User talk:Iamacyborg

Interlanguage Links

Usually, on the left you have a section called "Languages", and then a list of links of different languages that the current page is in (as opposed to a separate section for each language, each with a link to just the Main Page, as you have now). Also, something like Main Page/de is a "subpage" of Main Page: the MediaWiki software doesn't, I think, recognize it as Main Page in another language, but rather thinks it something (presumably still in English, as far as the software is concerned) related to Main Page.

Subpages are usually used for archives of discussions (e.g. Talk:Main Page/Archive 1 might be where you put old discussions after Talk:Main Page becomes too full), or for sections of pages that are literally "subpages" of the main article (e.g. you might create a Armour Shard/technical page for some technical details you don't want to bore most of the audience with in the main page, for example). I'm not sure of the "general form" for various language URLs; Wikipedia, Wiktionary, and Wikibooks all use the "lang.domain.tld/Page_title" format (e.g. [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_page] vs. [de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_page], not [wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_page/de]); this seems like a good format to me, but that involves some server configuration I'm not familiar with.

To be honest, I have not actually used interlanguage links before; the Wikis I have worked on have all been English-only. I've also never had administrator or server access, so I don't know the full details on setting things like this up on the back-end. I only know from experience that large-scale conversion from one scheme to another is a huge pain in the ass, so we should sort this out now, while there's only a few articles.
— DragoonWraith • Talk • 14:02, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

Got it. I started looking into your suggestion and have created a new wiki as a test, which you can find at French PoE Wiki. User accounts from this wiki should be getting carried over on to that one. I've also created a German one, but I'm waiting for Virtual Hosts to update before I can test to see if it's all working properly.

I've not yet enabled the actual interwiki links, but that'll be the next thing to test, alongside making sure all files are shared properly so I don't have to update a bunch of pages for something to take effect sitewide (like extensions).

The only thing that seems quite complicated about the process seems to be the URL structure, I don't think I'll have a main entry portal page like [1], instead it should go directly into the English language version of the site.

I definitely agree that getting everything set up now rather than later is the way to go, data migration is a huge pain in the arse, so I'd like to keep it all to a minimum and do everything the right way from the start. Iamacyborg 14:23, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

Wiki Bot

By the way, I have some software for automating certain tasks on Wikis; I mostly use it for RegEx Search&Replace across a large number of pages (e.g. change "Armor" to "Armour" or vice versa on every page in the (Main) namespace, perhaps), though I've used it a few times also for the batch creation of pages (it has a function to create pages from a single document, which can be a fast way to produce numerous similar pages). Typically, I request permission to use this bot, and if granted, create an account for it and request that the "Bot flag" be set on that account. The Bot flag is useful because it allows you to hide automated bot activity on Recent Changes.

If you're interested, the bot is a Pywikipediabot.
— DragoonWraith • Talk • 14:02, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

I've never actually run a bot on a wiki site before, but I'll take a look at it. Being able to batch create stuff like item and skill pages will be a huge boon, particularly if Chris is able to provide item data at a latter date. Iamacyborg 14:23, 16 October 2011 (UTC)