Hello!

First of all: The gog wiki is basically a great idea.
But second: In it's actual state it's more a joke. Patches are mostly missing, version numbers are lacking in most of the cases, not to mention absent language or size information.

Please update it constantly or bury it. With almost no info filled it is useless.

It's a community effort. So if you want to contribute, go ahead, ask the mods for a user and contribute :P Last time they were because of spam, but the admins might know better...

The GOG wiki is not officially supported by GOG, it's maintained by GOGers, just like you and IIRC everyone can modify it - I think it's usually JMich who encourages people to contribute to the wiki whenever they notice/claim that something's missing.

They are still closed. Come to think of it, what moderators are still active? Haven't seen xyem in a long time.

Gog has a wiki?

Out of curiosity; what kind of data would such a tool collect? I've looked at the Template:Installerinfo source as that's what I believe is the master source for this information on the wiki, but I'm not sure I understand exactly how it works, or should work.

What is the relationship between the wiki game title and the possible names retrieved from the GOG shelf (folder or game title)? It looks like it's the GOG game title, with the OS and sometimes the language added in brackets. How consistent is this? At least from my point of view, using the GOG install folder as key would be perfect, but that might make it difficult to edit the wiki I guess - I know very little about wikis and templates etc. It'd be very easy to generate a look-up table with said folders and game titles, though. Then a consistent scheme of adding OS/language should be all that's needed. I think..

Also, looking at Age of Wonders for instance, the wiki says v1.0.1.11 is dated 2010-09-16, my local copy says 2010-11-26 (probably when I bought it or downloaded the updated installer), while the timestamp retrieved from GOG is 2011-04-18. The MD5's all match. Which date to use here? The oldest one with a matching MD5?

Then there are the titles I don't have. My shelf has grown pretty big (along with my backlog), but there are titles I don't have - some no longer being sold like Toca etc - and I'd guess that goes for everyone. Perhaps one could add another field telling when this information was updated last so that (possibly) outdated entries could be easily listed?

My life's pretty busy so I don't know when I'd get around to it, but I could probably slap together some code that'd generate a list once every 24 or 48 hours and e-mail it to someone (or update a db directly if that's an option). I'd just need the exact specs..

The InstallerInfo template uses the following format
|Name=Size/version/date/filename&md5hash&filesize
For multi-file installers, the format becomes
|Name=Size/version/date/filename1&md5hash1&filesize1;filname2&md5hash2&filesize2;...;filesizeN &md5hashN&filesi zeN

Now, on to the fields.

The |Name is arbitrary. We do try to keep it relevant to the game, for better readability, but that is defined by the gamepage. The gamepage looks at ProductInfo -> name to see which entry to pull from the InstallerInfo template. For example, the name entry for Gabriel Knight 2 reads so it looks for the InstallerInfo entry with name as above. If the name (both on gamepage and InstallerInfo) was GK2, the pages would work the same.

The Size is the total size of the installer. For single file installers that is the same as filesize, for multiple ones it's the total size. Value is in MB or GB (1GB=1024MB, 1MB=1024KB etc).

Version is the installer version as reported by the installer itself, either through the filename (for newer) or through the properties (for older).

Date. This is a tricky one. The date is the date the installer was last modified, and so far it seems the only reliable way to get it is by checking the http-headers, for the last modified part. Sude could probably tell you more about it, but I can try looking for the thread where we discussed it.

On to the big part now. Filename&md5&filesize. All should be self-explanatory.

The name and date part could be corrected manually, assuming there is a reliable way to mass hash the files. Then there is also the question of making the script differentiate between the different language versions (check of language string?) and Mac ones (setup vs .dmg I guess).

Assuming Eli finds the needed time to finalize the Template, the pages should be able to display quite a few more installers, like the [url=http://www.gogwiki.com/wiki/Heroes_of_Might_and_Magic_2:_Gold_Edition]Heroes 2[/url] page currently does.

Not sure how coherent my explanation is atm, feel free to ask for more clarifications.

I don't know if he'll be in the mood after I drank his milkshake.

I quit the wiki to concentrate on VGCollect, thinking it had more than enough moderators.

Guess I did it too soon...

I started doing stuff on there but I decided pcgamingwiki.com would be a better use of my time, especially now the focus is getting the GOG catalogue up to date. I'm in two minds as to whether these two ventures should be combined....