Mefi Wiki upgraded and improved

November 7, 2010 2:24 AM

After a brief hiatus last night, the Mefi Wiki is now working again and improved.

I upgraded to the latest version of Mediawii (1.16.0), which I'm sure will be an improvement over the 3+ year old version I'd originally installed, and installed the Spam Blacklist extension, which should drastically cut down on the spam (at pronoiac's suggestion)

Admins (you know who you are) can also add spammy URLs to the blacklist at http://mssv.net/wiki/index.php/Spam_Blacklist

Also, if anyone has any suggestions for other Mediawiki extensions that would be useful and not troublesome to install/maintain, let me know.

posted by adrianhon to MetaFilter-Related at 2:24 AM (32 comments total)

That's some seriously outdated stats on the front page. Looks like it's time for Team MehFite to assemble!
posted by blue_beetle at 5:48 AM on November 7, 2010

Yay for largely invisible changes to the underlying infrastructure! The wiki is honestly one of my favorite things, I really appreciate you maintaining it all this time.
posted by cortex (staff) at 6:14 AM on November 7, 2010

Thank you for maintaining it!
posted by typewriter at 6:26 AM on November 7, 2010

largely invisibly awesome.
posted by mintcake! at 6:30 AM on November 7, 2010

Yay thanks for doing this. I was just talking about the MeFi wiki to a bunch of librarians "We have a list of book recommendations that has 1000 different sets of suggestions." sounded impressive.

For people looking for ideas on how to help out if they're interested, here are some suggestions.

- go to any of the "AskMe collections" pages and add any AskMes that were asked after the page was last updated.
- transcribe some podcasts
- Clean up the in-jokes page
- Add to the list of Famous MeFites or the Timeline or the AskMe FAQ

Also I'm not sure if I have the privileges to do this, can we add IRL t the sidebar where Meetups is now? I'll write the page, just want a link to it so all the subsites are represented.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 6:39 AM on November 7, 2010

My mom says I'm famous.

Actually the comment fable section could use an overhaul - if only I didn't have actual real life work to get to.

and by real life work I mean minecraft
posted by The Whelk at 6:50 AM on November 7, 2010

I've added an initial set of spam-detecting regexp to the MeFi wiki Spam Blacklist page that prohibits edits containing one or more links using a few dozen spammer domain names. I got these domain names by extracting them from the last 365 days of spam edits to the MeFi wiki.
posted by RichardP at 7:00 AM on November 7, 2010

Also I'm not sure if I have the privileges to do this, can we add IRL t the sidebar where Meetups is now? I'll write the page, just want a link to it so all the subsites are represented.

Jessamyn, the sidebar is editable via the wiki itself at the MediaWiki:Sidebar page. The sidebar uses a different syntax than standard wiki markup, instructions are available at mediawiki.org.

I took a look, for some reason all of the sidebar subsite links go to subsite.metafilter.com, except for "Meetups" which goes to the wiki Meet Up page. I've changed "Meetups" to "MeFi IRL" in the MeFi wiki sidebar and linked it to irl.metafilter.com like the other metafilter subsite links. Would you prefer it if the sidebar linked to individual pages about each of the subsites, instead of directly to the subsites themselves?
posted by RichardP at 7:23 AM on November 7, 2010

Thanks so much, I was sure there was a way to do that but I wasn't finding it. Probably the sidebar needs to link to pages about the subsites and not the subsites itself but it's nothing that needs to get done right away.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 8:26 AM on November 7, 2010

Thanks all! Glad everyone's finding the wiki useful, and I've got to hand it to RichardP, pronoiac, and jessamyn for helping keep the spam under control for all this time. Hopefully the combination of the upgrade, Spam Blacklist, and now also CheckUser (also accessible by admins) should save a lot of time.
posted by adrianhon at 8:44 AM on November 7, 2010

Probably the sidebar needs to link to pages about the subsites and not the subsites itself but it's nothing that needs to get done right away.

Jessamyn, I've modified the metafilter subsite links in the wiki sidebar to link to pages on the wiki, instead of directly to the subsites themselves. The wiki didn't have pre-existing pages about the MeFi Music, Jobs, and IRL subsites, so I added some placeholder pages for them.
posted by RichardP at 9:11 AM on November 7, 2010

Excellent, I'll add some text. Thanks so much you guys, I'm so happy to see the wiki evolve.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 10:30 AM on November 7, 2010

I always thought (reading the acronyms page) that "QFT" meant, not "quoted for truth", but "quite fucking true".
posted by kenko at 10:59 AM on November 7, 2010

I always thought (reading the acronyms page) that "QFT" meant, not "quoted for truth", but "quite fucking true".

For years I thought "FTW" was "fucks the world." Maybe it was, in some circles.
posted by Xezlec at 11:10 AM on November 7, 2010

I got Adrian's email about enabling the Blacklist extension, checked the Recent Changes list there, & was pretty bowled over by the extensive list of edits this morning. Sweet!
posted by Pronoiac at 11:10 AM on November 7, 2010

FTW was always fuck the world in biker circles, it's been amusing to watch it slowly get taken over by for the win.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 11:11 AM on November 7, 2010

When I first encountered it (as For The Win, I'm sure, but never explicated where I was seeing it) I parsed it as "Fuck The What" or perhaps "Fhat The Wuck", an extra-incredulous statement that communicated the even-syntax-mangling degree of WTFness involved.

For The Win makes more sense but is less exciting to me.
posted by cortex (staff) at 11:14 AM on November 7, 2010

Fuck the heck?
posted by SpiffyRob at 2:40 PM on November 7, 2010

Flip The Whelk.
posted by The Whelk at 2:55 PM on November 7, 2010

Don't listen to adrianhon, this is all part of a new ARG for some movie about wiki spammers.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 6:31 PM on November 7, 2010

Oh, excellent! I am not the only one who read it as "Fuck the What"!
posted by that girl at 6:59 PM on November 7, 2010

I used to think that "ftfy"mean "f- this, f- you". It almost always made sense in context.
posted by Joe in Australia at 7:12 PM on November 7, 2010

Don't know why I didn't realize it was user editable. Or if I knew, I guess I had forgotten.
posted by zarq at 10:53 AM on November 8, 2010

Neat, I just got back from mine and Uncle Ira's wedding and updated the Married Users page! Thanks, adrianhon.
posted by Unicorn on the cob at 11:13 AM on November 8, 2010

That's awesome. Congratulations!!! :)
posted by zarq at 1:03 PM on November 8, 2010

Thanks, zarq... we're feelin' the love.
posted by Unicorn on the cob at 3:01 PM on November 8, 2010

A question... I'm editing the wiki and want to set up a table of contents on a section I'm working on, but it's been a number of years since I used wiki markup language.

Can anyone point me to a solid guide for more complex formatting commands than bold, underline, etc.?
posted by zarq at 8:08 AM on November 9, 2010

Here is a convenient set of editing tips.
posted by cortex (staff) at 8:15 AM on November 9, 2010

And usually minimal editing is the way to go. You can click "edit" on any page and see how people did the stuff they did. The MeFi wiki used MediaWiki so the syntax is also the same as Wikipedia's in case you don't see an example on the MeFi wiki.

The table of contents stuff gets set up automatically if you use the headings in the right way, unless you specifically say "no table of contents" You can see how this works on the ReadMe page.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 8:17 AM on November 9, 2010

I'm editing the wiki and want to set up a table of contents on a section I'm working on, but it's been a number of years since I used wiki markup language

Table of contents are automatically generated by the wiki software if a page has more than three headings. You can put __FORCETOC__ in the wikitext to force a table of contents to appear on a page with less than four headings. Alternatively, you can use __TOC__ to specify that the table of contents should appear at the same position as the code instead of the default location (before the first section heading).

Can anyone point me to a solid guide for more complex formatting commands than bold, underline, etc.?

The MeFi wiki Main Page links to a page on the MeFi wiki with a short introduction to the editing syntax. However, it's not very complete. MeFi wiki runs the same software as Wikipedia (although without most of the extensions and extra features installed on WP), so you can use WP's editing help for a general overview of how to edit MeFi wiki. However, while much of the editing help you find there will be relevant to MeFi wiki, some of the more complex syntax will not be available on MeFi wiki. Wikimedia's meta wiki has some editing documentation that is more complete than the documentation on MeFi wiki without much of Wikipedia's complexity.
posted by RichardP at 8:36 AM on November 9, 2010

Ah! Excellent. Thank you both.
posted by zarq at 9:29 AM on November 9, 2010

err... my thanks to the three of you. :)
posted by zarq at 9:29 AM on November 9, 2010