Unreal Wiki:MediaWiki conversion

As of April 1st, 2008, the Unreal Wiki has moved to using wp:MediaWiki instead of a customized version of UseModWiki.

Who was involved

The primary people pushing for the conversion were the BeyondUnreal admins. The conversion itself was done primarily by Haarg and Wormbo.

Motivation

There were a number of problems with the old site. The primary motivation was a number of complaints about the organization of the wiki, and the inability for the old software to handle changes to the organization. Second, while the admins of the old wiki were able to be contacted, they had either a lack of interest time or to devote to the wiki. Third, while the software certainly worked, it wasn't maintainable and caused more load on the server than was desired. Fourth, while looking at possible changes to the wiki, the new admins looked at the licensing on the old wiki and believed it to be very much opposed to the concept of a wiki, and that there were likely numerous violations of it within the wiki itself.

Technical conversion

To do the conversion, a premade UseMod wiki converter was used, along with another script written to deal with the old wiki's custom syntax. Undocumented and ambiguous behavior of the old parser meant that some pages weren't converted perfectly. Additionally, human and time limitations have lead to some other minor issues. For the most part though, the conversion worked properly. If there are large widespread problems, they can be addressed by adding a comment to the talk page of a page suffering from the problem.

Legacy namespace

All of the old content from the wiki has been placed in the Legacy namespace. This has been interpreted by some as depreciating the information due to a lack of communication about the conversion. That is definitely not the case. The real purpose of the Legacy namespace is to separate content using the old license from that using the new one. Due to a change in page URLs, it was also possible to have all external links continue to function properly. Legacy content is also included in search results by default. Initially, Legacy content was not linked from the main page purposely, to discourage editing the Legacy pages. Now a warning has been added when editing a Legacy page and while not perfect, it is good enough that Legacy content can be linked to freely from the main page or other parts of the primary navigation structure. This hasn't been done yet, but suggestions for where to do so should be directed at the discussion for the relevant pages.

Licensing conflicts

The old wiki's license maintained the copyright of the original author, just like the new one does. However, when the original author maintains copyright, all rights granted to a third part have to be explicitly named. In the case of the old license, the only extra rights granted to the wiki were distribution and minor edits, along the lines of formatting and typo fixes. This means that many edits on the old wiki were likely in violation of the license. The new license explicitly allows distribution and any edits to the content as long as credit is given to the original author and it isn't used for monetary gain. These licenses are very different and can't be reconciled. That is the primary motivation for the Legacy namespace. If the original author agrees to relicense the content, it can be moved out of the Legacy namespace, but that isn't something that can be automated. Unfortunately, due to the lack of technical enforcement of the old license, many people likely misinterpreted what was a allowed due the free editing and a lack of familiarity with licensing issues.

User accounts

While the old wiki had a concept of users, they didn't store any information that would be relevant to the new wiki aside from the user name and password. Additionally, it wouldn't be technically possible to convert the old passwords. Because of this, no attempt was made to convert old user accounts. On the new wiki, anonymous edits have been turned off as a spam prevention method. If there are disagreements with this policy, please post them on the discussion page.

When

The conversion was done on April 1st, 2008. The new site had been a work in progress for at least a month beforehand, but along with a restructuring of the BeyondUnreal server, the new site was considered complete enough at this date. This decision was solely at the discretion of Haarg.

Going forward

The plan going forward is to move as much content out of the Legacy namespace as possible, and new content getting created in line with the new structure. This is likely to be an ongoing process, as there is a large volume of information in the Legacy namespace.

Feedback

Any and all feedback is appreciated, and should be directed at the discussion for the main page (for primary organization issues) or this page (for overall conversion issues).

Administrators or other leaders

Haarg is functioning as the primary admin going forward, but is mainly a technical person and not a large contributor or consumer of the wiki's content. Wormbo has been working on structure and content for the new site.