally any wiki (apparently except Wiki.js right now, which is genuinely unacceptable for wiki software), and 6) a lot of tools, extensions, and preferences that let you customize your editing experience are made for MediaWiki.
Looking at Wiki.js as someone with a decade of extensive experience editing and administrating various wikis, it looks very style-over-substance. Assuming the screenshot of their docs is supposed to represent the wiki, it’s basic as all fuck in comparison to what a MediaWiki page is capable of. It’s literally just text, headers, and hyperlinks to other pages. This is something fiddling around with CSS for 20 minutes could produce.
The sidebar has a bog-standard telescoping ToC, a standard history button (I hope that leads to a full history, anyway), a star rating system*, and a bookmark/share/print icon trio. This is baby’s first wiki. Where are the templates? Captioned images? Tables? Not all pages have to have these things, but Wiki.js gives the reader one (1) image at the top as a first impression, and it’s something totally unremarkable.
* As someone with 25,000+ edits on Wikipedia where we actually rate articles (other wikis don’t seriously do this), I can tell you this is absolutely fucking useless. We have a rating system on Wikipedia called Stub, Start, C, B, GA, A (basically disused), and FA. This is on the talk page and is nomimally based on various criteria. Almost always, the people using it actually know what they’re doing. Here, though? You’re encouraging substituting an actual talk page discussion (which I don’t even see here) with a useless star rating. Does the star rating reset every time you make an edit in case you resolved past issues? Do the votes get a corresponding message? Will the votes mean literally anything beyond what you could already glean by looking at the page? If I can edit anonymously, can I vote anonymously? It’s just stupid fluff to make up for how utterly redundant this software is to MediaWiki.
While I appreciate the honesty, you are coming off as a jerk.
This is my first time doing anything like this. I don’t normally do anything like this at all. It is a little side thing to have fun learning something new. Most of what you are talking about isn’t even something I am remotely aware of.
I’d be more interested to learn about MediaWiki from you if you hadn’t come off as such a jerk. I stated in the body of the post that I’m using it offline and for personal use. I have also just started, again, as stated in the body.
I appreciate your view, but I recommend coming at a different angle the next time you want to share your knowledge of something you are clearly passionate about.
I replied to Scrubbles, not to you, OP. If you saw it, I actually edited in “sorry for the brutal honesty, OP” at the end for just a minute because after I’d already submitted that comment, I misread something you said that made me think this was your work-in-progress hobby project (which is really sad that I could’ve thought that to begin with). I did try it here as linked below, and it’s hilariously horrendous. It’s like somebody made a bootleg Docusaurus where the contents of the page are editable and you can do a poor man’s git diff between edits and said “done, we’re wiki software now”. There are so many things wrong with this in the way of being serious, productive wiki software that I don’t even know where to begin. It’s somehow only barely less terrible than Fandom, and Fandom has 20% of the screen dedicated to actual articles and is a cancer eating away at fan wikis (plugging Indie Wiki Buddy).
Edit: Is there not even a spot at the bottom of the page for the license the contents of the article are released under? Oh my god. Copyleft is the most singularly important aspect of a healthy, thriving wiki, and instead of telling me a license like CC BY-SA 4.0, it’s saying “Powered by Wiki.js”. I can’t. This is not a serious piece of software created by someone who’s touched a wiki in their life.