This reference started out it’s life as a MediaWiki installation. It seemed like a good system to build upon 2006, but as our goals changed over the intervening years, it became apparent that, among other reasons, the technical barriers to learning to write wiki markup was not creating a space that felt organized and properly curated.
A decade later and we’ve completely rebuilt the Footbag Worldwide platform; while doing so, we found that there was no room for yet-another-php-application. Given that we’ve built a stable platform around WordPress MU for a variety of new features, we felt it germane to move the reference from MediaWiki to a WP install within that ecosystem. We eliminated both a dependence as well as liability (code needs to be kept up-to-date for security purposes).
There is no MediaWiki -> WordPress import/export tool that would do a particularly good job, at least not better than a human using their judgement to better structure the sections and format their contents. As such, I undertook the task and manually copied over 130 pages (albeit not a huge number, but significant), using my experience as a web developer to make better sense of the very chaotic structure of a wiki and transform it into WordPress’ Page system with some better formatting and a lot more pictures.
Now the goal is to get people to contribute more content so that this area of our site is as good as it can be.
– Allan