The restoration
This is a rebuild of tribes2wiki.com, the Tribes 2 community wiki that ran from 2008 until it went offline. This page explains what happened to it, what could be saved, and what still needs writing.
What happened
Section titled “What happened”The original wiki ran on MediaWiki 1.16. At its peak it held 121 content pages and 87 uploaded images, built up over roughly 1,620 edits by 27 registered contributors. Its own statistics page recorded more than 136,000 page views.
Then the site went offline, the domain lapsed, and for a while the address served a domain-parking page instead. Everything that had been written there was gone.
What survived
Section titled “What survived”Not all of it was lost. The Internet Archive’s crawlers had visited the wiki between 2009 and 2011, and those captures were enough to rebuild a substantial part of it.
| Original wiki | Recovered | |
|---|---|---|
| Content pages | 121 | 75 |
| Uploaded images | 87 | 2 |
Around 62% of the articles came back. The images fared far worse — only two survived the crawls, because the Archive rarely captured the wiki’s uploaded files.
How it was rebuilt
Section titled “How it was rebuilt”Every surviving capture was pulled from the Internet Archive and converted from MediaWiki HTML into Markdown. The wiki now lives in a public git repository, which means it can be edited by pull request and can’t quietly vanish again the way the original did.
A few details of the recovery are worth recording:
- Multiple captures per page. Where the Archive visited a page more than once, each visit may hold a different revision. MediaWiki stamped every page with its last-modified date, which made it possible to tell genuinely different revisions apart from repeat crawls of an unchanged page.
- Real authorship, where it survived. For eight pages the Archive also captured the revision history, naming who made each edit and when. Those edits are preserved in the repository’s commit history under their original authors and dates, the oldest going back to November 2008.
- Post-shutdown captures were discarded. After the domain lapsed the Archive kept crawling the parking page under the old article URLs. Those captures are not wiki content and were filtered out.
What is still missing
Section titled “What is still missing”Roughly a third of the articles were never captured and are simply gone. Among them is Jericho mobile point base, which had been the second most-read page on the entire wiki, along with Turret and Sensor jammer pack.
The full list lives in MISSING_PAGES.md in the repository, ordered by how many surviving articles link to each one — so the pages at the top are the ones readers hit dead ends on most often.
Most of the lost images have been replaced with community guide art where a fair equivalent existed. Where no honest match was available — the base turret barrels, for instance — the articles are left unillustrated rather than showing a picture of the wrong thing.
Credit
Section titled “Credit”The articles here were written by the community of the original wiki. The most prolific contributor by a wide margin was Kryand, who also turns up on the TribesNEXT forums pointing newcomers toward the wiki. Others recoverable from the archived histories include Eolk, Red Shifter, Misanthropic, DS, Maychill101, Redirect fixer and Teratos, along with a number of contributors who edited without an account.
That list is necessarily incomplete — revision histories survive for only eight of the wiki’s pages, so the great majority of contributions can’t be attributed to anyone by name. If you wrote for the original wiki and are missing from the credits, please open an issue.
Helping
Section titled “Helping”The most useful thing anyone can do is write one of the missing articles. You don’t need to know how the site is built — the wiki is Markdown files, and GitHub can edit them in a browser. See CONTRIBUTING.md.
Write from your own knowledge of the game. Please don’t paste text from forums or other wikis without asking: that writing belongs to whoever wrote it. See Community resources for places to refresh your memory before writing something in your own words.