ONE (1) SL wiki

Keep them seperate. They each serve different spheres of knowledge and you can choose which to go to based on the type of information you want.

Avatar

If i want to know general stuff answer is obvious. If i want to see what has changed over the years obvious. if i want to know technical aspects dealing with functions that effect them, obvious.

Does ANYONE not know which wiki to go to in each of the three examples on one 'noun' above?

Now if you want to UPGRADE to a single, better wiki software sure go ahead. But keep them as 3 seperate sites as the purposes they are geared to is not so simple as 'all information'. Humans categorize information to make it easier to parse. We dont lump everything together as that only muddles everything.

Seronis, there's no reason categorization can't still occur in a single wiki that caters to all aspects of SL. Why is this so hard for you people to accept? Do I need to create an example page as an illustration of this concept? Sheesh...

Please do not merge the LSL Wik into any general topics wiki. It is brilliant as it is; when I'm trying to work out if I need to use 'changed' or 'attach', with two or more in-game script windows open and BBEdit going, I very much do not want to wade through A History Of The Avatar, no matter how cunningly written or illustrated.

Good god...what wading through are you babbling about? YOU SIMPLY GO TO THE "SCRIPTING" SECTION OF THE ARTICLE! Geez, people...STOP BEING SO DAMN DENSE AND THINK BEFORE REPLYING (and thinking too)!

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1. Definition/Introduction
   
2. History
   
3. Scripting
   
4. Links
   

It ain't freakin' theoretical physics...

We do think. And counting the number of users in this thread for/against. I'm quite confident the intelligent decision will be made and they will be left as seperate sites.

That's not intelligent, but stupid and inefficient. Typical...

It could all work if only you could partition the wiki in such a way that searching the specific categories was simple, while also keeping the ease of cross-referencing a single wiki... ;0


Oh wait!! MediaWiki has easy to impliment custom namespaces ;0 If you file LSL only under the LSL namespace and Support topics only under the support namespace and General topics only under the general namespace... and then edit the search template to list a few specific custom categories at the top of the page... It's as easy as adding a few namespace identifiers to the URI
<edit>
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Search#Namespaces_searched
</edit>


Enter Pockets into the search bar. Click Search.
Page displays...

Search for Pockets under:
General Topics | Linden Scripting Language | Second Life Support

Search results for all topics

FOo
blah.....


Debate over! Baba wins the wiki wars... Baba wins the forums... Baba wins Second Life... Baba Sucks.

Yes, namespaces would be the way to go. I tried to get the SL History Wiki to implement an "ideas:" namespace but the admins can't seem to figure it out. :/

There is an ideas namespace, the data just needs to be tagged with it
Edit3:
also needed is an Ideas_Talk page
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Namespace

Edit:
Another less desirable option is interwiki linking
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Interwiki_linking

Edit2:
Subpages also could make the wiki easier to navigate.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Sub_pages

Edit4:

On a related note, MediaWiki 1.7 will feature a new automated namespace generator. Currently the namespaces must be manually implimented by modifying the php files. I would suggest holding off on mucking with the history wiki until 1.7 is released.

Currently in alpha.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.7

I must agree that it's really stupid to have three separate wikis. It would be much better with just one. While using different namespaces might make sense for some things, I think maybe the majority of articles would be just fine in a single namespace, diving articles into sections isn't really that difficult.

Well, the merge could be done in phases.
First, get everything on MediaWiki(Since that's the one most users are familer with, due to all the WikiMedia Foundation's wikis.)
Second, move them all into the same DB using catagories. This could be skiped, but it would be nice.
Third, over time, take the info from each page on a topic and merge it into a single article.

For the people with modern-media attention spans:
1) Change to MediaWiki
2) ...
3) Profit!

The issue comes from how MediaWiki searches pages. You can easily search by a single namespace only. That will make combining the Wikis much easier. Currently people use the LSL wiki to reference LSL (go figure) If the LSL wiki were merged with all the other wikis with no way to limit your search you would find many references that were not at all relevant to your search.

Prefixing the wiki link with a namespace like LSL: would be an easy way to define what is specificly LSL related. Prefixing support topics with something like Support: would be simple. General topics would remain in the main namespace.

Right. I'm not sure how many irrelevant hits you'd get though, and it might be possible to just use disambiguation pages like they do on wikipedia.

Interesting! I'd be more inclined to agree with a unified wiki if we used this.
==Chris

Of course the history and general wikis are going to have some overlap. History needs to cover terms that are often used in everyday SL living.

If words in the history wiki's glossary also exist in the general wiki, it emphasizes that the word holds historical significance. Likewise for the LSL glossary, if any overlap exists between it and the general wiki, it emphasizes that the term has a significant everyday meaning, but also has some underlying technical specifics useful to scripters.
==Chris

Correction: There are 4 Wikis.
I installed MediaWiki on my website the other day and created MetaverseWiki.
http://metaversemedia.awardspace.com/MetaWiki/index.php.

Merging the wikis is a decidedly bad idea. If it's something the Lindens want to do, that's fine, but if so, I'm volunteering to host the LSL wiki privately again.

The reason a a specialized LSL wiki is beneficial is because with a narrow focus and frequently-referenced information it provides incentive for the most useful data to stay useful. Because the SL wiki is so painful to use, it has a lot of vastly out-of-date information on it.

The LSL wiki, on the other hand, has a far narrower scope, and makes assumptions that its users already know how to use SL, and the gist of what can be done with it. This allows it to contain less ever-changing data, and maintain a far smaller set of reference pages. However, it is still prone to outdated information when features pertaining to seldom-used pages are updated -- the Lighting page, for example.

This trend will get worse as less directly-used information is added to any wiki. We can expect to see the likelihood of bad information, biases, and basic errors increase, the farther away from the most commonly-accessed pages we go.

Actually there are five, I created a SeedWiki wiki on SL, it has one whole paragraph of text in it so far.

What Baba suggests seems much more reasonble. But still, I am not really convinced that the LSL wiki should be joined with the others, for the simple fact that i see LSL as just a other scripting language.
Are we going to join other wikis as well, when SL supports other program/scripting languages? How about joining a texturing knowledge base?

I don't go to wikipedia for help with C#, but i go to a C# knowledge base. Why should it be different for LSL?

btw, did you know there really is a fourth wiki. Second_Life_Education_Wiki

Fic'i' Wiki

My feelings exactly: a specialized reference for a specialized topic.

I would like to see a All in One Wiki on MediaWiki, but the LSL wiki would probably function best in it's current format ;0 It's too bad the wiki software it runs on stopped updating in 03 ;0

Several of the WakkoWiki forks support migration tho ;0

If the SL Wiki used MediaWiki it would be easier to use and have current info (assuming all existing content on the 3 main wikis are merged).

Yet there are still many pages that explain very basic things--especially with regards to programming concepts. Yes, the LSL Wiki is more technical than the others but that's hardly a reason to exclude that information from a single SL wiki.

Only if it's not kept after, like anything.

Because LSL is SL-specific, whereas C# is not. The LSL Wiki has basic info about SL's supported file formats, too, yet it doesn't go into TOO much detail about them since that is obviously beyond the scope of an SL-specific wiki. However, links to more info on, say, Wikipedia, are fine.

The point of a single wiki is convienence for both viewers (stay on a single site, don't have to weed through duplicate info, etc) AND contributors (same syntax, don't have to worry about not duplicating info on other wikis or linking to the correct page, etc).

Merge it.

Yes, and you created most of them, against wiki guidelines. The LSL wiki's intended focus on LSL alone is certainly a reason to exclude them from it.