User:Aryllia



Hello there!

I'm Aryllia. Well, not really. I mean, on the internet I'm Aryllia. Mostly because that name (usually) isn't taken on a site before I get there. My parents did not name me Aryllia. I have an irrational hatered of facebook for mixing my offline and online life and thus making me use my real name online. By now you have probably deduced a few things about my mind and I'm almost willing to bet that they aren't favourable to me. That's OK, I don't mind as long as you're nice about it.

I am the proud instigator of three wikis, the first created in 2011. Since then I have learned a lot about how wikis work and I've had heaps of fun. Ironically, despite the long term activity I've always been the only active member on my wikis. Such is my life. Not that I mind that either, at least I don't have to worry about vandalism ;)

The first wiki I created was Bibliotheca Erifort, which is a kind of knowledge hub for my own fictional... mess. Self-centred to heck and back, but by Coffee! I don't know what I would have done without that wiki. When it comes to organising 500+ articles on characters, settings, plots and de facto stories - nothing beats a wiki. What inspired me to create it was actually the Harry Potter Wiki. When I wrote Harry Potter fanfiction I used that particular wiki extensively to do what I previously had done with hundreds of bookmarks and margin vandalism. Then I wished I could double-check obscure facts from my own writings just as easily and one thing led to another.

The second wiki was my first voyage into a more fact and reality based wiki, as well as my first wiki in Swedish. Retorik Wiki (Rhetoric Wiki) is currently abandoned and truth be told I never got much further than copying wiki articles before I gave up on that venture.

Now that I'm studying to become a biogas technician I realized that while there are some very informative introduction sites on the matter, it's increasingly difficult to find more advanced information. More importantly, there was no wiki to tie the available information together. So I created Biogas Wiki, another venture in making something in Swedish online. This time I feel more motivated for the project and I'm slightly more prepared to face the difficulties of writing a non-Enlish wiki

Difficulties with writing a non-English wiki?
Oh yes, there are difficulties. Perhaps most notrably the templates. Did you know that templates are called Mallar in Swedish namespaces? I didn't. From Erifort I had gotten the habit of importing my templates from the brilliant Templates Wiki, but these are exclusively in English and I had quite some issues with English text appearing anywhere a template was used. Now I'm gradually replacing these with templates from the Swedish Wikipedia.

Overall, most of anything transferred from one community to another (that is to say, all kinds of meta pages) pose a bit of trouble, since typically everything transferred is in English. This is due to there being so incredibly many people who speak English and relatively so very few who speak, for example, Swedish. Things have to be translated. Expect to have to translate it yourself because if there is wiki information in whatever online minority language you speak (anything that isn't English, German, France, Spanish or Chinese), chances is that it will be poorly translated by google translate, outdated and abandoned at least five years ago unless you're looking at Wikipedia itself.

Heck, my Community Portal is still named Community Portal where it should be Medlemmsportal, and is mostly untranslated. I have heaps of templates where there should be mallar and I had to run crying (not really) to the Community Central Wiki just to find out how to make the Wikipedia template link to the Swedish Wikipedia instead of the default English Wikipedia.

So in conclusion, if you want to create a wiki in any other language: make sure you are a master of English first.

My favourite pages Wiki-enhancing wikis

 * Community Central, duh.
 * Wikia Templates If you want templates in English/is desperate enough for templates that you'll accept English, then this is the best place to find templates. It's a treasure trove of all kinds of useful stuff. There's also a lot of useful meta-stuff on templates.
 * Wikia Developers Wiki, I don't understand half the stuff I find on this wiki, but I'm damn grateful it's open source so I can take it with me to my own wikis.

Things I still hate about the new Visual Editor

 * 1) Making links is fucked to hell and back, if you pardon my language. Instead of two lines (link and displayed text respectively) I only get the link line unless I switch to wikitext. Nothing wrong with going to the source and writing in wikitext but I shouldn't have to do that for a fucking link. Especially when I have to save and edit in the old visual editor to switch to source.