Forum:Starting additional wikis

Forums: Index > Starting additional wikis

This page or section is an archive. Please do not edit the contents of this page. This thread was archived on 19 February 2021 by IsobelJ.

Recently there has been interest by several parties in starting RS3/OS wikis for other languages and currently we have no policy on how to handle such inquiries. While the technical back-end requirements of starting up another are minimal, we need to ensure that it is of quality and well maintained. I think the right course of action would be having them start a meta thread, where they introduce themselves and answer a few set questions, and then the community can discuss and decide.

Some things I think we need to ensure:

• A large enough initial group to reasonably create and maintain a small wiki
• Sufficient lua/scribunto knowledge to be able to port necessary modules with minimal assistance
• Sufficient js and css knowledge to maintain the gadgets and themes

Discussion

Comment - See above Elessar2 (talk) 17:38, 27 July 2020 (UTC)

Comment - I think it would be appropriate to discuss creating some equivalent of Wikidata (as was suggested on Discord) and work through the obstacles presented so that the current wikis and any potential future wikis can benefit from it. In the same line, I wonder if scary transclusion is something that is wanted for ease in maintaining shared templates which are not likely to diverge in each wiki. That would probably come with its own issues, though, and I don't think it's supported in our version of MediaWiki. I'm not familiar with the technical obstacles that come with each issue, so other people are more suited to judge if the cost is worth it. Habblet (talk|c) 18:16, 27 July 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata or similar is actually something we discussed during the board meeting (look for it in the notes), and in the meta, we'll probably look into it more once the GCP migration is completed, we want to concentrate on that for now. - Elessar2 (talk) 18:53, 27 July 2020 (UTC)

Comment - Technical ability in admins comes over time as the needs of the wiki diversifies beyond mere content. I disagree with making that a requirement up front. cqm ^talk 18:23, 27 July 2020 (UTC)

Comment - While I agree with this sentiment, I think it's not the best for establishing a new Wiki. Without some of this technical knowledge, would there be an expectation of the contracted Weird Gloop folks to work on some of this or to be the main ones assisting? I could understand a more independent route being preferred due to the potential language barrier and general upkeep needed.

I'd be curious on how the PT-BR version went and what the launch looked like for that. Legaia 2 Pla ^{ᴛ · ʟ · ᴄ} 22:07, 27 July 2020 (UTC)

Wikis are not built in a day. RSW is 15 years old. OSRSW builds on the same foundation and learned many lessons from RSW. And let's be honest, OSRSW spent some time being the lesser of the two wikis technically until the technical admins started appearing and rebalanced the playing field. Strong content is the foundation of a wiki, but we've had so much time to refine upon that and a virtually unparalleled team of dedicated editors given our size that we forget that. We have had the benefit of building on strong content for so long we can focus on minutiae in the style guide, grand technical projects and develop other resources that smaller wikis barely dream about. Don't hold new wikis to our current standards immediately - let them develop and see what innovations they generate along the way. cqm ^talk 11:47, 28 July 2020 (UTC)

While I see where you're coming from in terms of building wikis up over time (as the RuneScape wikis have done over the last 15 years), I think there is a fundamental difference between creating a new wiki from scratch and making an alternate-language wiki based on an existing wiki. When I think of an alternate-language OSRS wiki, for example, I imagine it would copy over many of the styles, templates, modules, etc. from the English-language OSRS wiki. This would benefit the new wiki by giving them ready-made tools for most their needs, but could also be problematic as many important templates and modules are quite technically complex.

So, assuming they would be porting over many of these existing templates so as to emulate the styles and appearance of their English wiki counterparts, do you think there should be a level of technical competence expected of people looking to start an alternate-language wiki? If not, how do you think we (as a wiki community) can support these new wikis so they can understand and use existing wiki infrastructure? BigDiesel2m (talk) 21:22, 28 August 2020 (UTC)

I think there's a base level of competence required to become an admin on an established wiki, but that begins to vary wildly when the wiki is much more new. Personally, I think placing requirements on the initial founders is a bit pointless as editor retention is always a problem on a wiki, regardless of its age. Sometimes people get bored and move on. As such, building things to be able to support multiple languages feels like a very different question.

Building features to help new wikis get up and running quickly is the perceived value Wikia provides. That said, some of the ideas they've tried over the years have been awful, many more didn't take and very few stood the test of time. In technical terms, one of the success stories on Wikia is the Dev wiki - a repository of 'gadgets' (not true gadgets because mw1.19 had very poor support for them) and lua modules. Both of these are considered to be a global repository, with mixed uptake in the wider Wikia community due to its fragmentation and scale. In the past 2-3 years, Dev wiki have made headway with translating those scripts and modules so they alter their messages based on the content language and/or user language for JS (I actually wrote the JS library for this). This is perhaps worth exploring in our own way.

Global gadgets and modules have been on the WMF radar for some years, but I don't think ever made it onto their roadmap unfortunately. If they were available, that's the avenue I'd go down. If not, you may find the work is nearly done and just needs a bit of live to get it completed. cqm ^talk 11:07, 29 August 2020 (UTC)

Comment - I see the opening of new wiki branches in different languages, for people who play RS3/OSRS from various zones of the world, a must to help the game to diversify it's community. Although the game (i will refer to OSRS) is only in english, playing it, and learn the mechanics isn't really hard to accomplish (i did it with 10-12 years old and almost any knowledge in that language, in 2005). On the other hand, a player who only knows how to play and doesn't know anything about lore behind quests, doesn't have any place to make friends who can communicate with him/her, and is a "forced ironman" in the adventure world of Gielinor, isn't a really full player. Of course, wiki aren't social media like discord, twitter or reddit, but i think if people realize about the existense of non english communities in the wikis, they will be encouraged to join and enjoy a lot more with the game. Finally, im here because i support the creation of a spanish speaking wiki, and i have a little team who will work with me if this proyect is supported enough. Some of they (including me) have a bit of knowledge in programming and there are 4 people who play the game years ago. Raguixxx 22:07, 27 July 2020 (UTC)

Comment -

The main thing

The opening of this Wiki is to be used as a means of interval so that people who currently play runescape have some knowledge about the game, also to encourage new players to be encouraged to enter this world, which will become interesting for them. everything you can learn, We will also look for the way to interact with our Followers through the English language, This will not be easy but with the effort and dedication of our team we can make Several People come to Love This Wonderful Game

The Secondary

In addition to inviting new players to this game we will give you Guides to make it less complicated when entering the world of Runescape, these Guides will go from Level Elevation, Efficient Methods, Mission, Etc. Our team will always be ready for this Wiki to attract more public through this —The preceding unsigned comment was added by NemesisUwU (talk) on 01:10, 28 July, 2020 (UTC).

Copied from the talk page by Elessar2 (talk) 07:58, 28 July 2020 (UTC)

Comment - I speak French and Spanish quite well (English natively) and am particularly interested in working on a German wiki. Doesn't matter which game, though I primarily play rs3. I know players who play both and am quite triggerhappy asking questions when I need to. So as long as you've got the team for it, I can help you with any of those three languages, for either game. I am also passionate about making this game as accessible as possible for people from all countries. I comment here not to say I would halfheartedly help—I would probably drive the project. (I also know very, very basic CSS/JavaScript, and am currently in a course as I try to get better)O TERAGARD 02:04, 29 July 2020 (UTC)

Comment - I am also commenting on behalf of Raguixxx, a native Argentinian, who has a small team of 6 (including me) who are committed to working on the osrs Spanish project. O TERAGARD 02:10, 29 July 2020 (UTC)

Comment - Me and the rest of the PT-br team are very supportive of additional languages, especially if a wikidata-like system is implemented (though in my opinion, only after such a system is added). I agree completely with Cqm's point, as the PT-br wiki took quite a long time developing its textual content before reaching the point where it was absolutely necessary to go after the technical innovations that were originally created for the English wikis. Besides, once the first international wiki deploys these features, multiple interlang wikis can help each other to do the same with less and less guidance from Gloop members, if these members are occupied with other projects. Crowborn (Talk) 19:41, 30 July 2020 (UTC)

Question - What obstacles have you run into while working on the PT-br wiki, both in terms of textual content and technical improvements? Has there been difficulty bringing techincal changes from the English-language wikis over to the PT-br wiki? At some of the board meetings I've been a part of, we've had requests from the PT-br wiki representative for help on some stuff like converting modules and fixing up GE stuff, with middling success in addressing those. Do you think it is possible for the PT-br wiki (and other future alternate-language wikis) to get support through existing channels (like the Discord or the quarterly board meetings) or do we need to figure out a better way for you to ask for help? BigDiesel2m (talk) 18:55, 13 August 2020 (UTC)

Follow-up - I've found it troublesome to keep track of all things we'd like to work on - dumping dozens of them at once or pinging someone every week with a new one both seem inefficient (and rude) solutions i wouldn't like to rely on. In the past, the PT wiki has internally used tables/spreadsheets as to-do lists, so maybe we could have a similar system, either here or on the Discord, where interlang staff can add and track issues we couldn't solve ourselves. This way, requests wouldn't be forgotten when a more pressing issue pops up, and multiple groups of editors can exchange solutions for easier porting of features. What do you all think of this? Crowborn (Talk) 19:27, 14 August 2020 (UTC)

Comment - If we create a wiki in spanish it will facilitate communication among the spanish-speaking participants since they form a great part of both RS3 and OSRS players. The creation of the wiki in osrs will steadily increase the number of players of this game, which has been groundbreaking in the entire world, and give a much needed linguistic aid to many of the players who love and appreciate this game. With every day as we diversify and increase the utility of this great tool, the wiki, it will aid enormously in the ability of spanish speakers to learn since the game doesn't have a spanish dev version, and our idea is to create this tool in Spanish to facilitate the game all the more.  —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Guasaylatino (talk) on 21:55, 30 July 2020 (UTC).

Comment I think it's an excelent, and revolutionary proyect, to start a wiki in spanish, where all people who doesn't understand english will be helped. Many people who play the game in various countries will benefit from it. I support it atte: 77tigercows  —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Alijesus4455 (talk) on 03:37, 31 July 2020 (UTC).

Comment - I think it's a great idea to have more wikis, except that good sources of information and very well planned organization structure are needed to facilitate this process, mainly to define the order of page creation and other such details, because it's useless to create a small series of disconnected pages, such as random Herbology or Smithing pages. There will be huge gaps of content. It was only a few months ago that I joined the PT-BR community, and so for I came across this topic a lot, because more often than not, I want to import an RSW module and I end up facing trouble because that Wiki is already consolidated on a very strong basis. Even more so when you come across property-based modules, making it hard (or sometimes impossible) to just copy stuff one to one. Therefore, I recommend that a base system for creating new wikis should be developed, alongside an initial strategic planning. Especially in relation to some bots that could work for more than one wiki (for uploading images and updating prices, for example). In addition to the fact that there is no longer an official Spanish translation team, some rules on how to translate certain objects and texts should be predefined. Toktom 16:02, 31 July 2020 (UTC)

Comment - I support additional languages as long as the game exists in that particular language. I would even contribute to a certain extend in building up a German wiki for RS3. I don't really play RS3, but still i could translate pages if necessary. I also think it would be a good idea to reach out to Schnupptrupp (if they're still active) and ask if they're interested in moving to our site. When it comes to old school, I am not sure it's a good idea to have multiple languages, mostly because the game only exists in english and it would be quite a challenge to translate examines etc. Brok 17:19, 31 July 2020 (UTC)

Comment - While I don't think we should introduce hard requirements for new wiki creation, I do think we should implement a policy along the lines of the people interested in starting the wiki making a thread on meta answering some standard questions around the factors Elessar mentions. Ultimately the wiki community should decide on a case by case basis whether a new wiki should be supported, bearing in mind that support for a new wiki may take away from other projects. IsobelJ (talk) 20:04, 2 August 2020 (UTC)

Comment - Something I brought up in Discord, but one of the biggest hurdles I see is for languages that the game is not translated into. How would you go about handling item names and examines, transcription of dialogue, and whatever else escapes me currently? I feel like it's a safe assumption that most people who natively speak a non-supported language play on the English servers, but there'a always going to be someone who doesn't. Is it worth leaving the actual in-game text in English (or, if for some reason you make Spanish derivations of the PT-BR pages, then the Portuguese text)? Badassiel 20:14, 2 August 2020 (UTC)

I agree that that poses a major hurdle for those languages, but I think that needs to be evaluated on a case by case basis. That's actually a great question to add for those languages though, since it's really something that needs to be decided right at the outset. I think regardless the base language probably needs to be English, since that's the language the game is developed in.

It was asked in meta by cook, but I'll ask it here again, does anyone have examples of localized wikis for games not translated to that language? Elessar2 (talk) 06:41, 3 August 2020 (UTC)

I found that Wowpedia has a translated wiki that does not correspond to an official language provided by the game. The wiki has a Polski option, which is not one for the game's installer. Legaia 2 Pla ^{ᴛ · ʟ · ᴄ} 00:32, 21 August 2020 (UTC)

According to their policy: NPCs, titles and Skill names (spells, talents, etc) are never translated. Special care should be taken when translating Item and Faction names. The most important rule regarding translations is: On WoWWiki, translations of any terms may appear only in continuous text (for example, description under a given heading). Information provided in infoboxes, tables and lists must be kept in its original form.

The vast majority of page names are in the original language, so they use piped links to display article links in Polish. They also have a manually updated list of translation pairs, with plural forms and comments. Habblet (talk|c) 15:40, 24 August 2020 (UTC)

This is a very cool example. To be honest, when I heard we were looking into maybe starting a Spanish-language wiki for OSRS, this is kinda how I thought we would do it. After all, OSRS is only in English, so any player, regardless of their native language, would see any in-game text in English. Because of that, I'm still not convinced we'd want to translate stuff like "Iron sword" to "Espada de hierro" (or whatever the correct translation is, if google translate has failed me), but I'd be interested in arguments both ways. I think the more obvious benefit of having alternate-language wikis are the various guides and strategies that would be available in that langauge, regardless of whether the item names are in English or not. BigDiesel2m (talk) 20:16, 25 August 2020 (UTC)

Comment - I'm coming on behalf of Raguixxx and his team with the interest of contributing to a spanish translated OSRS wiki. Ignacio 18:57, 11 August 2020 (UTC)

Comment - Hello! I'm Darma. An Admin from the Official OSRS Hispanic Community Discord Server. Reading about this idea of contributing to an OSRS Wiki on Spanish sounds fantastic. I would love to see this happening. Darma 20:38, 11 August 2020 (UTC)

Comment - Regarding the naming of game entities: for languages that the game wasn't translated into (or used to be translated into):

1. One solution that was brought up is for those wikis to have the page name in English (that is, in the URL), but have the first heading (the page title) contain both the fan translation and the original name in English. The reason for this is that, while a player could translate a fair amount of game entities and then look them up in the wiki, their translation could not match the fan translation (with some names not having literal translations or being able to be translated into multiple names), not to mention this may end up being tiring for the reader. The official name of the game entity (in the respective languages for the translated game versions; in English for the untranslated languages) is the quickest reference that a player has to look it up on the wiki.
   An inconvenience with this approach is having to constantly use the English name in links like [[English name|Translated name]], which would be pretty tiring, unless it was automated. It would be possible to make a template used like {{Tr|English name}} which looks for a property in the linked page containing the translated title, and displaying that instead, while keeping the page name in the URL in English. But this also has its own inconveniences.
2. A more pragmatic solution is to have page names translated into the target language, and use English redirects instead.

Regarding partially translated game versions (only Latin American Spanish at the moment), it may be worth keeping a record of officially translated game entities (in one common place and/or in each relevant page), for historical purposes and to avoid translation disputes (unless it is decided that a fan translation is superior the original translation in specific cases). Habblet (talk|c) 12:54, 12 August 2020 (UTC)

Comment - If wikis in non-supported languages are created, at some point (when they are somewhat developed) we should consider asking Jagex to create a wiki command for those languages (eg: ::eswiki Varrock / /eswiki Varrock) Habblet (talk|c) 17:33, 12 August 2020 (UTC)

Question for User:Riblet15 - Recently, we were both part of an effort to improve the RSC Wiki, for which you ported over a number of modules originally developed for the OSRS Wiki. This included the infobox and navbox modules, which now appear on nearly every page on the wiki. Assuming we'd want the general style and layout of alternate-language wikis to match the corresponding English-language wiki, do you think someone with little technical/lua knowledge could port modules over to a new wiki in the same way? If not, what can we do to make it easier or more approachable for new wikis to take advantage of existing wiki tech? BigDiesel2m (talk) 18:55, 13 August 2020 (UTC)

Comment - Most of the modules ported to the PT wiki were done so by people with very little knowledge in LUA and seem to work fine. With that said, whenever something goes wrong in a port, it usually requires attention from someone in the English wiki, as our more experienced coders have gone inactive. Other than having a lifeline to check these requests, if we do acquire a wikidata-like system, automatic infoboxes could make one of the big groups of templates more easily portable. Some templates will always require manual work, though, as they include things like string concatenating rules that aren't usable between languages.

Another thing that would be interesting to have is more pages in the editing help sections of the English wiki for parts of the system like Properties, since MediaWiki pages in these topics are extremely arcane for newcomers attempting to start a wiki to understand and make use of. I realize saying the following may reflect poorly on us, which is not my intention, but figuring out the specifics of how Properties work has largely been trial-and-error for us, unlike Modules and Templates. I see Properties and other cool features like them only becoming a must-have after the new wikis have grown quite a bit, but IMO it would be a great thing to start the wiki already with a solid backend, rather than leaving these things to editors to struggle with implementing across thousands of pages.

Finally, maybe the help pages on things like Properties could be included not in the English wiki but in the Meta wiki, in an easily-accessible section specifically dedicated to guiding the creators of new localized wikis. Crowborn (Talk) 21:24, 13 August 2020 (UTC)

I just did a major revamp of the RuneScape:Editing section on the english wiki, which now has sections on dpl and lua (big shout out to Ceph and Gaz), among other things. Also made it easier to navigate and find things but it doesn't yet have an smw section, although that would be nice. Elessar2 (talk) 22:21, 13 August 2020 (UTC)

For the most part the modules on the classic wiki had to be written from scratch, since they needed to represent unique game mechanics. Porting RSW or OSW to a new language would only require language translation, which still requires technical knowledge but most likely not as much. To do a proper translation you would need to be able to identify which strings in the module are presented to users, and sometimes rearrange variables or add conditional logic for differences in grammar. I don't have any good suggestions for keeping a translated module in sync with changes made to the english version. Riblet15 (talk) 02:51, 14 August 2020 (UTC)

To keep translations in sync, it might be easier if all user facing strings got moved to vars at the top of the module, but that seems clunky when there's a lot of different strings. One thing to keep in min is that, as Gaz and I have learned, the fewer function, var and param names that get translated the better. User facing params are hard to aviod translating, they make it easier for casual editors to edit, but the internals should be left alone as much as possible. Elessar2 (talk) 08:30, 14 August 2020 (UTC)

I wouldn't want to sacrifice the maintainability of the english version. It's already very difficult to ramp up new editors on how this kind of module works, and unusual code style sounds like it could be a further barrier to entry. Riblet15 (talk) 16:53, 14 August 2020 (UTC)

It's possible to put the translation layer in the template namespace and alias the parameters there. You just rename the argument when you call #invoke. cqm ^talk 06:55, 15 August 2020 (UTC)

If this was the approach a new wiki wanted to take, what would the process look like? You'd go into the module code to change visible string text to the alternate language, and in the template also add some sort of layer to change the parameters? Is that better than just doing all those changes in the module itself? Is it really an issue if the parameters behind-the-scenes are still in English? Are we concerned that could confuse novice editors? BigDiesel2m (talk) 20:16, 25 August 2020 (UTC)

Comment - Would like to see people's thoughts on hosting wikis for Jagex-related games (defunct and future) and non-Jagex games. If there is interest in hosting additional Jagex game wikis, it would surely be on a case-by-case basis, but would people want to review non-Jagex game wiki requests individually or completely bar the idea? For further reading, there have been some considerations about hosting Jagex and non-Jagex games in the 2018 and 2019 Weird Gloop election candidate presentations (and on Discord). Habblet (talk|c) 15:40, 24 August 2020 (UTC)

Comment - Supporting other Jagex game wikis should be reviewed on a case by case basis, both based on the level of demand for both readers and editing community. I wouldn't outright bar the idea of hosting non-Jagex wikis, but I think hosting them should be conditional on securing a source of funding to support the project(s) and keeping that allocation of funds clear, since currently we are primarily funded by Jagex for their products. It could be a potential strain if we are using Jagex funds to support non-Jagex wikis. Hephaestus 16:04, 24 August 2020 (UTC)

Comment/Proposal - This thread is getting a bit disorganized. There's a few different conversations going on here (and in Discord over the last month), but it's transitioned to be primarily about whether it's wise to create a Spanish-language OSRS Wiki, and what implementation of that would look like.

While I know it's possible/plausible that this would not be the only additional wiki we take on (either additional non-English wikis, sub-wikis for other parts of the community like clans, or past/future Jagex projects), it seems clear to me that:

1. There's broad agreement that any wiki proposal should happen via a meta thread (I actually don't even see discussion on this point of the original proposal - I think it's fairly self-evident).
2. There is very little agreement on what the requirements should be for a potential wiki team, especially related to technical expertise.
3. Every wiki proposal will be a bit different, with unique strengths, pitfalls and ways it will defy our existing categorization.

Because of that, I actually think it's quite hopeless to come up with any sort of general process and guidelines for considering new wikis. The best we can hope for is to get them to make a meta thread, and let our very inquisitive community think about similarities and differences to our existing projects, and look at what existing precedents and unique challenges they will need to account for.

I also think that having a concrete proposal for a specific, not-yet-extant wiki would help us coalesce on what the real requirements are, and the types of questions we're looking for the community to answer. It will also help us analyze in real terms the viability and value of building more shared systems.

With that in mind, I would suggest winding this thread down, and welcoming a proposal that is unambiguously about the Spanish OSRS Wiki. From there we can start to dig into the specifics, including (off the top of my head):

• How do we handle entity names when the game itself isn't localized to Spanish, and is only in English? How much could we or should we rely on the 2014 Spanish version of RS3?
• Do we want to build shared systems for using certain types of data/media cross-wiki? This includes images (Wikimedia Commons style, probably doable), exchange data (probably only viable if we get the exchange extension finished, so that's most likely a launch blocker here), and other semantic properties or Wikidata-type repo (probably not viable without major disruption to English wiki articles, and probably not as useful as we think anyway)
• Is there a way to port over the templates/modules/JS/CSS that doesn't massively encumber the ~5 people who know how most of it works? What about keeping them updated after translations? Is it maintainable if none of the people on the wiki know how the templates work?
  • This is something that pt-br is also struggling with, and has been a source of pain for small language Wikipedias too. Perhaps we can create some process where technical requests can be actioned by some of our people, possibly involving Gloop funds.
• What does the Spanish-language OSRS community look like? Who are their leaders? Can we get a sense of how many people there would be interested in contributing (or even just reading) a wiki in their language?
• What is the role of Venezuela in all of this? I'm under the impression that Venezuelan players make up about 10-15% of the total game population, and are a significant majority of Spanish speakers. Does the fact that a lot of them are playing, uh, somewhat illegitimately, change anything or impact our ability to get funding for this?
• [Should we]/[how could we] leverage the popularity of the English OSRS Wiki to expand awareness of a new wiki?
• What's the plan for building out the content? How and when can we get to a point that the Spanish wiki is better than using the English wiki on Google Translate?

ʞooɔ 02:22, 29 August 2020 (UTC)

Comment/Suggestion - So reading the Spanish wiki thread and this one, I came up with an idea that I believe would be the best option when creating a new wiki would be too hard.

I though about creating a translation system with user-input text (better than Google Translate) that displays the article in a selected language.

I know RS and OSRS Wikis automatically detect where the user is and auto-changes the flooring system, for exemple. I think that would be a great way of showing translated articles.

This would be specially great for Quest Guides and articles that don't have to be edited that much (excluding updates, typos and infos added) because the content is timeless.

This requires less work than starting a new wiki and it's a great way to implement German, French and Spanish to RuneScape Wiki without having the effort of creating a brand new fresh wiki.

Another comment is about the Spanish content: we already have most of the old quest guides on the old Spanish RuneScape Wiki, [a list can be found here]. So mainly the new quest guides would have to be done from scratch.

So a list of possible obstacles and hard things to do:

• Code everything: The main thing would be to make everything work
  • A button that changes an article's content to display it in a different language.
  • The auto-detection to auto-translate articles that have a translation
• Templates: Making new templates and infoboxes to work on the new languages.
  • We could do the same "translation" system to templates or make new templates

Pros:

• RuneScape Wiki would be accecible for other languages (most people don't speak english and don't have good quest guides to follow and have to use Google Translate, which is terrible)
• Communities don't have to create brand new-fresh wikis: so the work of doing templates all-over again, styling, CSS and everything involved would be already done.

Cons:

• Maybe we end up with lots of outdated articles as the RS Wiki gets updated constantly, but the Quest Guides (the main goal of this) don't require much maintenance.
• Every language would have to have its own bunch of editors willing to translate the pages to their languages and we have to think about what languages would be supported:
  • Official RuneScape-supported languages that don't have a "new"-wiki: French and German.
  • Unsupported languages that have RuneScape communities interested in having translated guides: Spanish, Mandarin (Chinese) etc.

Let me know what you guys think. Gugu (Talk) 17:11, 23 October 2020 (UTC)

As I said on Discord: I feel they should get their own wiki so there is a community that maintains it if not then people should continue to let Google Chrome translate the pages automatically. I feel that your idea will result in a lot of outdated and possibly vandalised content (as none of us can speak the language) if there is no community to maintain it. And if there is a community, then they should make their own wiki within our network. I feel that people who just wanna translate a couple of pages don't necessarily understand what it takes to maintain a wiki and will not stay very long. // Salix // Talk-to Salix // 23:39, 23 October 2020 (UTC)

A user has requested closure for Starting additional wikis. Request complete. The reason given was: complete

Request - Either a closure or a next step sort of thread would be nice. Seems this conversation has run its course; perhaps the next thread can be more about policy and less about a specific wiki? --Legaia 2 Pla ^{ᴛ · ʟ · ᴄ} 02:44, 19 December 2020 (UTC)

Closed - there is support from the community for the idea of creating other language versions of existing Weird Gloop wikis. The prospect of creating wikis for other Jagex games has also been brought up and no objections have been raised to the idea.

There is broad support for the proposal that any group of editors who would be interested in establishing and maintaining one of these wikis should create a meta wiki thread setting out their intention/background and for the community to decide on a case by case basis whether Weird Gloop should host the wiki.

There isn't a consensus yet on if/what we should be looking for in these requests. Some commenters have suggested that the requests should see the editors answering set questions relating to their technical editing abilities, and that we should be looking for people who are able to be self-sufficient in the running of any new wikis; others have argued that new wikis rarely have users with this type of skill set and that it shouldn't be a necessity for a community to have this from the outset.

One proposal from this thread was whether the creation of foreign language versions of content on existing wikis could be a substitute; but this was argued against. Most commenters are in favour of investigating the use of something like wikidata to share (technical) content between wikis, which would be a large factor in determining the feasibility of hosting other language wikis and setting expectations of new wiki editors' abilities. At the moment the tech peeps are focused on GCP migration, so there hasn't been progress in investigating a system like this. Once the migration is complete we can revisit this idea and progress the idea of hosting other wikis, but I'm conscious that this thread has now been open for some time with no further discussion so want to draw it to a close. Cook

Cook has already made a good summary above of the different technical factors that would need consideration; there have been other good points made about different things to consider which I am going to summarise here for future discussion:

• How any new wikis would track different features/projects they would like and communicate these with tech peeps (e.g. raising at board meetings/informally through Discord).
• How to handle proposed wikis for languages which RuneScape is not translated into - i.e. would game content such as item names be translated or left in English? An example of a wiki that has translated into a language that is not supported by its game is Wowpedia's Polish wiki.
• Asking Jagex for support with these wikis by introducing a specific wiki command. IsobelJ (talk) 14:12, 19 February 2021 (UTC)