EG Redesign - Ideas and Suggestions?

[inkoalawetrust]

There hasn't been major progress, although one of the Editors has created a mock-up/test site of a wiki that we've played with a bit and there is some slow rolling discussion about various details of how this might work. In terms when things might speed up/really get started, we've made some changes to how we operate as a non-profit corporation that are still ongoing and eating up much of Trond's time and mine (Trond as our webmaster being most important in terms of anything that happens to the website/EG/wiki stuff). At this juncture I don't expect to have bandwidth to really focus on the wiki project until early 2026 since right now I'm aiming to get all the 'business stuff' done before the end of the year. I can't speak for what Trond's availability will be at that time, but fingers crossed.

Yeah I figured, didn't know about the weird legal non-profit stuff though.

As far as the switch to a wiki, there are various reasons for it, many of them due to a wiki providing various improvements from an editorial and operational perspective. The current content management system isn't all that byzantine once you know how to use it, but it does have various limitations that a wiki would fix mostly due to built in stuff that is pretty standard for wikis as well as granting the editors various additional capabilities we don't have now.

Yeah that's what I was thinking of, but also how more front-end editing would be easier, familiar to newer editors; but then that'd probably come at the expense of MediaWiki (And I presume most other software like PmWiki or DokuWiki) needing a lot wrangling to get into a unique OA-shaped layout and UI. And then risk requiring updates for any new wiki version, which would slow down updating the EG when a new version comes out.

As far as which wiki platform we might go with, IIRC there's at least one - I don't recall the name - that we all agree should absolutely NOT be used, but beyond that at this point it's not fully settled.

... did someone suggest that the EG be moved to Fandom? Lmfao. I mean, it'd be hilarious for about 5 minutes I guess.

As far as what a wiki version of the EG might look like - that's still up in the air, but a common mention is that people like the current fractal swirly background of the EG and would like that or something like carried over. Nothing much else has been really decided, but I'm confident that we are very much not looking to create a purely generic wiki.

If/when we launch this project, I expect we'll keep the membership updated on progress.

Hope this helps,

Todd

Fractal swirly background? You mean the faded top graphic? Yeah I think that'd be pretty trivial to add to a MediaWiki instance, for example the Minecraft wiki already uses custom background images. Also I definitely don't think any of you want the EG to be generic, I was moreso saying that customizing any premade wiki software that much might be a problem. But changes like background images and hiding MediaWiki's normal "Ediit/View history" buttons and user login stuff for anyone who isn't a logged in editor should be pretty easy.