Talk:Community portal

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Revision as of 12:09, 22 February 2011 by Orphaea Imperium (talk | contribs) (Wiki Admins Needed / Policies and Standards Required)
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Wiki Admins Needed / Policies and Standards Required

Can we make it a point not to just copy the entirety of the (largely shoddy) Compedia over to this? With a new wiki, we should take the opportunity to write good quality IC content, rather than just making a duplicate of the same crap that's available on an already existing website. Orphaea Imperium 06:43, 22 February 2011 (GMT)

This wiki was released before any ground rules were made, there are no admins to keep watch on things and users create their own templates and categories. If everyone does whatever they wish and copy paste from their wikies (I saw articles from the ImpWiki and Compedia) then pretty soon this place will be no better than the other failed wiki experiments. --Ryan Roche 06:47, 22 February 2011 (GMT)
Copying and pasting of good content should be okay - there are some decent character pages on both wikis, there are some good templates around, etc, but wanton copying for the sake of 'filling out the wiki' should be avoided. Orphaea Imperium 07:15, 22 February 2011 (GMT)
But that's exactly what's happening though. Already a number of articles on here display a clear lack of objectivity and are riddled with bias. Most of them also drift between IC and OOC with references to game mechanics, RL dates, and so forth. I thought the point here was that the Holocron was to be strictly IC, and the Compedia was notorious for mixing IC and OOC. I really hope some specific guidelines and rules will be set in place and actually enforced, otherwise more time will be spent cleaning up copied-and-pasted crap from Compedia and biased sources, rather than contributing actual quality content that could potentially make this a wiki of high quality that can be considered reliable. --Alex Tylger 14:01, 22 February 2011 (GMT)
Merged the two discussions on wiki admins into one to keep things easier to read. Also just sent an email to Vey / Dreighton / Fish on getting some admins and policies sorted out. Orphaea Imperium 14:11, 22 February 2011 (GMT)
One of the original purposes of this wiki was to give a new home to content of the (mostly abandoned) Compedia, so there is nothing wrong with bringing in content from there (or other sources, as far as there are no copyright concerns).
I am keeping an eye on the wiki atm and so far I am quite happy about what I see. Also I can not see at this point what anyone would need admin status for that he can not do just as well as a user. This wiki alerady has a team and a whole host of admins: Its users. I do take Wikipedia as a role model and I admit that it is not clear as of yet, if the SWC community will be able to live up to this model. But I also see no indication that it will not be able to do so and I don't want to destroy any chance for it from the start. Despite edit wars, cries over admin bias and emotional debates in the community, Wikipedia and its standards grew out of the basic principles that everyone has the equal opportunity to add, edit, move and delete. In short: It grew out of freedom and equal opportunities, combined with a software tool that makes it easy to revert true vandalism. If someone does not agree with the POV or quality of some articles, they can contribute material fromm other sources, rephrase the text or use the discussion page of the article to start a discussion on the matter in question. Wikipedia didn't get where they are by censoring content. Many articles on Wikipedia started out as horribly one-sided stubs. Still they were rarely deleted, and even more rarely by an admin. They were maintained and improved. By other users. You think an article is less than it could be? Improve it!
I also feel like the standards and policies I laid out on the community portal so far are good enough, in any case at this point. What more should there be then 1/ keep it IC 2/ use a NPOV? And if you find the standards lackingyou can just what we are doing now: Start a discussion.
We could possibly need more pages and more tools to help us with community functions, most notably some templates, as Wikipedia uses them, for marking articles that are too short or of low quality. But this should not be the job of any admin in a wiki, not even a team. It's the job of every singe user.
I have to add that I am absolutely delighted about what I see so far. No one abused his options to edit and post so far, in one situation where someone posted some insincere joke in an article, it was quickly removed by another user. And someone corrected my typo on the starting page. :)
So far it looks like people are using the wiki in a responsible and cooperative way. Different wikis are ... different. But they are best and strongest, if the users take charge of improving it. But this can not really happen, if we put a team in charge. We may need more moderators and admins at some point, but right now, the wiki needs freedom to grow more than anything else. I already have several offers for help and some of the people that posted in this discussion are clearly high on my list of people I may approach, should I see the need for more administration and moderation.
I said I'll keep an eye on the wiki, but I have only two eyes and only that much time. You and all other users have to help me.
Please do whatever it is that you want to do to improve the wiki. If someone puts OOC stuff in an article - (re)move it. If you know of an important opposing opinion - add it. If you think there is a mistake - fix it. All of you can change pages, suggest templates, add categories, make suggestions and convince people - please do so.
Orphaea, I was writing a reply to you, I think I no longer have to send it, I think this is the far more adequate way to discuss this.--Dreighton 16:55, 22 February 2011 (GMT)
Your comparison to Wikipedia isn't very good. For one, they do have processes where pages are deleted left right and center. They also do have bureaucrats that take care of reversions, moderate certain processes, handle templates, etc. They also have a hell of a lot more potential editors who might be inspired to rewrite an article.
The problem with bringing stuff from the other wikis is that a lot of it is trash (Compedia), or heavily biased biased (the Galactic Archives, for example, is unashamedly pro-Imperial in parts; Compedia varies depending on who wrote a page). Many of the pages are little more than copy-and-pasted versions of faction websites, which are now the articles that are being moved over here. For instance, look at pretty much everything Vip Fortuna has posted - it's either copy and pasted from Compedia, or it reads like a faction advertisement (at least one page even generously mentions pricing arrangements), or both. Yes, I could edit them, but I won't - one because I'm unqualified to write material on those factions, and two because rather than getting a bunch of terrible articles and then having to go through and edit or mark all of them for future editing, we should encourage original quality material in the first place. It's admins, or a wiki team, that could do that kind of moderation. If I tried telling people now, as a random person, what they should be looking to contribute I'd get mercilessly flamed regardless of how much what I say actually follows the few rules we have down.
Simply put: just because we're only starting out doesn't mean we need to encourage crap just for the sake of getting our article count up fast. Maintenance on random contributions will be more difficult than simply establishing some kind of framework in the first place. Orphaea Imperium 17:09, 22 February 2011 (GMT)

Sub-Faction Pages

For sub-faction organisational units (e.g. Imperial Navy), should these be their own page and risk conflict between similar pages, or be subpages of the main faction page (e.g. Galactic Empire/Imperial Navy)? Or should pages of this type be avoided altogether and any relevant information incorporated into sections on the appropriate pages? Obviously we'd need to cap things at a certain limit, e.g. a page for the Imperial Navy might be appropriate, but for every Imperial military unit that has ever existed may be a bit excessive. Orphaea Imperium 07:23, 22 February 2011 (GMT)

My view is that we should follow the wikipedia rules for naming pages (thus Imperial Navy and Imperial Navy (Other Empire)). --Owen von Ismay 08:50, 22 February 2011 (GMT)
People aren't getting the hint nor read this page, they continue on creating pages with no extra throught, maybe I should post a Sim News asking not to do this. --Ryan Roche 16:32, 22 February 2011 (GMT)
Without rules somewhere clear for people to read, and clear guidelines, and admins to enforce them, any Sim News will be limited in effect. Couldn't hurt though, if it just said not to wantonly copy and paste stuff from elsewhere, and not to create article categories or anything like that until we've sorted things out. Orphaea Imperium 16:48, 22 February 2011 (GMT)
See above. But who is "we" in your last sentence? If it is "us, the users", I fully agree. ;)--Dreighton 16:58, 22 February 2011 (GMT)