Better documentation/ using the wiki

[sphinxc0re]

I know it's not the hottest of topics but we have to do a better and centralized documentation of the server software. Most servers are using a wiki for that so why don't we set up a wiki at wiki.mc-server.org? I know there is 'something like' a wiki already set up there but I am talking about a real wiki. I would even write articles for it but can we please discuss that?

[bearbin]

The wiki is outdated and is griefed by the spammers all the time.

I don't think we plan to create a wiki at the moment - API documentation is covered well by http://mc-server.xoft.cz/LuaAPI/ and there's a user's manual under construction at http://book.mc-server.org . If you could contribute some sections to the book that would be great, as it only really has the basic setup in it ATM.

[xoft]

So what has a "real" wiki got what the current one doesn't have?

I know of two major problems that the current wiki has: it's hopelessly outdated, and its start page is constantly being defaced by spambots. Will creating a "real" wiki fix either of these problems?

There may be a different approach, taken by the "book" subproject - it's not exactly a wiki, but rather a github repo that has individual pages in it, and it is then being compiled into a web form. By using GitHub, it prevents the spambot defacement; on the other hand, it's even worse off than the wiki on the outdatedness. Also what I personally don't like about it is the lack of documentation on how to actually add content there, properly.

A similar approach would be to use a normal static website, with all the pages saved in a GitHub repository. This would have the advantage of easy editing, but the disadvantages of needing to know HTML and CSS in order to edit it, and doing things the hard way - if you wanted to add something to a sidebar menu, you'd have to edit ALL the pages.

[bearbin]

xoft - if you look inside the "book" subfolder of the mcs-book project then you can see it's just a load of HTML files, with links in {{}} s replaced.

[xoft]

The book is somewhat difficult to navigate, I personally do prefer a sidebar menu and a subpage for each topic, rather than a huge monolithic page, even with an index at the top.

[bearbin]

I am planning to make it have an index, and subpages, and a sidebar menu is entirely possible. But doing individual pages is a lot more work than just one, and when I wrote the compiler program I didn't know if anybody was going to write the text to go in the book.