A couple of months ago, GitHub enforced their exclusion of wikis from crawling, leading to them not being indexed by (and thus findable via) search engines. While their reasoning behind this change is understandable (abusive behaviour in wikis has had a negative impact on their search engine ranking), this made our wiki basically invisible to users not knowing where to find it, and far less accessible to those that did. As a consequence, we set out to look for a solution and settled on moving the wiki to our main website.
How?
Our old wiki was basically a bunch of markdown files located in a GitHub wiki repo. Luckily, Jekyll, the static site generator our website depends on, also uses Markdown. So, the main steps in migrating were comparatively minor. In particular, the wiki-style links ([[graphics]] -> [graphics](/wiki/graphics)) and the asset paths needed changing. In addition, the pages were organised in categories to make editing easier (previously, all ~200 pages were located in one directory) and the URLs more SEO-friendly. This was done with the help of @Spaio – thank you very much for this! Going forward, the wiki pages are located within the /wiki/ directory of the website repo and use a special version of the Minimal Mistakes theme that we already use for the rest of the website.
And now?
The wiki can now be accessed via https://libgdx.com/wiki/. To edit a page, use the “Edit on GitHub” link on top of each page. This will redirect you to GitHub, where you can submit a PR with your changes. We know that that makes contributing a bit of a hassle, but hope that it isn’t too much of an inconvenience.
Our new wiki style guide can be found here. Please give it a read before contributing.
As an added bonus, the migration allows us to use normal HTML, JS and CSS code in the wiki, which offers a few interesting possibilities:
- Text can be formatted in various new ways
- Videos can easily be included:
{% include video id="3kPK_O6Q4wA" provider="youtube" %} - Jekyll elements like, for example, carousels can be used
- libGDX GWT apps can be embedded on wiki pages, allowing us to showcase live libGDX examples
- We have also recently added a search feature to the wiki
- Every code example now features a “Copy to clipboard” button
Feedback on this migration is very much welcome – just join our Discord and let us know what you think!
