Archiving the Lolcow Wiki

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Was the Lolcow wiki overall good during it's run?

  • Yes

    Votes: 50 61.0%

  • No

    Votes: 7 8.5%

  • Unsure

    Votes: 25 30.5%
  • Total voters
    82
Lazybird8654

Lazybird8654

kiwifarms.net
Joined
Oct 8, 2018
With Null saying the Lolcow wiki is bound to death it is now time to archive the entire Lolcow wiki.
Update: The entire site is currently down, Null has said it is in a read only state so archiving the site will be hard.
 
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I wrote a bit for the wiki back in 2016 or so, and while it's a good idea, it's absolutely not worth the effort to write a good article. The PK article I did took weeks of on and off work, was never fully finished, and is now massively out of date because I can barely keep up with the thread, let alone gather sources and format it all nice. I dunno if people even looked at it. It's a lot of effort for pretty much no payoff.

Community writing projects never go well because writing is hard and boring. The "community OP" thing might be slightly more successful, we'll see.
 
I think it went over pretty well. Had a lot of useful information about it regarding Onision.
 
Sergeant Politeness said:
I wrote a bit for the wiki back in 2016 or so, and while it's a good idea, it's absolutely not worth the effort to write a good article. The PK article I did took weeks of on and off work, was never fully finished, and is now massively out of date because I can barely keep up with the thread, let alone gather sources and format it all nice. I dunno if people even looked at it. It's a lot of effort for pretty much no payoff.

Community writing projects never go well because writing is hard and boring. The "community OP" thing might be slightly more successful, we'll see.
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Perhaps, but while some lolcows on here only have a single page's worth of info, how will the community OP work for ones like PK who had multiple sections? Would they be altogether on the OP or under a spoiler? That's what I'm mostly wondering.
 
Kokkino said:
I think it went over pretty well. Had a lot of useful information about it regarding Onision.
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For every decent article, I can point to two or three stubs or DN leftovers that weren't even that relevant at the time. Good articles on active cows basically required one person to roost over them and autistically add information, something virtually no one was willing to do.

Catastrophe-TM said:
Perhaps, but while some lolcows on here only have a single page's worth of info, how will the community OP work for ones like PK who had multiple sections? Would they be altogether on the OP or under a spoiler? That's what I'm mostly wondering.
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I think someone like PK has way too long an internet history to comfortably fit in an OP, spoilered or not. Where the wiki got it right was being able to have multiple pages for a cow's projects and associates, letting that info be better organized. Even if you spoiler things, we're still talking 10+ years of internet history and interactions and fuckups you have to fit in a single forum post.

I don't think it'll really work out, but I'll wait and see how it's implemented before I judge.
 
The wiki is extremely important for those threads that are 600+ or 3000+ pages long. It only takes a couple minutes to "bookmark" a post for posterity in the wiki page instead of people needing to search each and every page to see where that important piece of information was to begin with.

Sadly, very few were willing to do that regardless. I''m excited to see what's going to come in to take the wiki's place for that - if it's in-site instead of requiring people to navigate away (or even know the wiki existed at all), I'm sure more will be willing.
 
I kinda lost interest in maintaining it myself after a while, despite being a sysop, but I'm still kinda proud of a couple of the articles I wrote. Namely, the ones for Eddie Dzial and Aaron McCluske.
 
The Wiki is back up now. Some of the pages were good, especially since they were good summaries of long ass threads but it is in dire need of more updates.
 
A Robin said:
It honestly sounds like it's not going to go anywhere, but Archiveteam crawled it all for the Wayback Machine a couple weeks ago
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Archiveteam / the Internet Archive can't be trusted. They're not afraid of corporate copyright trolls, but they take down content on request from private individuals, especially libs. "I don't own this content, but it being available on the interwebs hurts me personally. Delete it. Sincerely, an autistic troon" is exactly the kind of scenario they're most sympathetic to.

(Don't use IA to archive corporate stuff, either - they hide content disallowed by robots.txt on the live site.)
 
Safir said:
Archiveteam / the Internet Archive can't be trusted. They're not afraid of corporate copyright trolls, but they take down content on request from private individuals, especially libs. "I don't own this content, but it being available on the interwebs hurts me personally. Delete it. Sincerely, an autistic troon" is exactly the kind of scenario they're most sympathetic to.

(Don't use IA to archive corporate stuff, either - they hide content disallowed by robots.txt on the live site.)
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Haha, the IA antagonism on this site. Understandable though.

Things can get excluded from the Wayback Machine, yes, but in this case, if Archiveteam crawls something and it is excluded from the Wayback Machine, from what I've seen, the files are still available (like for Snopes, which is excluded from Wayback for some godforsaken reason). Download them, if you wish. Archiveteam does great work and likes to make these things available for people. (and they are not exactly the Internet Archive, they just work with it)

Plus, I think Null (the domain owner) would have to contact the Internet Archive himself in order for it to get excluded. Or I guess content would have to be illegal (copyright?/child porn). I recall Archiveteam also did a prolonged crawl of Encyclopedia Dramatica--didn't that site have batshit enemies too? If something from there was excluded on Wayback, that'd be news to me. I'm not saying it can't happen though, and it's always best to make multiple backups. I just shared that because it's there and for the taking and can be browsed easily. If it's excluded as we fall further into a memory-holed dystopia, egg on my face I guess
 
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Guessing it's been archived now since I can't login anymore (I had to clear my cookies because I thought the wiki was in mobile but that wasn't the case)
 
The LOLcow Wiki definitely benefited newcomers the most and those like me who stopped regularly reading and posting in the LOLcow board years ago because of the 600+ page mega threads (for instance, I still have no idea why people call DSP Dave). It was nice to be able to follow a cow much more casually, but honestly, there are few cows I have an interest in from the start and the ones I do have an interest in I am more than willing to follow the mega thread for.

On that note, I've noticed mega threads are being managed a lot better now, and the main posts are being updated to reflect current events, which has eliminated most of the leg work of skimming through the last 30 pages at the end of the thread to find the post revealing whatever the new shitstorm is.

The wiki was an ambitious project and I commend the work of those who gave their time to it. But like an 800 elbee mound of swollen, diabetic flesh and varicose veins, it's time to hang up the paddles, pull the plug and bury it in the ocean with its ancestors.
 
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