Glitch City Laboratories (Join/Affiliation Request)

[Yuzihax]

Due to the lack of a response after an attempt at email contact, we figured it'd be more lucrative to instead post a request on the forums rather than continue waiting.

But onto the matter at hand; I am here today as a representative of Glitch City Laboratories, an independent website and wiki that finds its subject matter within the in-depth study and recording of information regarding glitches, quirks and assorted programming errors of, primarily, the Pokemon series of video games (although we also, at the present, record the same on other series of video games, and not just strictly Nintendo titles.)

An important article of note is that we are considered -the- authority on glitches in the Pokemon games, backing this is the fact that we have several databases full of information on the assorted glitches in the games, for example the GlitchDex, documenting all of the glitch Pokemon and their relevant information, the aptly-named Item and AttackDexes, and the yet-to-be-added information regarding the 65,000+ "Decamarks" or glitch Pokemon found in the third generation.

As such, we are used as citation for more important glitch-related articles on places such as Bulbapedia (for example citing parts of our research here and an entire article based on one of our discoveries here and an article referring to the Decamarks themselves here)

On the forums, there has been discussion as to whether or not our website would be applicable for becoming a part of NIWA, and as such we wish to find out whether or not we would be accepted for a membership or affiliation with NIWA.

Currently, we have 257 articles (page indexes for quick viewing located here and here) dealing with this subject matter and still growing, and we hope that NIWA will be able to further assist us in both the gathering of this information and, subsequently, in the growth of the site itself.

We do hope you will take us into consideration and we thank you for your time.

e: okay so as I somehow completely forgot to mention the server does have its occasional errors because the wiki has a memory cap in place to prevent the entire server from going down.

[Level 3]

I took a look, and ran into an error message while going to a Random Page, and while trying to access the Special Pages.
Most of the articles I saw were extremely short, but considering the subject matter, they don't look like they can get too much bigger. There needs to be some organization done there as well, but I don't see any major problems really, but you'll have to wait for one of the staff members to reply first.

[Yuzihax]

I took a look, and ran into an error message while going to a Random Page, and while trying to access the Special Pages.

as really, really bad as its going to sound i legitimately forgot to mention that, yes, there are occasional problems with the server, but nothing that really impedes browsing all that much as most of the time they're occasional but it does have its bad days (I did say it was going to sound bad but I honestly never meant to omit that .)

e: good god I'm having a load of memory problems today, but alongside that its notable that there are going to be fixes and all that stuff later on after the release of SMF 2.0 when wiki-forum integration and other things like that are going on, so we're not technically in the final stage of development.

[Koroku]

Ouch at the memory cap. Have you guys looked into cacheing options and stuff? Wikimon used to have a lot of problems too, and enabling [a rather annoying] cache has helped quite a bit.

[Torchickens]

Ouch at the memory cap. Have you guys looked into cacheing options and stuff? Wikimon used to have a lot of problems too, and enabling [a rather annoying] cache has helped quite a bit.

Originally we were a stand alone website with forums and information was contributed to our website via site administrators, so if server errors become extreme, the administrators could easily temporarily put the wiki offline and add newer information on to the old site. The main reason why we are having these server errors is because Glitch City Laboratories is not the only website hosted by Adrian Malacoda (our webmaster), he also has to host the old site (see below), Operation Time Capsule and his own personal website "The Morass". We have a memory cap to prevent the whole server from going down and all of the other sites consequently.

Our wiki project: "Project Phoenix" is not actually 100% complete (as Yuzihax rightfully stated, where we're currently awaiting the release of SMF 2.0 to solve some of our problems and eventually integrate the wiki with the forums). The old site dates back to 2006 yet we only actually officially made the wiki public as of March 28th 2010, there are still (a few) inconsistencies with the site itself. For example, the older site followed a format from webmaster Adrian Malacoda (formally Abwayax) for our GlitchDex (glitch Pokémon database) called 'Melchior'. Basically, the branches of our GlitchDex are put into the format: Game/index number (e.g. GlitchDex/RB:255) and an individual glitch Pokémon's page is put like this. http://img227.imageshack.us/img227/4050/samplec.png In order to import these pages on to our wiki in the correct Melchior format (not just text) Abwayax had to do it automatically via a MediaWiki extension, hence whilst the GlitchDex articles display correctly (with the exception of a small bug when accessing them via random pages/ redirects) , they are not easily editable and those pages are not in standard wiki format. The same applies to the ItemDex and AttackDex pages (not yet on the sidebar because they haven't been imported from the old site yet).


--Torchickens: GCL forums global moderator/'Staff', wiki Sysop.

[Adrian Malacoda]

Hi, I'm the owner of Glitch City Laboratories.

We are currently not ready for any sort of membership/affiliation - we're in the middle of a huge overhaul, and part of that deals with those memory errors. As such we discussed whether to approach NIWA now or until the renovations are complete. We decided that we'd simply check to see if our wiki was conceptually eligible for membership/affiliation assuming that those problems would be smoothed over.

Torchickens is right; we're migrating from a non-wiki site over to MediaWiki, and there are still things left to be brought over, bugs to be fixed, and style issues to be addressed. In the future the wiki and the forum will be completely merged together and there will be a new style. We're investigating caching and other ways to improve our codebase, but I suspect there are simply errors in how I'm using the MediaWiki API (the GlitchDex is a dynamically generated page through an extension, so I think the bottleneck is in there somewhere)

So this isn't really a formal request for any sort of connection with NIWA, as I look at it. But we're interested in seeking such a connection when all of the bugs have been smoothed over and the final phase of "Project Phoenix" (as we refer to it) is complete.

(Torchickens: the old site dates back to December 2005 actually the forums were opened in March 2006 tho)

(edit: I figured I should list some of the concerns I have regarding our eligibility. We're all really excited about the prospect, but I've been wondering specifically about these potential issues:

1 - we started out as a Pokemon website and are still primarily Pokemon, but we've since been starting to move into non-Pokemon territory. I'm concerned that a) we overlap significantly with Bulbapedia in this regard, and b) since we're moving more into general gaming glitches, we're no longer strictly a "Nintendo wiki".
2 - we are a wiki, but we have a feature called "flagged revisions" that allows us to have the capability to manually review edits before they make it onto the live website. We did this because, glitches being what they are, we wanted to be able to manually review every article that gets posted to make sure we can reproduce that glitch. I happen to like the idea, but people on Wikipedia have resisted flagged revisions because they feel it dilutes the "wiki way")

[tacopill]

The email was received, but before sending a response, our coordinator has been discussing with the staff what our response should be. Rest assured, we are working on it.

[Xizor]

We've been discussing this as a staff, and many of the same concerns brought up here were brought up in the staff discussions.

We noticed the errors, and realized that you were not directly asking for membership at the moment. In fact, the thread we were using only discusses potential. We agree that when your issues like the errors are resolved, you guys could be good members.

Also, we wanted to make you aware of a similar site to yours that focuses on Zelda: Zelda Chaos. Perhaps you might consider a merge with them, and they may consider the same thing if you approach them? You could help each other not only get the best database on glitches, but also possibly improved servers, etc. This could also ease issues of "overlap" with Bulbapedia.

I apologize for the delay in email response. The Coordinator position is rather new, and I'm still figuring out how I want to handle requests like that: do I reply with a "We'll talk about it, thanks for stopping by" or do I wait until we have a decision? I just wanted to assure that we have been talking about it since you emailed me. Thanks for coming here and taking initiative for yourselves, though. That's a good sign.

[Axiomist]

Well, it looks like we'll have to start responding with a canned message. "Thank you for your submission, this will be brought to the full staff's attention and discussed thoroughly and carefully. In most cases, this is a time consuming process, please be patient." or something.

Anyway, Adrian, Torchickens, and Yuzihax, we aren't saying yes or no at the moment. Conceptually, a glitch focused wiki would be a great inclusion to NIWA's portfolio of offerings. Currently NIWA has 9 franchise specific wikis, and more on the way. If you browse these threads a little, you would see that even bare bones wikis with extremely limited scopes are interested in joining our network. On one hand we're thrilled by this, but in the same breath, we're a little cautious to say 9 proposed glitch driven wikis applying for membership. Although, technically each would be eligible, eventually it would seem ridiculous; since we couldn't possibly bring all of them up to the quality levels of say Zelda Wiki.

As far as I know, no one from NIWA has spoken to Zelda Chaos. But it would be a good idea, since I'm sure Jay would like to work on a more active site. I would prefer something as strong as Strategy Wiki to be the NIWA glitch partner. There would be compromises on both ends, you've stated you are currently on an overloaded server and are having tech issues; Zelda Chaos is running fine, but there's only so many Zelda glitches, then that wiki will be all filled in. A merge could result in the best of both worlds, a broader coverage potential and likely more wiki activity, especially if it's on a server that can handle it.

[Tucayo]

^That

[KidIcarus]

I think it's better to have wikis that ARE NOT committed to a single franchise