Changes to the official Unreal Engine Wiki

General Announcements
193

Official reply from Amanda from Epic

Indeed, it’s understandable, only thing that in my experience as a web developer and seo optimizator, is that those pages are well optimized and crawled, searched every day and appearing in search engine results, the best thing to do in order to not lose the acquired priority over other searches is to not destroy the inside content but instead (even in another server) serve the same static version of the wiki with a simple redirect.
A good Web Dev and SEO or server admin can do that in a matter of minutes. From a visual perspective the result it’s identical, you can maintain the page layout and all.
And the search engines will be happy of that and you will not destroy the workflow of users, and of the search engines.

That is the solution, a static simple page solution, mirror your results in plain html version and no one will be able to hack anything, if the server will be hardened and updated (but I believe that your system administrators are more than competent in that :slight_smile:

About Rama reply about UE4 becoming closed to community, I had the same feels at first, but 13 pages of disappointment let one think how much community driven is this engine, all united like a community.

This is what Epic have to follow, a community, not enterprises, but people.

And I hope that this message will reach Sweeney to change his mind about this decision, if it’s that the reason.

Let’s be optimistic, I will wait a reply from someone that will clearly say that it’s not something hidden and sketchy, but instead a simple routine that will build something a lot better in a short time.

In the meantime I return to point to the backup from Michael J. Cole:

Fork this to preserve until the official solution will be available :slight_smile:

194

Conspiracy theories aside (Epic supports open source as they can, including financial support for Blender), so it’s not gonna like anybody would need closing some wiki to close the engine source. Given the number of places on the internet where engine’s code is forked, quoted, discussed - community wiki is tiny, tiny thing :wink:

Yeah, it sad that from Epic perspective - a huge company with hundreds or thousands of employees, working on the indie-AAA engine, online services, digital store, purchasing and integrating content-related companies - the community wiki was just a tiny speckle in their universe… And that’s why nobody bothered to simply notify people a few weeks prior to shutting down the service entirely. This what should happen with every online service if the company behind it has any employees and money left, not just removing service out of the blue…

A really bad thing if we’re talking about the company operating the digital store and online services for third parties. Google is shutting down its services all the time, but usually giving months for taking data out of the service.

It would be great if someone would have enough time and “expertise” to actually organize some “hive mind” wiki team. Currently I see just many people spawning their wikis on personal websites… It’s a useful thing to bring the old content alive, but not exactly best way to develop any wiki further…
To be honest, I’m sure how such 100% community wiki could be organized. Maybe someone is able to figure that out…

195

Hey all,

You can download a mirror of the Unreal Engine Wiki site here. Please keep in mind, this repository does not include full site functionality, but the contents of the Wiki are all there.

We are still exploring how we may be able to export the Wiki data to the community members who are looking to stand up a centralized, community-hosted Wiki, to help expedite their efforts. Thanks so much to those that are coordinating the initiative and have reached out!

196

Thanks Amanda! This is the reply we needed :slight_smile: !

About wiki softwares, there are a lot of them, this is a comparison table on some (but one can search on more than 80 wiki softwares to find the one that is best for needed task):

https://www.slant.co/topics/1086/~best-multi--wiki#5
A simple chart with doku and tiddly on top, but mediawiki (wikipedia) and wiki.js are good enough.

Let me know if you need something, if I will not be able to reply for sure some other person here will :slight_smile:

197

Thanks Amanda, that’s a good first step. :slight_smile:

198

+1 to the terrible idea posts, of course I can mirror my own copy but half of the forum posts that come up from Google or AnswerHub link to the old wiki anyway, with really useful stuff there… A really unusual bad move from Epic…

199

Thank you. Not having wiki was a game changer for me. Yea literally, it changes the game i’m making because I couldn’t lookup info anymore. Everything out there was linked to wiki. I am glad to at least have the content. We do need a better solution though. We need to keep collaborating and sharing info, and the wiki was a great place for it. Frankly the documentation for ue4 is bad imo, and we should be evolving forward, not going backwards. For any coding question i have, I would prefer an authoritative place made by the authors (Epic), which is kept up to date with the latest standards. Currently we just kinda surf around and look for stuff, and often the wiki is the place we end up at, but even the wiki has out of date info.

200

what they said. having our archive is better than nothing for now, but we need our wiki back, and we need authoritative documentation from epic on all issues related to coding questions.

201

well, the 7zip just posted and the other web archives are pretty hard to use atm. not sure how to browse them and find stuff, and links are broken. not sure this will work out. i suppose i can just use ‘find text’ on a windows command prompt or something. it seems to suck atm…need…better…solutions…
ne1 with help suggestions on how to use these archives is appreciated

202

And on these 13 pages have you seen a single response from an Epic employee? Or read the post “Making Wiki read only while we work on it” for fun. This “Amanda Schade” avatar posted the announcement in April 2018. About 3 months later people started to ask “What now? How much longer???” and there was nothing, nada, all the way to April 2020 not a single response from Epic to all those questions.

No my lord Aragorn. We ARE alone!

203

Amanda is a real person. We like to be nice to real people.

204

Thanks for this update Amanda, it’s encouraging. It would be great to be able to redirect the search results from the old wiki to the new one, as @thunder_nemesis explained in it’s previous post.

And thanks to the community members handling this, it’s a great service to all of us, kudos!

205

Oh I am very nice.
In contrast it is not nice to ignore people’s pleas for years and don’t even honor them with a response.

206

Worst decision ever.

207

I think Epic doesn’t even know how bad their documentation is. People forgave them or just didn’t care as they had the wiki where the most information is and where the examples can be seen. Now that we only have the official documentation, it is extremely hard for newcomers to learn anything more than basic information without delving into source code which is not an optional way to learn things.

Very bad and wrong decision to make, and it speaks volumes of how diverged Epic staff is about how people learn to use their Engine.

208

This is a bit bummer news, because I used the Wiki quite often, but then again, the Forums already serves as Tutorial and code snippet depot, even though the categorisation would be difficult.

Although, if Epic is afraid of vandalism on the Wiki (and considering potential vandalism from elitist gamers), they should’ve make editing harder, by having moderated edits. Wikipedia entry of both Epic Games and Fortnite has been vandalised by elitist gamers for quite sometime, yet the moderators managed to lock down the entry from edits made by unverified accounts. And it works. Or else, if Epic don’t want the wiki to get edited at all, at least keep it online and change the notice into something like “Editing on Unreal Engine wiki is disabled, some information might be hugely outdated”

Although I suspect this has also something to do with minor API overhaul in 4.25, IIRC.

209

Just brainstorming here, but a potential cool move from Epic would be to buy the high quality courses on Udemy about UE4 (on the top of my head, Tom Looman’s course and the other on multiplayer for instance) and make them free as part of the official doc (or their learning platform). I suspect it could be cheaper for Epic as the material already exists.

It would be a huge benefit for the users of the engine and would *partially *solve the documentation problem.

PS: to be fair, documentation content is improving these last months - it’s important to check it for updated content regularly, but it’s still hard to find the kind of information we had on the Wiki.

210

I’ve converted the Linking DLLs article @warrenjayv (don’t remember who else posted the link to it itt because the search bar doesn’t include links)

211

@Zebratov I’ve converted the OpenCV Integration Wiki article for you and the others who name-dropped it here: Integrating OpenCV into Unreal Engine 4 - UE4: Guidebook

Please @ me with more requests

213

I think part of the issue here too is these initiatives span over years and out live many of Epics community team members, that can be problematic because it feels like starting again every time things change hands to someone new. I can appreciate its not an easy job and not everyone likes being public facing 100% of the time but we as a community do need some sort of commitment, the Evangelists for example are amazing, lots of people know who they are and many have been a part of the community for years, as Ive said previously its similar to the moderators here. Every time Epic rolls out a new community person its like here we go again because its akin to a freshly formatted computer.

Now I know some Epic community team members have been involved for acouple of years but in all honesty when it feels like Ive really only just seen them post for the first time it goes to show how Epics community team are failing. Thats not to say I wish anyone ill will, just that pointing it out might help improve things in the future. There is no reason for community interaction to happen all behind closed doors, Epic should be allowed in the sunlight and Ive had some amazing interactions with people who have worked at Epic but those have slowed down to almost nothing. Its great how puts himself out there on Twitter and I loved how Mark Rein used to jump in on the old UT forums, unfortunately many people I got to know at Epic moved on and its really difficult to make those connections with everything being heavily filtered.

I dont want to ramble, just trying to convey why I think the Wiki didnt work out as well as it could have and perhaps deeper understanding of why people feel the need to badmouth Epic as a whole.

**Wallenstein **certainly hit the nail on the head, we are real people too so it would be nice for Epic to attempt to build rapport with the community rather than treating us like a herd which can be forced into compliance. Sure things get heated but I believe many of Epics public relations issues stem from a similar point of failure :cool: