Blog:We're Back!

a dinosaur's story

But yes, the Random-ness Wiki is officially back here on Miraheze! Tell your friends! Maybe not your enemies though.

Wait why are we here now?
WELL, uh.,

On June 3rd, 2021, Wikia/FANDOM decided to close the original place after eleven years due to a relatively recent rule change regarding what a wiki could be about. When we first heard about the rule change in 2020, we initially thought that we were safe since we've been around longer than the rule, but this is clearly not the case anymore. Staff did Not inform anyone of the wiki closure, as we all woke up to the site being...Gone. I had to email them myself to find out why (and they told me themselves that it was because of the rule change...and "low quality" content. Ouch).

This ticked me off for many reasons. I've been on the wiki for almost ten years now, and while a lot has changed since 2011, I would not be who I am today if it wasn't for the original place. The spirit of the original wiki led me to many many new friends and even my own stuff. I owe the wiki so much. It just wouldn't be right to let the Random-ness Wiki's legacy die because of corporate rule changes, and hell that sort of thing is why the original creator of the wiki, Daisy56 made it in the first place!

So here we are, pretty much starting from scratch.

Yeah, so what now?
Personally, my goals right now are the following:


 * Recreate some of the more iconic pages via the XML Database Dump of the original place. I started that with recreating the original's very first page here. I'll slowly chip away at it the best I can.
 * Try and get Miraheze figured out. This is all very new to me as well. I only just now got blog posts enabled! So much to do...

Okay, so how can I help?
You're absolutely welcome to help recreate some of the wiki's old pages!

You can get the dump if you open the old wiki on Firefox and download them, extract its contents using something like 7zip, and open the XML file on Notepad++ (regular Notepad also works but the formatting might be a mess). There's two dumps, a current one, which has only the most current page contents from before the wiki was closed, and a full one that includes all page histories...so they are pretty big files! The full one is about 2GB once it's all extracted. Current one is smaller but is still on the large side as it has uhh...7 million lines of code? It's A Lot to dig through. There is a search function on Notepad++ that is, a little stubborn, but works nonetheless.

(A quick aside, when you open it on Notepad++, the "<" and ">" keys are replaced by tags of code ("&lt;" and "&gt;" respectively). Replacing them back to normal can be done with a search and replace on this editor, as there is a lone hourglass icon on the right that does just that.)

The database dump *only* has the pure text and code, so there is the Wayback Machine and other methods to find images. As of this writing (June 5th, 2021), some images are still floating around Google Images search but I imagine it won't be very long until those disappear...

You're also welcome to create new pages! My main goal is to preserve the original's legacy, but that isn't just replicating the original pages. I want the spirit of this place to continue on with new stuff! New projects! New ahjgdhgdjshgh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And like I said above, tell your friends we're over here now!!

...One could argue, like Wikia is...basically now doing with its new rule, that there isn't a place for something like this now, but I immensely disagree with that idea. I believe there should be a place for people to come together, have fun, and bond over interests that isn't on regular social media. I also believe it's much easier to figure yourself out on smaller places like this. Of course there are still rules to follow but that's a given :P. You should look at those if you haven't.

Conclusion
The Random-ness Wiki means so much to me. I don't think I could have truly live with myself if I just let the spirit of the place die by the Wikia Staff's hands after 11 years. It's not the same of course, but it is my hope that I keep random-ness alive for new generations.

Thank you for reading. Remember to stay weird, stay kind, and stay random!

- AceLad (talk) 01:03, 6 June 2021 (UTC)