Fixed it jdcarpe



And as far as I know, the mods/admins have concluded the mediaWiki doesn't work for our community. Which is why the Keepers were created to port the format to a forum-esque format.



For me personally? I agree that the Wiki as it stands isn't working. I hate editing the Wiki and so has anyone who has offered to help me in the past. Smallfry refused to work in the Clack Wiki and would ask me to make the updates because the code is frustrating to learn. As a volunteer, I'd rather not spend two hours of my spare time making a picture box work (which yes, I really did) when I can pound out a huge update to a regular forum thread. A Wiki might be way better at organizing but the learning curve for people helping is much higher, like Metalliqaz said.



If people really want, I can talk to mkawa when I see him and rknize to see what their thoughts are on keeping the mediaWiki. But like I said as far as I know, it's going away.







we set up the mediawiki because it just seemed like a good idea at the time and we literally had no idea what we were doing. as it turned out, it was a huge pita to connect to smf, and the mediawiki language is incredibly complex and obscure. as a result, we just don't really have a base of contributors. meanwhile, everyone was filling the forum proper with some of the most amazing information ever to be collected in one place. the amount of brain we have collectively here is amazing, but the mediawiki doesn't do it justice because of the impedance of contributing to it. my initial idea was to solve this with search a la google. so we tried pushing sphinx into place (a very fast keyword searcher but with NO semantic capability) and ripped out the smf search, which is horrible. that made things a little better, but there's still a TON of information buried away in little nooks and crannies, and sometimes the only way to get that stuff out is just by tasking people with doing it. so, i started the keepers, and then rather than make them become these kind of controllers of the information stores by forcing them to use the incredibly obtuse mediawiki, russ started designing a modules that allows people to build knowledgebases INTO the forum rather than aside of the forum.so that's the basic idea. mediawiki has too high an impedance to contribute, and we saw that by the non-participation in it while participation and information in the forum itself grew exponentially at the same time. our proposed solution is to assign a small group of librarians to help guide information organization, but to democratize the entire process by turning the library language into the forum language itself -- bbcode.the reason not to leave the mediawiki up anyway is several-fold. first, our new module is going to made iit really easy to move between knowledgebase and active forum. this is strictly superior to the mediawiki. second, much like our informational slash discussion threads are called "the living ... thread", the knowledgebase is going to be a living, breathing thing that will deprecate the mediawiki, which frankly i see suffering a very slow painful death even if we were to leave it up. it's a better use of time now to take that information along with the information in the living breathing forum, turn it into this bridge format that uses bbcode as the common language, and then move forward from there.sure, that's my .02c, but i've been thinking about this pretty hard for a while. when we launched the mediawiki it was only after quite a bit of nail-biting, and seeing it flounder like this has only confirmed our fears that it was the wrong choice. i'd rather back up and fix things then leave half broken projects everywhere.