Why Wiki
From AdamWiki
Beginnings
At the end of 2004, I converted my existing HTML web pages over to a wiki. I was spending too much time messing around with HTML and formatting and not enough time updating the content. Any update to the site required me to create a new page and all the templating and whatnot took me much longer than I liked. The site wasn't really searchable except by Google. I couldn't add a quick note to the site during my lunch break at work because I didn't have SSH access to my host. There wasn't a way for other people to add comments or discuss anything on the pages.
When I discovered Wikipedia, I was amazed — not by the content but by the format. I'd seen wikis before but really hadn't contemplated how useful they could be. I imagined how I could use them for my own uses and soon thereafter created a wiki for my fantasy setting project, A Thousand Towers. It wasn't long till I decided to transfer the content from all of my regular home pages into a new wiki. It took me a few hours to move the content over, not including images.
Some of the content isn't as pretty. For example, some of the gaming stuff I did had fancy layouts and stuff and now it's been shoehorned into monobook skin layout or whatever skin you use to read my site. In the end, it's the content that matters.
So now I have a wiki home page. Feel free to edit stuff. Feel welcome to write on the discussion pages. Feel welcome to write new pages. If there's anything I don't like, I can always change it or revert it to the old version. Wiki's nice that way.
Troubles
Spammers have been a constant problem and they've recently gotten much worse. Typically, spammers create bogus accounts on a wiki and then edit pages (often Talk pages and other out-of-the way pages) and replace them with a billion hyperlinks to other sites. Why? Because they want to fool Google and other search engines into believing that their site is legitimate and link-worthy. They believe that the more links there are to their pages, the higher their Google rating will be. I'm pretty sure this is a myth these days, because the guys and gals at Google are very smart. Nonetheless, I end up with pages and pages of craptastic pharma links.
I installed a mediawiki extension called Bad Behavior a while ago. It monitors page edits and stops suspicious changes. It stopped working for me a while ago and I disabled it.
Recently, I installed ReCaptcha, one of those systems that makes you type in some mangled letters and numbers to prove you're a human being. It only bugs you when you register or mistype your password. Once you're logged in, it should leave you alone. This should drop my spammer occurrences to zero. Yay!
Upgraded, finally
I just (September 2007) upgraded the wiki software. I'd run on 1.3 since I started and never upgraded. I'm sure my installation had hundreds of bugs and security vulnerabilities. Upgrading was a real pain in the ass, though, as I had to upgrade one major version at a time, skipping only a couple. I went from 1.3 to 1.5.8 to 1.6.9 to 1.7.3 to 1.9.1 to 1.9.3 to 1.11.0. That's a lot of upgrading. Worse, I had to run backups between each upgrade; that way, if something broke, I could restore to the last working upgrade and not have to start from scratch. I restored about six times. But now I am current.
