I am not a trusting soul.
When the Wiki I contribute to crashed a few months ago, we discovered that our backups were not being performed as billed. That was a great sadness, and a scramble to back up ~27,000 pages out of web-caches, plus re-creating some very complicated templates from scratch. It was not fun.

Several months later… TWiki is ( Read more... )

It is September 14. I am crazy busy. All Hail Megatron #15 is released in the 16th.
Let’s do this thing.

I’ve been calling my proposal for TFWiki’s hypothetical “second license” intended to protect producers of official Transformers-related material from legal complications around the CC-BY-SA license which governs our content the “ZX License.” ( Read more... )

I have not slept in some time, and perhaps have taken too many different kinds of cold medication at once… because everything is sort of pulsing, and my peripheral vision has developed a scanline flicker like a bad CRT monitor.
Anyway I’m high as a kite and catching up on blog comments and discussions relating to TFWiki’s current copyright issues.
I ( Read more... )

When the Transformers Wiki was deciding to relicense its content under the Creative Commons, we spent a lot of time discussing it. I mean-an insane amount of time. The GFDL’s relicensing option offered a single up-or-down choice; stay with GFDL or switch to Creative Commons. Why bother?

Well, because the community is concerned about potential ( Read more... )

Everyone has “someday maybe” creative projects; the kind of think they’d like to do if they got an opportunity, but rarely make time for. Sometimes these are passionate fever-dreams, more often they’re simple roads-not-taken… a possible path you glimpse while on your way to another destination, and regret not having the time to explore.

I’ve done ( Read more... )

On august 6, I was presented with a large-but-finite set of pages that needed to be moved on a MediaWiki project; the parenthetical disambig was changing from “Page Name (Object)” to “Page Name (Obj).”

Since there were more than 100 such pages (and the disambig change wasn’t actually quite so neat) I decided to streamline. All these pages belonged ( Read more... )

Ages ago and for reasons which escape me at the moment, I was given access to TFWiki’s Google analytics account. (Probably because I once wrote custom software to track our downtime.) As a consequence, I make periodic traffic or architecture reports…. because no one else really cares to. (The last one prompted a redesign of the front page.)

I ( Read more... )

I’m a Transformers fan. For the last few years I’ve been active on the Transformers Wiki. And the TFWiki is currently debating whether or not to migrate our site-wide licensing from GFDL to CC-BY-SA3. Essentially a platform change in our site’s underlying “legalese” from Linux to Mac.

Sounds boring, right?

The complete meltdown of Western ( Read more... )

This is the new face of the Transformers wiki;

( Read more... )

The Transformers Wiki suffered a serious database fault on March 15th. It’s been 9 days.
We’ve had a tech-guy on standby try and reconstruct the database for 7 days. He’s a specialist, he does not come cheap, and he’s doing this on a volunteer basis. Our web-host is dragging its ankles, demanding teleconferences and approvals and all sorts of ( Read more... )