Glitch City Laboratories Archives

[li]Complete integration with the Forum. I ran a wiki+forum site in 2007/2008 where everything was shared between the two, including theme and user info.[/li]
[li]Easy-peasy editing of pages. Instead of logging into an "Admin CP" interface, going to a "Directory" listing, and then finding the page there, just hit the edit link.[/li]
[li]Easier to learn syntax: Tables aside, wiki syntax is in my experience easy to pick up. There are also other benefits, including the fact that newlines are automatically converted into linebreaks (I know I was frustrated when my "\n"s didn't show in the browser, but that was a long time ago on a site far far away)[/li]
[li]More opportunity for non-staff users to contribute: Normal users can edit pages too. The problem, initially, is that this is prone to unexperienced or malicious users inserting misinformation or blatant vandalism into articles. However, MediaWiki has an extension FlaggedRevisions. This lets people with authority (i.e. Staff) to review revisions to articles manually and "flag" them as "stable". The Stable revision will always be shown to guests, so in effect all revisions made by non-staff members MUST be "flagged" by Staff to become visible to all. This to me is a better approach than the current "Submit a Glitch" thing going on (which has been in place since the late-2004 incarnation of the site) in that users can add the information to the site and Staff can just verify and "flag" it (or delete it if it's bogus). And, of course, if a user is troublesome, we can block them from editing.[/li]
[li]"Interwiki" links - links to other wikis - will be made much easier. We will be linking A LOT to Bulbapedia if we switch to this system.[/li]
[li]We will lose no data. At all. Everything we have can be transitioned to a MediaWiki.[/li]
[li]Template syntax is exactly the same as it is on The Orange Glove.[/li]
[li]The Glitchdex, as it is now, can be preserved if we make it an "extension" (i.e. not actually hardcode any of the pages into the wiki, but dynamically generate it, as we do now). Not going into the technical details, we can preserve the sort, search, etc. features of it while making it wiki-ready. All of the data can be preserved in "plaintext" (perhaps XML, since it's nice to read) and can be edited by any user (and vetted by Staff). The same will go for the other 'dexes.[/li]

As long as we add in security verification to edits to prevent spam bot edits then yes. :)

Eh, worth a try. This does look like a good idea but one flaw. Would guests be able to make new pages? Even if the pages are flagged and unseen, could they have the authority to make them? If the answer is no, then we'll still need the submit a glitch feature on the site. But the idea of having working sonic sections and whatnot is great. For that reason, we should go for it.