Forum:How to incorporate "All Pages" page of another wiki?

Hello!

I am looking for a way to incorporate the „All Pages“ page of another wiki into a wiki. Is this at all possible? The reason why I would like to do it is: D&D Wiki covers the parent topic of Forgotten Realms Wiki, Spelljammer Wiki, etc.. Therefore I would like to find any article from Forgotten Realms Wiki when I was searching in D&D Wiki, without having to copy all articles from one wiki into the other. Thanks for any replys! Daranios 15:49, 9 January 2009 (UTC)


 * I can think of two ways that might work (although I don't know how to do either):
 * Done manually, maybe you could make a pair of dummy namespaces for Forgotten Realms Wiki and Spelljammer Wiki and then make a D&D Wiki page called something like 'Spelljammer_Wiki:Krynnspace' that either redirects over to the Spelljammer Wiki 'Krynnspace' page, or has some sort of include template that imports the text from the SJ wiki into your wiki. However, while this would be faster than the work done at the other wiki's it would still involve a lot of work and pages might get missed. (I suppose you would need to reguarly check the pages in both namespaces against the pages of FR Wiki and SJ Wiki and any other wiki's you wanted to link to.)
 * Done automatically, you would need help from the Wikia team. I wonder if they could reconfigure the new Shared Help feature, to allow you to use Forgotten Realms Wiki and Spelljammer Wiki as if they were shared help pages.
 * Have you thought about how you are going to deal with non-Wikia resources yet? There is a fantastic Greyhawk wiki on Canonfire! (while Wikia has its own Greyhawk wiki that was one page, last time I looked). And for Dragonlance information, Dragonlance Lexicon (hosted at Dragonlance Nexus) currently beats the Dragonlance Wiki at Wikia for content. Ultimately, I wonder if it might be better for D&D Wiki to make short summary length articles for everything that is altered in various campaign settings and then provide a list of external links to external sources that deal with the subject in further details. I think that would allow you to create something like an article that described every elven subrace in every published D&D setting, but then point people to various other sources for more than a brief description (or for the generic elves handle this in-house).
 * By the way, I'm the Administrator over at Spelljammer Wiki and if Wikia staff updating D&D Wiki mod needs to take my wiki offline for a while (to dynamically add content to D&D Wiki) I'll be happy to put up with any delay. (Just as long as I don't get any more merger suggestions. I had that proposal before, from someone who thought a multi-setting D&D wiki would attract more editiors. But if the SJ Wiki is ever dumpmerged into your wiki, I'll be moving somewhere else.) But as long as you are just talking of a widget and the other wikis will remain independent, I'd be very happy to see the work done. So please let me know how you get on with this interesting idea. I am also one of the moderators in the Spelljmmer forum at The Piazza If you want help finding experts on obscure D&D campaign settings, please feel free to pop over to The Piazza, find the appropriate forum and then ask for help. I'm not sure you will attrace dozens of wiki-editors at The Piazza, but if you want to know specific facts about an obsure elf found in The Hollow World, I think you will find plenty of people who can dig out the facts for you or point you to web pages that you can use for research.David Shepheard 19:53, 16 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks a lot! I think I will try out some copy-paste-idea that I have, and if that does not work out fine, I will try to contact the right people as soon as I can find the time :-). I will have to talk about any major changes with the people form D&D Wiki anyway, I am still a relative new-comer there. Daranios 19:07, 18 January 2009 (UTC)

As an alternative, have you considered adding Google search buttons for various other D&D sources?
I've got another idea that you might want to consider (either if Wikia can't help you) or if you want to add another way for your wiki users to find information.

You may have seen other pages that have Google buttons to "Search this site", but may not realise that you can actually create a button (to put onto your own webpages) to get Google to search any other website.

So maybe you could create a D&D website category within your wiki and write articles that describe what sort of information people can find on other websites. If you had pages for these things, you could perhaps add HTML form text to put a search box onto every page. (Or if Wikia have restricted this as a staff member to add it for you.)

That won't help you with things like Dragonlance Lexicon, that isn't on its own subdomain (Google only searches sites on a domain basis), but the Lexicon has its own internal search engine and if you spoke to the staff at Dragonlance Nexus, they may well help you to create a button that links into their search routine.

If you created a set of pages like that, you could probably quicky turn D&D Wiki into a portal for research onto the content of other D&D websites (especially if you add information for the official sites like Beyond the Moons and other useful websites like The Hypertext d20 SRD).David Shepheard 20:31, 16 January 2009 (UTC)