A user suggested that the Coasterpedia and Tilt-A-Wiki sites be merged into one. After giving it some thought, here's why I think it could be better:
- No duplication of amusement park pages
- One user and talk page, one sign in and one notification stream (I haven't worked out how to enable cross-wiki notifications)
- One set of help pages
- Quicker to hop between coasters and flat rides, having one wiki will hopefully bring more traffic to the flat ride pages
- Easier for me to maintain (especially if Coasterpedia is created in other languages in the future, a long term ambition of mine)
How it would work
I will try and explain now how this would work, if I go ahead with this idea. I had hoped that I could keep both the coasterpedia.net and tiltawiki.net names, with the flat ride articles coming under the tiltawiki.net name. Following some research yesterday, it's a non-starter. So Tilt-A-Wiki content will be imported into the Coasterpedia site. This means that:
- Everything will be under the coasterpedia.net domain name. I did think about a new name that combines both coasters and flat rides, but Coasterpedia is already a bit unwieldy so I don't want to confuse matters further
- The tiltawiki.net name will continue to exist at least for now, and it will redirect to coasterpedia.net
- I'm thinking the Tilt-A-Wiki red colour will be ditched, except for the Tilt-A-Wiki logo, and the whole site will be Coasterpedia green
- The site will be called "Coasterpedia and Tilt-A-Wiki", but Coasterpedia for short. Tagline could be "the attractions wiki" or something like that
- As user accounts and preferences are already shared across both sites, there will be no change there
The goal would be to keep a distinction between coasters and flat rides.
- The flat ride lists from Tilt-A-Wiki amusement park pages will be added underneath the current roller coaster listings
- Similar situation for year articles, but as these pages tend to get very long, new flat ride year articles will be created. Roller coaster year articles will be renamed "Coasters in 2020" or similar
- There are currently sperate categories for roller coasters, powered coasters and alpine coasters (even though there's only a handful of alpine coasters listed at the moment). This structure would be maintained, but an additional "Flat rides" (or just "Rides"?) category would be added
Timescale
There isn't a set plan. I'm hoping that MediaWiki 1.33 will be released soonish, as would be good to upgrade and merge the site in one go. Just depends on any feedback I get back.
Discussion
Leave any feedback, concerns, suggestions below. 👇
Names
My name idea is "Coasterpedia; Tracks & Flats" or just "Tracks & Flats" to demonstrate the combined nature. That name also reflects the inclusion of roller coasters, tracked rides, and flat rides all in one name.
- Thanks for the suggestion! I think though that most people won't konw what a "Flat" is, whereas at least "flat ride" has the word "ride" in it. I could try it for the tagline though, but it sounds a bit weird to me if I'm being honest. I definetly want to keep the "Coasterpedia" name around though as that's what we've had the past ten (!!) years. Lachlan (Talk | contribs) (an admin) 13:14, 29 June 2019 (UTC)
Questions
First of all, I didn't know you had created your own Tilt-A-Wiki. It's not a bad idea, but I'm not sold on it.
Questions:
- Are you the site owner of both?
- Will it save costs to merge them?
- Can you keep the tiltawiki.net URL, even as a redirect?
MontagnaMagica (talk) 06:38, 29 June 2019 (UTC)
- Hello, yeah I created it after speaking to Jason foulkes who is a lot more passionate about flat rides than I am :D Yeah right now both are paid for and hosted by me on the same shared server. It won't save any costs unless I don't renew the tiltawiki.net name. I'm definetly keeping it, as it stands it would just redirect to coasterpedia.net. I want to make sure there's still some seperation between coasters and other rides, as I think a lot of people care more about the coasters. Lachlan (Talk | contribs) (an admin) 13:15, 29 June 2019 (UTC)
Any further comments on this? Seems that most people are either in favour or indifferent, but I'll hold off for the time being in case there's any more thoughts! Lachlan (Talk | contribs) (an admin) 11:30, 5 July 2019 (UTC)
Update (14 August 2019)
Both Tilt-A-Wiki and Coasterpedia are now on MediaWiki 1.33. Before the sites merge, some changes must take place to ensure the content from Tilt-A-Wiki fits with the content from Coasterpedia:
- Rides from Tilt-A-Wiki will be added, and for lack of a better term, we can use "Rides" in place of "Roller coaster", "Alpine coaster" etc in the category structure. Can use "Attractions" to catch coasters and rides together into one category.
- Manufacturer categories will have to change. Could maybe use "Roller coasters manufactured by Arrow Dynamics" for example, though many coasters aren't actually "manufactured" by the listed manufacturer. Maybe this doesn't matter though? Or should we use something less specific, like "Roller coasters from Arrow Dynamics"?
- Amusement park content from Tilt-A-Wiki will just be copied on to the amusement park pages on Coasterpedia
Lachlan (Talk | contribs) (an admin) 12:25, 14 August 2019 (UTC)