Forum:Wikihack and fan-fiction

< Forum:Watercooler

So the discussion started off on The Main Page and I thought it necessary and frankly, more appropriate to continue it here, where users can see the discussion and state their opinions.

Here is the discussion till now.

Nethack wiki replacing WikiHack?

Personally, I like wikihack, the format, everything. (For those wondering what WikiHack is, it's the old NetHack wikia.)

What's to happen to WikiHack now?

(leave a reply on my talk page, thanks)

--WaveDivisionMultiplexer (talk) 10:30, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

I hope nothing, until it fades into oblivion. Wikia certainly do not honor shutdown requests (unless requested by a lawyer). --Tjr (talk) 19:17, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

But what's to happen to WikiHack? It's got many pages, and some users still add to it. Also, I'm rather fond of that wiki now. Perhaps if I had found this website before, I wouldn't have bothered to ask.

--WaveDivisionMultiplexer (talk) 13:03, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

A little note at the beginning: I've tried to explain as clearly as possible below. If anything is unclear, feel encouraged to ask. :) (I should also mention that I joined NetHackWiki after the move. I also don't claim to represent all of NetHackWiki or that my opinion is in any way official; I do think that parts of the NetHackWiki community might agree with me, though. Anyone may feel free to comment otherwise.)

"It's got many pages" – yes, but NetHackWiki has more; 2337 "content pages" as opposed to the old wiki with only 2030 pages. Keep in mind that NetHackWiki is essentially WikiHack without Wikia: this independence means there is no need for ads, and you aren't forced to use the Wikia skin (which most people dislike as it gives little room for content). The idea is to keep all the good things from WikiHack (the "many pages" you mentioned) while removing the things people don't like (ads, the skin, Wikia).

The same applies to users still adding to it: there are more edits to our new wiki (c. 85 thousand) than to the old wiki (c. 57 thousand). (Special:Statistics, if you're curious.) Also, many edits to the old wiki are vandalism or edits that were well-intentioned, but still incorrect. Some of that is fixed, but the majority is not.

Now, of course some edits to the old site are actually very useful and would improve the new wiki, too. That is quite unfortunate, as it actually splits the wiki – if the old wiki had just spam/vandalism/other trash edits, we could point at it and say "we moved, now only vandals frequent it". This way, however, it looks like there's an actual community around the old site when the community really just moved.

Most of the people who actually know a lot about NetHack – those people who can tell you exactly how the code for something works and why a wiki entry about it has to be improved – also know that we decided to move to NetHackWiki. Unfortunately, as Wikia would not allow us to "properly" move, they artificially created a divide between those who know about the move and those who don't – and the old wiki is still better known outside certain parts of the NetHack community, mostly because it was there first (and on Wikia, too) and Google's algorithm doesn't care who "should" be found. Thus, there are still edits to the old wiki, and we can't do anything about that. (We tried. Wikia fought our tries, though.)

It'd be best for WikiHack to close down or redirect to this new site. That way, the community wouldn't be split anymore. That's not going to happen, though – Wikia won't allow that.

What will actually happen? Probably, it'll stay like this – WikiHack will remain there as a trap for people searching for information about NetHack while actual improvements will be made to NetHackWiki. I hope that at some point, NetHackWiki will actually outrank WikiHack on Google – it's a long way to go, of course. I hope you'll follow us on that path, even if it's just to end the confusion caused by having "two wikis".

But to address your last line, what is it that makes you fond of the old wiki? We started with all its content and now have even more, so I don't think it's that. If you can tell us what you prefer about the old wiki, the administrators might be able to add that on NetHackWiki too. Perhaps it's something trivial that'd help a lot. Maybe other people would also be convinced to follow that way. Feel free to suggest any improvement; whether it can be done is a question for the admins. :)

— Hoping that you'll eventually feel the same kind of fondness for our moved site, bcode ^{talk | mail} 19:33, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

is there a reason why the main page at wikihack can't be changed to include (or even be just) a link to the NetHackWiki? i understand why wikia wouldn't want it, but what do they do to prevent it? have people tried "talking" to editors there to ask them to come here? are there negative outcomes? --194.116.198.185 12:53, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

There pretty much are no editors there anymore. Last time I checked the recent changes page the only edits that had been done in months were changing the spelling of "encyclopedia" to the UK spelling on a few pages, which is kind of dumb because the game itself uses the American spelling. The community of people who actually contribute has already completely abandoned that site, the only problem is that their PageRank means the community of new players looking for information is likely going there first. Wooble (talk) 13:43, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

Mmm, I'm thinking about turning wikihack into a fanfiction wiki anyways, so people won't find anything useful for the game there, and a link could be included. I don't think they can do anything about it. Any who, it's to make use of the old wiki as it won't be deleted and to separate the fan fiction from the facts. --Detonator coil, suitable for a small nuclear device. (talk) 13:12, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

Wikia staff has reverted similar edits before. So it's likely they will do this in the future as well. You can try but you might get banned if you are not careful. I like the idea of changing the scope of the old wiki to a fan fiction. ——Bhaak (talk) 13:23, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

Don't admins have rights to un-ban themselves? or wait I have to check that on the test wiki. Also, thank you. If you have a fan fiction, you could post it there. --Detonator coil, suitable for a small nuclear device. (talk) 16:08, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

Great idea with the fan-fiction. Should we seed it with the humorous conduct YAAP posts on RGRN, e.g. a pacifist ascension told from the archon's point of view? --Tjr (talk) 21:02, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

We could add anything at all, from Stupid deaths or inventory items named in a humorous fashion. Comics are a good idea, because you have to use a lot of imagination without tiles. It could even be a nethack game experience. That way, we'd have a lot of content to continue with. --Detonator coil, suitable for a small nuclear device. (talk) 07:55, 16 January 2014 (UTC)

I disagree with the general consensus that we should try to repurpose the Wikia wiki; the staff would likely notice the inevitable mass deletions. It's probably better just to let the site die. It might even worth be pointing out to the Wikia admins that the site is no longer updated and becoming more inaccurate over time, in a few years. Ais523 (talk) 08:00, 16 January 2014 (UTC)

To be fair, some users will keep editing, and it's gonna take another bunch of edits to stop them from doing so. It's going to take a lot more time for the site to die out. My point here is to make use of a wiki what won't be deleted. Secondly, we do not need to destroy all the content. And lastly, if anything is changed, it will be done gradually, because one cannot change the content of a wiki in a day. --Detonator coil, suitable for a small nuclear device. (talk) 10:17, 16 January 2014 (UTC)

I'm going to move this to the forums, it seems like an appropriate page for this discussion.--Detonator coil, suitable for a small nuclear device. (talk) 10:25, 17 January 2014 (UTC)

Yes, it is long.

But it's an idea, to convert the old wikia into a fanfiction site, and opinions would be nice.

I have not got too many oppositions at this point, so I have decided to carry on with the decision. I updated the community corner in order to inform users about the oncoming change and this website, edited the 'Current projects' and changed the theme. Now I'm planning to change quite a few things on the main page, and delete quite a few articles. Seems easy enough I guess. PS: I could use some help!--Detonator Coil, suitable for a small nuclear device (Leave a message here) 14:31, 22 January 2014 (UTC)

Maybe it's easier to turn the pages-to-delete into disambiguation pages. Something like "vampires: are seen in stories foo and bar". The Wikia people probably monitor mass deletions. --Tjr (talk) 06:36, 23 January 2014 (UTC)

Why are you discussing wikihack policy and procedure here? The two aren't related in any way, and their community, if they still have one, is there, not here. Personally, I can't see using that awful site for anything at all, including fan fiction. Why would I want to put new content there at all? Wooble (talk) 12:10, 23 January 2014 (UTC)

i think the idea was to find a way of slowly shutting it down without alerting the authorities. wikia makes money off page visits, so a popular site like wikihack would be something they wouldn't want to shut down. distasteful thought the subject is, this seems to be an SEO problem. perhaps rather than changing the site a project could be started to contact all the people who link to that site to link to this one instead. i wonder if google et al. rate internal wikia links more or less highly? that's one big link farm either way. --194.116.198.185 13:21, 23 January 2014 (UTC)

It is indeed an SEO problem, but it's not fixable. The odds are stacked against us. I've tried extensively, using almost every technique you can find on SEOmoz, short of hiring people or building spam sites (as Wikia do). --Tjr (talk) 18:05, 23 January 2014 (UTC)

We've changed the vast majority of the inbound links that previously went to nethack.wikia specifically (many of them were owned by people in the NetHack community already, or on publicly editable sites; for some of the rest, we managed to contact the site owners). Wikia still has a high page rank as a site generally, though, and that rubs off on specific Wikia wikis even if there are no non-Wikia links going to them. Ais523 (talk) 08:18, 27 January 2014 (UTC)

The wiki is being used for fanfiction because 1) wikia wont delete it and it doesn't seem like a good plan to 'slowly shut it down' as young, misled specimen will always find it and edit. 2) we have two sites, why not make use of them? 3) fanfics go on wikihack to separate the content that is 'spoilers' from content that is 'fiction'. 4) the discussion is on this wiki to make people aware of the change, and to make a point that I'm not 'reviving' the website or anything, but simply making use of it. 5) there is no 5. --Detonator Coil, suitable for a small nuclear device (Leave a message here) 14:30, 23 January 2014 (UTC)

Introduction text

Might we consider changing the beginning of the intro text (the part starting with "NetHackWiki is a free community web site for the game NetHack that anyone can edit") to mention that the Wikia version is junk? The first sentence and a half shows up on the Google results page, so we might be able to catch people who are scanning the page if the two wikis come pretty close together. Scorchgeek (talk) 00:36, 15 February 2014 (UTC)

Maybe, if you can word it in some positive way rather than "the other one is shit".

Good thinking, trying to attack the problem from this angle! --Tjr (talk) 07:13, 15 February 2014 (UTC)

Google

I notice Google tends to give me the Wikihack page unless I specifically specify nethackwiki (one word) as a keyword. I also notice that it never gives me both for the same page, presumably due to automatic alternate url / mirror removal. Is there anything that can be done about this? -- 2.96.111.96 16:14, 3 April 2015 (UTC)