💾 Archived View for magda.cities.yesterweb.org › gemlog › 2024-05-23.gmi captured on 2024-08-18 at 17:17:46. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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When I experienced last weekend's partial internet outage, I was being reminded of still needing to download a bunch of websites for offline usage. Now that my connection is fully functional again, I wanted to get started with perhabs the most comphehensive identification guide for lepidoptera, LepiWiki.
I'm pretty sure any mortal would assume that plain guides like these would be easy to copy and thus perserve but no, only the front page is mostly static, while ALL species pages do not load past the in-page navigation header. The vast majority of LepiWiki and the organization's main page, Lepiforum, are almost fully dependent on five differen JS scripts, only loading relevant content when scrolling down a page. Indeed, even Wayback Machine cannot archive this Wiki's main content beyond the navigation bars. This puts LepiWiki at a huge risk of becoming a "lost website" in the future – and Lepiforum, the organization, actually is aware of this.
When they introduced their new Wiki in 2021, they relied on Wayback Machine to check their old Wiki's copy on the Internet Archive, noting a bunch of broken links and only the species pages being fully archived. It even was recommended during the transition to use IA to compare the old design with the new one. But that was it; no further discussion happened afterwards, so no one highlighted that this redesign now rendered any attempts at archiving LepiWiki beyond its main page impossible. On the other hand, they actually may be aware of this and merely chose to disregard it in favor of "admin experience", as the benefits for its admins are brought up multiple times, even when other forum members criticized aspects of the new navigation.
[GER] Lepiforum thread from 6 September, 2021
Since c. 2022, Lepiforum is seeing a drastic decline in user contributions, likely as a result of the end of the pandemic. Other users, however, noted that they contribute less to the project due to the redesign. The new forum, which was rolled out just a few months ago, was described as cumbersome to use, with some users noting that this point was raised during meetings but not acknowledged by Lepiforum's board members. Once again, user complaints raised in the forum repeatedly got rejected and those defending the new Wiki continued to point towards the almost-completely automatized admin experience.
[GER] Lepiforum thread from 22 March, 2024
There also are a few hints about the LepiWiki possibly being expanded to include every single butterfly and moth species across the world and offer multi-language support in the future (likely hoping that some LLM or even ChatGPT will handle this). From what I can tell, the board wants to attract more international users and assumes that non-German-speaking users are using Lepiforum and LepiWiki right now, despite all sites being provided in German only.
But yeah, the entirety of Lepiforum, inluding LepiWiki and its forum, cannot be archived and Lepiforum is aware of it. It's ridiculous how a project MUCH smaller than iNaturalist now entirely disregards the digital perservation and usability of its project just to be "easier to manage". I highly doubt the latter because all conent merely got stuffed into containers by an unnamed brand (either Kubernetes or Docker; there really isn't a third option) that aren't provided as downloadable/installable images. Lepiforum pretty much is a proprietary online service – neither can any content be submitted to IA nor is its entire source code provided as a public open source repository. (And because they used IA as a diff tool during the rollout, I highly doubt that they even use git or any other VC.)
Overall, it's disappointing and, quite frankly, embarrassing especially because this is a tiny non-profit organization aiming to expand their database – they also consider Excel a database, by the way – and amount of contributors we're talking about. It's fairly inaccessible once you want to get past the mere online comsumption part.
(I'm not gonna get deeper into how HEAVY Lepiforum and LepiWiki are. My ancient Acer Aspire heats up the moment it loads any page for the first time even right after a cold boot. I also had to disable NoScript entirely because nothing loads and letting "Dark Background and Light Text" change the stylesheet provides mixed results.)