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NSC Wiki

Fearnavigatr

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2022-12-28:

The Wiki is back!


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nscwiki.com
or https://nationsongcontest.miraheze.org/

This is our very own Wiki database, hosted by the kind people at Miraheze.
The purpose of the NSC Wiki is to provide a resource of the Nation Song Contest, the history of all previous entries in all previous editions, all the participating nations past and present and a wealth of other information. It is also an area for participants to flesh out the lore and details about their fictional nations.

Being a Wiki, the database relies on user-generated content. That means it's up to all of you to keep the content correct and up to date. Anyone can edit the Wiki, and we rely on this community effort to make sure the whole thing works. There's always a lot of pages in need of renovation or even creation, so if you feel up to the task, grab your keyboard and get to work!

I am the administrator (but likewise a regular contributor) of this Wiki, so feel free to contact me with any questions or suggestions.

Some general guidelines when editing the Wiki
*In short
Don't spam, make sensible edits and respect other contestants!

*Editing contest pages
The most important part of the Wiki is the general pages detailing all the contest history and other such information with huge importance to the community, the best example would be any of the articles about individual editions of the contest. These are of interest to everyone, and they're for anyone to contribute to.
When editing a contest-related article, make sure you try to follow the styles established in previous articles, such as the position and contents of templates, the layout of tables and styles of writing. Correct spelling and grammar is essential, but stylistic variations in names, including nations, artists and song titles, should be followed (example: artists with odd capitalizations, such as iiO or HammerFall). As a rule of thumb, everything should be written only with the Latin alphabet, but try to make sure to include all the correct accents in non-English names and titles (such as Rinôçérôse or Björk). Use the assets available to figure out proper spellings, styles and accents if you're uncertain.
If you don't know the proper way to include an addition with your edit, check around, see if there's anything like it to compare to, or simply ask. Don't be disheartened if someone comes along to correct your edit or gives you pointers for future editing. The Wiki is and will always be a community effort, and your contributions are always appreciated.

*Editing nation pages
As a participant in the contest and the owner of a nation, you are free to create a page about your nation and fill it with various information such as language, culture, history, NSC history or anything else that fits your liking. You are also free to create an unlimited amount of individual pages about your nation's various cities, provinces, celebrities or any such items. While it's recommended to keep the pages well formatted, the content is entirely up to you, and the only requirement is that you categorize the pages within your nation's category and don't give the articles confusing names that can be easily mistaken as related to something else.
Generally, you should not edit articles belonging to someone else's nation without their permission. However, you should accept that nation articles do get occasional outside edits, usually moderation to fix categories or names, but also to clean up things like sloppy formatting or rule breaches such as spam content.
Try to be respectful with content that you add to your nation's pages. Personal attacks are naturally not tolerated, but also check that things like your nation's fictional history doesn't contradict with someone else's history or control details of someone else's nation in a way they don't approve of. Especially if your nation has a location on the map that was previously occupied by a now defunct nation, it's good courtesy to acknowledge that previous nation's existance.
Articles about NSC artists are on the borderland between contest-related and nation-related. If you are the sole sender of a particular artist, feel free to claim the page as your own to make most of the edits, but if the same artist has been sent by another nation in a different edition (or several), it's important that you try to compromise.

*Editing The Dictionary
The NSC Dictionary is perhaps the most popular and topical article on the whole NSC Wiki, and is in much a category of its own. It is one of few articles based entirely around the community aspect of the contest rather than role-playing or the contest aspect itself, and features more or less helpful descriptions of various in-jokes and jargons created by the community, most notably in the group conversations commonly taking place on Windows Live Messenger (MSN). The whole page exists mostly just for fun, and should not be taken seriously or looked at as a credible source of information. While many of the dictionary definitions properly describe the entries to make them more understandable for outsiders, a lot of the content is still mostly added as in-jokes or silly memes without the intention of being helpful. You are free to add your own words and definitions, but try to keep the relevance at a good level, don't go adding dozens of random crazy jokes that only you will understand.
Most importantly, be respectful! Since we're all in a community, things like hostilities or back talks can often arise, and the Dictionary is the most vulnerable place on the Wiki to contain personal attacks. Any dictionary entry making reference to a person in NSC must be approved by the person being referenced him/herself. An entry making jokes at the expense of another person or any other kind of harm, whether intentional or not, will be immediately removed, and action may be taken against the author. If you find yourself being unjustly attacked by another NSC member in the Dictionary (or anywhere else for that matter, both in or out of the Wiki), do not hesitate to report this to an NSC mod.

FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions
Unless otherwise noted, the answers in this FAQ are written for the regular source code editor rather than the graphically based Rich Text editor. To turn off Rich Text as your default editor, while logged in go to the "MORE" list in the top right corner and click "Preferences". Choose the tab called "Editing" and uncheck the "Enable Rich Text Editing" option.

*How do I edit an article?
Press "Edit this page", write your text in the big white box and press "Save page".

That's pretty much the whole gist of it. A lot of people who don't take their time to edit the Wiki unfortunately do so because they don't understand how the Wiki works and think it's more advanced than it actually is. It doesn't have to be hard! Just write your text, and if you need to do something fancy with it, such as bold or italics, take a look at the interface buttons and see if the function is there. It's okay if you don't know how to make tables, templates or stuff like that, do what you can and let other people handle the rest! If you want to learn the more advanced stuff, you can ask for help or take a look at Wikipedia's help contents.

*What's up with [any outdated article]?
No one has updated it, simple as that. As unfortunate as it is to see pages left untouched for years, we can't force people to stick around and devote their free time to keep the whole Wiki up to date. If you want to see it fixed, perhaps you could have a go at updating it yourself? Otherwise, if you ask around there may be a kind soul willing to take their time with it, but don't rely too much on everyone else to keep up the Wiki maintenance for you. We're all just human, and we all often have more important things to do.

*How do I upload pictures and add them to articles?
In the default layout, there should be a link in the menu to the left called "Upload file". After browsing for the file in your computer and uploading it, you will get a file name that is basically the page name when looking at the picture (example). When adding the image to an article, you'll want that page name, but with the namespace Image: rather than File:. Add it like you would a link to a different article, within two brackets. The file name is case sensitive, and it's important that it is written exactly like it was after you uploaded it.
Code:
[[Image:Arjastan.png]]
To give a picture a caption, you make it into a thumbnail. Add a line break (|) in the code after the file name and write "thumb" after it, add another line break and write the caption after it.
Code:
[[Image:Arjastan.png|thumb|Flag logo of Arjastan]]
gives
arjfaq.png

Our Wiki uses the same code as regular Wikipedia, so for more formatting options, you can use their help page for reference:
Wikipedia Picture Tutorial

*Where'd the cheese go?
I dunno.

*Can my waiting list nation have its own article(s)?
Sure, we've usually allowed this, albeit informally. Just keep in mind that the Wiki overall is focused on NSC, and WLSC is considered an independent side-event unrelated to "NSC canon".
 
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Brandt

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December 27, 2014
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3,203
I actually thought of making a suggestion of moving our wiki to miraheze. To me, previous interface was just as hideous to my taste. Miraheze, in the other hand, is very user-friendly and has a great interface, akin to Wikipedia. But I thought no one would be into it given that we have about 200 editions to cover and prepare templates from the scratch. Although if we were to do it, I'd be happy to help since I organize two other wikis there.
 

Kimrt

Well-known member
Joined
May 11, 2011
Posts
2,116
Miraheze is amazing tbh
The isc wiki looks pretty like regular Wikipedia, not sure if it's Miraheze or something else.
It's really easy to update and so ^^
 

Fearnavigatr

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Arvidsjaur, Sweden
I have started the process of requesting a wiki on Miraheze and preparing an XML for transfer from Wikia/Fandom. I'll get back to you all shortly. If you make any edits on the Fandom now, they may risk not being included in the transfer.

If anyone opposes this transfer, speak now or forever hold your peace.
 
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Fearnavigatr

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Okay, ran into some issues with Miraheze. I'll try to get them resolved, in the meantime you can resume your editing and I'll simply transfer a later dump when it's possible.
 

Fearnavigatr

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I'm sure you're all wondering what's going on, so here's an update.

The Miraheze wiki is created and ready, but naturally we'll want to get as much as possible of the old wiki transfered before we start using it. The pages and all the text is no problem, but the thousands of images have proven a bit more complicated. There are some third party methods to do it automatically, but it hasn't worked so far.

If anyone with some skills and know-how is able to get this running, please let me know!

I'll try for a little while more, and if it doesn't work I'll start coordinating an effort to gather all images manually. One way or another I intend to have the new wiki ready by early October.
 

Fearnavigatr

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Here we are, our brand new Wiki is ready to go! Please update your bookmarks!

https://nationsongcontest.miraheze.org/
(I tried to make it "nsc" instead of "nationsongcontest", but some old deleted wiki blocked that unfortunately.)

Most things seem to have translated well in the transfer, but as expected there will be some kinks to work out (most of them related to file names and extensions being case sensitive), and there's always a lot of clean-up to do, including things remaining from the old Wiki. If you come across any broken images or anything else that might need attention, don't hesitate to let me know!

Things like the logo is subject to change, we'll look at that in due time, but otherwise we're all set for you to start editing! Before you do that, it's highly recommended that you create an account and make your edits while logged in.

The old Wiki is still around for archival and back-up purposes, but to avoid conflicting and/or missing information, please leave it for dead and don't make any new edits. I'll be patrolling it for a while and try to inform people who may have missed the memo.

 
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Uto

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April 20, 2015
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A Bridge Too Far
I clicked around a bit, saw some stuff that broken, saw way more stuff that survived without any issues. Think we can chalk it up as a success.
 
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Edweis

WorldVision Mod
Staff member
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February 10, 2019
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chocolatine in savouè
I appreciated the colorful template of wikia however Miraheze seems easier to manipulate without long time loads.
We just have to edit all the </image> <label>/label> that were used for the summary template on wikia and we're all good.
Thanks for the work
 

Fearnavigatr

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Arvidsjaur, Sweden
So Miraheze had some serious issues going on with the actual physical server being fried and backups failing.
We currently have two options available:

-We can wait and see if they manage to recover all the data from the server. There is no ETA whatsoever for when this might happen, and they estimate there's only a 50/50 shot of it actually succeeding.

-I can request to have the wiki recreated using a backup from June 25 (mid-NSC 206). This means there'll be a rollback on all edits from the past few months, and things will have to be remade, such as the articles of the last few editions. But this does mean we can get the wiki back sooner.

And yes, there's a risk we'll wait a long time for option 1 to fail and be stuck with option 2 anyway.

I don't want to make this decision on my own, please let me know what course of action you would prefer.
 
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Rmetr0

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August 5, 2018
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Maybe I'd wait until the end of NSC 211, and if nothing is recovered by then, then I'd go for the option 2 🤔
 

berlyda

NSC Mod
Staff member
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September 28, 2009
Posts
4,641
Location
Halito
This is very unfortunate news. I say we use the June 25 backup. Losing 5 editions is not great, but it's manageable, and at least we have the most important data on nscstats.com, which should make it easier to recreate the NSC 206-210 wiki pages.

@nofuxCZ is it possible to pause the syncing on nscstats, if you haven't already? We wouldn't want to end up losing the data when the wiki is rolled back to the June 25 version.
 
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