[Enhancement]: Move away from GitHub pages and onto a real wiki

[jonbarrow]

Checked Existing

• I have checked the repository for duplicate issues.

What enhancement would you like to see?

GitHub pages has served us well for a long time, but has some glaring issues, such as:

1. We lose a lot of control as all the hosting is handled by GitHub
2. Since we lose control, we have more limited options for how to actually host the content. We have to either use an existing template (like we are now), or build one from scratch (which is kinda annoying and at that point we might as well just build it all from scratch)
3. None of the existing templates really fit our needs well imo. We've made do with the one we currently use, but it also has issues (such as https://nintendo-wiki.pretendo.network throwing a "404")

I propose we move away from GitHub pages and onto real wiki software, much like the other wikis in the scene (such as the brew wikis) are, and then use this repo as a place to sync/manage page changes (which is effectively already what we're doing, all we do in this repo is update pages). We really only have 2 options for this as far as I can tell:

• DokuWiki
• MediaWiki

DokuWiki

Pros

• Supports files for pages. This makes it pretty easy to sync with a repo (like this one) for changes

Cons

• Seems to be less mature/stable than MediaWiki
• Only officially supports Ubuntu 14/16. There's a page for Ubuntu 18 but it mentions being broken
  • You CAN get it working on newer versions, but it's not documented and it took me some fiddling
• Things like the default pathing is weird imo (it defaults to using doku.php with query params for document paths...?), and changing the settings can break installations (I broke a test install multiple times doing this)

MediaWiki

Pros

• Very mature
• Very familiar. Other wikis like the brew wikis use it

Cons

• Only supports real databases, not files, for pages. That means we cannot, by default, sync to a repo for changes
  • There are some extensions which may be able to help with this? Git-Mediawiki seems to be able to replicate this functionality, and OAuth2 Client says it can let uses login with GitHub on the wiki itself. Though I have not tested any of these extensions

Any other details to share? (OPTIONAL)

Moving to a real wiki was already discussed internally with @DaniElectra, so that's already green-lit. This issue mostly just serves as a place to discuss options

I also own the nintendo.wiki domain now. I think we should consider moving the wiki to this domain, and start a more general-purpose wiki, with the networking stuff (which is this wikis current aim) being a subsection of this larger wiki? I don't have the goal to replace existing resources like the brew wikis, but this more general-purpose wiki could still give some basic info and then link to the more detailed brew wikis when needed?

I think it's worth considering centralizing some information into a more general wiki, or at least acting as a hub to link to sources. One of the biggest issues I ran into when starting my side project canihomebrew is that information for the Xbox and PlayStation scenes is incredibly scattered, so I'd like to try and help prevent that from happening in our scene as well

I think that can work quite well, personally

[jonbarrow]

Going to tag @DaniElectra and @ZeroSkill1 for opinions since you both have contributed to both here and the brew wikis

[jonbarrow]

As of February 7th, at some point before 11pm EST (unsure of the exact time), https://wiiubrew.org has gone down with an nginx 503 error. This is far from the first time this has happened and to my knowledge there is no easy way to contact the maintainers of the wiki about these things. There doesn't seem to be any reason given for the outage (last time this happened they were upgrading) and no signs of when it'll be back online

I think this supports my proposal of making a larger wiki on the nintendo.wiki domain, and possibly mirroring the brew wikis, in case these issues keep happening in the future. Something like wiiubrew.nintendo.wiki which just acts as a rehosted mirror

Again, the aim is not to replace the brew wikis, but rather just have a mirror for when these times happen