UDWiki:Project Ragnarök
It sates itself on the life-blood
of fated men,
paints red the powers' homes
with crimson gore.
Black become the sun's beams
in the summers that follow,
weathers all treacherous.
Do you still seek to know? And what?
-Völuspá
What is Wiki Ragnarök
On February 19th, 2014, while international news agencies began reporting that Ragnarök was predicted to occur, UDWiki experienced some data corruption following some maintenance downtime. At first, it appeared that merely a few pages were effected by the corruption. UDWiki denizen Aichon was the first to notice the problem:
| Aichon said: |
| The wiki was down a few hours yesterday for maintenance, and following that, it appears that some of the data may have been corrupted ever-so-slightly. For instance, every single em dash ("—") I've seen has been replaced with "—", including in the history of the pages. It's a simple matter of fixing it, and I've already replaced a few templates where em dashes appear, but we'll likely need to be on the lookout for more stuff that has changed. |
Soon, the true depth of Wiki Ragnarök began to take shape. Much of the plain text found throughout the wiki had been replaced with strange glyphs.
| Vapor said: |
| Looks like additional characters were added all over the place. Hundreds, probably thousands, of broken links. Its proper fucked. Look at Sexual Harrison's user page, The Fortress Recruit ad, and any page that has Yonnua Kopponen's signature for just a few hundred examples. |
| A Helpful Little Gnome said: |
| My games are an inconsistent mess. Sigh. |
And work to manually correct the known issues began:
| Aichon said: |
Looks like that's because "‎" is inserting itself into seemingly random places where previously there was either a space or no text at all. I actually first saw the issue because my signature was screwed up. Anyway, I'm just correcting the issues as I see them...
|
| A Helpful Little Gnome said: |
| A long time ago in a wiki far, far away... there once was this thing (╯°□°)╯ ┻━┻ |
These brave few wiki veterans banded together to try to determine the true scope of the decimation, and to formulate a plan to piece the wiki back together. And thus, it was foretold that a codex shall be formed, and more soldiers would be summoned, and prayers to the Old Gods would be made. This is that Codex. You are that soldier. This is Project Ragnarök!
Are these the end times?
One can only speculate. The sheer amount of work involved with manually correcting the issues will necessitate years of dedication. With a waning wiki population, the task is much too daunting a mere few mortals to overcome. The groundwork has been laid, some resources are in place, but the wiki needs many more contributors working together to vanquish the corruption. That is where you, and this project page, come in.
Volunteering
You don't need to sign up to be a contributing member to this project, but it would be best to familiarize yourself with the problem and how we're going about fixing it. You'll find some helpful resources below, and can see what others are doing. Then just jump right in and start reversing the damage.
Project Status
- Create Project Page - Done!
- Discuss Issue - Ongoing
- Identify Source of Problem - Ongoing
- Notify Kevan - Not Done
- Identify Specific Issues - Ongoing
- Manually Correct Issues - Ongoing
Discussion
Use this project's talk page for discussion purposes. See also, the previous discussion here.
Problem Source
A few theories have been put forward as to the cause of the problem. The most likely explanation came from Aichon:
| Aichon said: |
| My guess is that it wasn't an update, so much as merely a transfer of the db data from one server to another as he switched hosts. Hence the corruption issues in encoding. |
Another suggestion was that this was caused by an update to some part of the wiki's software, but as Wez points out, this seems unlikely:
| Wez said: |
| We can see that the Apache, Wiki, PHP and MySQL versions are out of date, so I am not sure if this was update related. I mean why would they have updated to an old stable version? |
Kevan will likely have an idea about the source of the issue once he is notified of it.
Notifying Kevan
Once we notify Kevan of the issue, we hope he will know of a solution which does not include manual adjustment of all of these pages. We'll post his response here once we get it.
Specifics
These are specific characters that have been identified as having become corrupt. This list may be added to as new characters are identified
- Ã in place of Ä?
- ä in place of ä
- é in place of é
- ê in place of ê
- ñ in place of ñ
- ˆž in place of ∞
- „ in place of Ä?
- ‎ in place of an invisible character that was there before?
- – in place of <unknown> (– maybe?)
- — in place of —
- … in place of …
- ’ in place of ’ (note: smart apostrophe, not to be confused with ')
- “ in place of “ (note: smart quotation mark, not to be confused with ")
- †in place of ” (note: smart quotation mark, not to be confused with ")
- • in place of •
- ╯ in place of <unknown>
- ☠in place of <unknown>
- ☺ in place of ☺
- â–¡ in place of □
- â–§ in place of ▧
- â–ˆ in place of ▋
- â— in place of ●
- â—† in place of ◆
- ♪ in place of <unknown>
- ♥ in place of ❤
- ➤ in place of ➤
- ↵ in place of ↵
- ╯ in place of ╯
- â” in place of ━
- â”» in place of ┻
- â„‚ in place of ℂ
- â“‚ in place of Ⓜ
- ✳ in place of ✳
- Ç in place of ǝ
- É in place of ɐ
- ɯ in place of ɯ
- É¥ in place of ɥ
- Ê in place of ʍ
- ʇ in place of ʇ
- ÊŽ in place of ʎ
- χ in place of Χ
- Ω in place of Ω
- Â getting inserted before a load of characters, including º, ·, ±, §, ¡, ¿, ¶, ¼, ¾, £, ¥, ¹, ², ³, ½, ¤, ¢
This list might come in handy, although it unfortunately doesn't cover every special character.
Solutions
It is hoped that this can be corrected by Kevan and that will be the end of Ragnarok and we can go on living our wiki lives like this never happened. Otherswise, it has been suggested that these issues can be corrected via bot software. This option will be discussed more in depth. The last option is that all pages will need to be manually corrected over time. The sections below are to be used to list specific problems in the normal manual correction process.
List of pages needing work
Feel free to add or strike out items on this list:
- The unlinkable/unreachable "◆◆◆" page needs to be moved back to ◆◆◆
- Fixing bad links to ˆž with links to ∞
- Subst'd sigs for:
- boxy
- Yonn
- Thantologist (he has multiple sigs)
- Templated sigs for:
- User pages
- Group Pages
- Dr. schwan’s Research and Development Team
- There are several subpages as well
- Quite a lot of text in all of these pages was altered
- Les Anus Enflammés
- Dr. schwan’s Research and Development Team
Useful searches for finding pages needing work:
- This, this, this, this, and this for finding messed up Yonn sigs
- ¯\(°_o)/¯ should be replaced with ¯\(°_o)/¯
- —The should be replaced with –The
- Piñata should be replaced with Piñata
- ×מת should be replaced with אמת
Sysop Action Required
If you encounter a problem that requires specific sysop action, such as page movement or editing of protect pages, post a request here. This section should only be used for problems specific to corrupted text. All other requests should go through normal channels.
