Wikia downloading the wiki

One of the prime reasons that I decided to go with Wikia is that it promised portability. Here are the links to what I know about how to download the wiki. Apparently the photos are not necessarily downloadable, but can be done in a separate step. If I had to take it down and put it up again somewhere else, I could probably do what I needed to do with sed and other linux tools.

Here's how to do the download. It uses one of the "special pages". The first download had to be "requested", which apparently involves manual approval by an admin then I got the link and it seemed to work. Will the download links get updated weekly as promised? I haven't tried yet to find out.

http://community.wikia.com/wiki/Help:Database_download

Here is a page about downloading everything, supposedly including the pictures. I haven't tried it yet though:

http://how-to.wikia.com/wiki/How_to_download_all_image_files_in_a_Wikimedia_Commons_page_or_directory

Now, what is missing from these download options is an upload option using the same file. Maybe this exists, I don't know.

Wikia administrative tools

I haven't had a chance to try out all the links on this page, but many of them look like they would be incredibly valuable in maintaining the links in Vygisstories:

http://community.wikia.com/wiki/Help:Special_pages

However, after a couple of false starts I have tried out special page "Multiple Uploads" which seems to work but each photo of course still needs to be individually captioned:

http://community.wikia.com/wiki/Help:Multiple_uploads

Wikia making a gallery

Like everything else in Wikia, it seems nighmarishly labor intensive:

http://community.wikia.com/wiki/Help:Galleries,_Slideshows,_and_Sliders

This is the closest that I was able to get to finding some way to upload albums for a wiki (it doesn't seem like it is possible). Also, you'd think that since Wikia can pull photos from flickr, that it would be natural to make albums in flickr and pull or imbed from there, but flickr is an unusable mess, and the only way to link pictures from it in Wikia seems to be an almost completely useless search tool.

Here is the guide to uploading photos that does *not* mention flickr, and still manages to give a sense of how pointlessly constrained photo uploading is in Wikia:

http://community.wikia.com/wiki/Help:Import_free_images

Wikia how to indent text

It's so simple, yet so hard to find in Wikia's documentation.

When editing markup directly, to indent one level, start the line with ":". To indent an additional level, use two colons. The number of colons indicated produces the desired indentation level.

This page spells it out as if to a 5-year old:

http://wikimarkup.wikia.com/wiki/Text_Indent

How to make a bullet list in Wikia

It's so simple, yet so hard to find in Wikia's documentation.

When editing markup directly, to add a Bullet, start a line with "*". To add a bullet with additional indention, use two stars. The number of stars indicated produces the desired indentation level. I don't think that there is any control over what bullet marks are used.

This page spells it out as if to a 5-year old. This also covers numbered lists:

http://wikimarkup.wikia.com/wiki/Bullets_and_Lists

Making Wikia work for me

My goal: Set up a Wikia wiki for my Vygis Stories museum.

The museum will consist of stories, and photos of objects and people.

I want to use tagging to create pages that group the contents of the wiki several different ways and have Table Of Contents pages that show those groupings.

Blogger has tags, but apparently a 127 tag limit (need to re-find the reference for this). My memory blog has a long tag list and it's easy to click on a tag link and see all entries with that tag, so for that blog I'm pretty satisfied.

In Wikia, they don't have tags, but have something called categories.

I want to have a hierarchy of categories: Top level categories, the following list:

Stories
Traditions
Themes
Things
Year
Date
People
Places
Nicknames
Author

In Wikia, when you add a category to a page that you've made, the category seems to have its own page too. So if I add a category named "Oldsmobile", there must be a page named "Oldsmobile". That "Oldsmobile" page can have a category "Things". At this point, the "Things" page will show "Oldsmobile" as a subcategory.

I would like categories like "Oldsmobile" to contain the name of the top-level category as well, like "Things: Oldsmobile" which would rigidly enforce the relationship of top and bottom categories at the bottom level, and make the meaning of the categories attached to a story clearer. The downside of this is that it breaks the lovely category alphabetization that seems to be built in to the listing of subcategories.

I guess what will happen is that all subcategories, particularly things, will be entered directly. The top level category being added to the bottom of the subcategory page will immediately get them added to the top level. These can all be then referenced in stories.

An issue seems to be that all things have stories attached. Should the stories be separate from the thing or be part of the thing's page? There are hundreds of Oldsmobile stories, which is an example of it being better to have the stories be separate. The Red Green Show DVD has only one story, and it seems ungainly to have to go to the Red Green DVD's thing page to get to the story.