Wiki

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Revision as of 07:10, 9 March 2013 by Tjr (talk | contribs)
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NetHackWiki is a wiki; it is a web site that allows all readers, including you, to edit almost any page. The process is simple: click "edit" at the top of a page, make some changes in the box that appears, and then save them.

If this seems strange (or if wiki seems familiar, but NetHackWiki seems strange), you might want to experiment by editing the NetHackWiki:Sandbox. If you want to learn about this wiki, read About. The remainder of this page concerns the origin of wiki, from the perspective of this wiki.

Founding of this wiki

Though many other wikis have had pages about NetHack, we are not aware of any attempts to start a NetHack wiki before 2004.

Magnus Nilsson started the other NetHack wiki, http://www.riters.com/NetHack/, at 3 September 2004, in response to an rgrn suggestion by xanthian. Though not much content appeared there, its "recent changes" page does feature a random (true!) NetHack fortune. Within a few months, spammers overran the wiki.

User:Sgeo started this wiki (then called WikiHack) at 11 October 2005, on Wikia. Editors immediately began the task of SeedPosting the wiki to encourage the development of many detailed articles. When Wikia changed their terms and their wiki skin, several admins of the WikiHack got annoyed, and 8 November 2010 the wiki was moved to the server where nethack.alt.org resides.

Right now we have 4,049 articles.

NetHack at other wiki

  • NetHack is a single player dungeon exploration ("roguelike") game that runs on a wide variety of computer systems, with a variety of graphical and text interfaces all using the same game engine. Unlike many other Dungeons & Dragons-inspired games, the emphasis in NetHack is on discovering the detail of the dungeon and not simply killing everything in sight - in fact, killing everything in sight is a good way to die quickly. ... NetHack was to UnixCulture what GameOfPong was to the world in general.
  • This is a rogue-like game with cult status. It is a single-user game where you descend into a Dungeon, trying to find an Amulet. The fascination of the game is the unbelievable amount of complexity introduced by many many interactions between items, spells, and the surroundings.
  • There is no ready supply of Scrolls of Identify, and you start out not even knowing which scroll is the Scroll of Identify, so you have to develop tactics for identifying all of the items that you collect.
  • The name NetHack references the fact that its development has been coordinated through the Internet, though it is not a multiplayer game, nor is it in any way connected with computer-security related usages of the word hacking. The "hack" element refers to a genre of role playing games known as hack and slash for their violent focus.
  • As you read the scroll, it disappears. This is an identify scroll. —More-
What would you like to identify first? nethack
NetHack is old. The first version came out in 1987 and its development is still not finished.
NetHack is complex. It can take years of play to see it all.
NetHack is random. It is one of the three founding roguelikes and will sometimes generate levels that seem flatly impossible. But they never are.

NetHackWiki compared to other wiki

NetHackWiki uses the wiki engine "MediaWiki". RogueBasin also uses MediaWiki, as do many other wiki. Across each MediaWiki, the wiki markup is the same: [[link]], '''bold''', ''italic'', {{template}}, and so on.

NetHackWiki welcomes editors from other wiki, but NetHackWiki is not other wiki. Our articles are about NetHack; in fact most assume vanilla NetHack 3.4.3. However, some other wiki have influenced this one. See that box on the right linking to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia? That style of box started on the Wikimedia projects.

Wikipedia is so popular now that some wikis refer to themselves as encyclopedias and even assume familiarity with obscure Wikipedia policies. Not this wiki! NetHackWiki has several articles in the style of encyclopedia articles, but also contains scenarios, strategies, source code, gameplay discussions, and possibly other NetHack-related articles.

Some other roguelike games have established official wiki: DoomRL, ToME. Not this wiki! NetHackWiki is not an official wiki, and we have nothing to do with The DevTeam. Many NetHack players still do not know that we exist. So NetHackWiki contains only unofficial NetHack bug reports or documentation.

NetHackWiki could contain fan fiction, though Novelas:NetHack already exists. It could contain bug reports if a patch author ever asks that they be posted here. It could even contain day in the life pages if we ever figure it out.

Links