To help see which people would be good candidates to have extra user rights, I have a list of the issues our wiki is currently experiencing and what each of us can do to fix them. Those who can tackle these issues will show they're helping to build the wiki and should be considered to become a Thread moderator for the Discussions area, Content moderator for the main part of the wiki, or Administrator to help with the more advanced parts of maintaining a wiki.
Issues:
- No one's putting anything in the Edit Summary (the "Describe what you changed" line) so we have no way to know why they're changing something.
- I think a lot of the pages for characters created here are just copied from another wiki. It would be better if we didn't do that and we came up with our own info.
- Antagonist and protagonist labels. This will be covered separately, but the very short answer is those labels create a huge number of problems and they don't add anything of value for the character.
- Category spamming (spending a lot of time only adding categories)
- Infobox stuffing, where more and more gets added to the Infobox while the rest of the page looks empty.
- Many pages like the one for the Snapping Turtle are missing an Infobox.
- We have several infoboxes for characters: Antagonist; Antagonist Group; Antagonist Infobox (current); Antagonist Infobox (upgraded); Antagonistic Species; Character; Fact file Normal; Infobox character; Minecraft Story Mode Villains; Mira; Partners in Crime; Villain Infobox (which is a copy of what the Villains Wiki uses) and the generic Infobox. We need to standardize and reduce the number of Infoboxes.
Here's how we can fix this. These are the things I will be looking for when considering people to receive extra user rights and responsibilities:
- Get in the habit of filling out the Edit Summary line. Tell us why you're changing or adding something so we can verify it's correct. If you leave it blank, then the assumption is what you're putting in is true. If it turns out not to be and it's discovered you've been doing that a lot, it can lead to being blocked for adding false information. A reason in the Edit Summary can make the difference between it being an honest mistake and deliberate vandalism.
- I would love to see galleries being created for characters. We don't have a whole lot. When uploading a picture or video, please fill out a summary of where the picture is from, select the appropriate licensing, and put at least one category that shows what movie it's from and maybe a couple of categories for any characters, such as [[:Category:Dr. Evil images]].
- Likewise, if someone's willing to monitor and maintain the Discussions area, that would be appreciated. That's an area that really doesn't match my interests, so I'd like it if other could handle that on their own.
- Cut back on copying from other wikis. Put together your own information. If you do copy from somewhere else, say in the Edit Summary where you got it, and leave out as many of the categories as you can so there's less cleanup to do later.
- As stated above, there's a lot of pages that don't have an Infobox. Add one if you can, but be mindful of how much info is in it. Infobox stuffing has been occurring where more and more gets put into the Infobox and you get situations like there's 60 different adjectives for the character's personality, what their goals are and their relatives going back twelve generations. The result is you have to keep scrolling and scrolling and scrolling to get to the bottom of the Infobox. Meanwhile, the main portion of the page is a barren wasteland with one or two sentences. This version of the Leprechaun page is an example of Infobox stuffing at the sacrifice of the rest of the page.
To avoid this, move as much as you can out of the Infobox onto the rest of the page. Fill it out so it's not a factoid list. If a character's arrogant, write sentences to show how they're arrogant. If they're remorseful, show why they regret what they've done. - Don't spend a lot of time adding categories and keep in mind that they're for organizing the page. Don't fall into the trap of using them as a substitute for working on the main part of the page. It's easy to keep clicking on the Add Category button so you never write anything else. Before you add a category, stop to think, "Is this category really needed and will people want to find pages with this category?" For example, do people really want to know which characters have blue eyes or have freckles? If you can't honestly say yes, leave it out. If the category is an adjective or something trivial, leave it out.
- When Infoboxes and Categories get out of control, what you can wind up with is essentially a situation like going to read one of the Harry Potter books, opening it up and then finding out that the Table of Contents takes up 50 pages, the Index takes another 50, and in between is about one page that has anything to do with the story.
- When writing a description of a character, don't put in any kind of antagonist or protagonist label, and replace any that already exist. Example: "Betty Rubble is the secondary deuteragonist of The Flintstones". Leave it completely out. If you can't think of a better way to rewrite it, change the label to be just "character".
The reason for this is that sort of thing says how much of an antagonist or a protagonist she is is the most important thing about her, but it actually says nothing about who she is. It's like looking at a person and deciding their skin color is the most important thing about them.
In contrast, "Betty Rubble is the wife of Barney Rubble, the mother of their son Bamm-Bamm, a housewife and a friend of Fred and Wilma Flintstone" lets everyone know who she is.
This is covered in a lot more detail in the No longer saying the word "antagonist" blog and it's now in effect. - On any page, clean out an unnecessary text formatting. On any that have links to Wikipedia, see if they're really needed. We may not need a link to something like a pickup truck since that's a commonly-understood item. Change any you can to a page here, even if it hasn't been created yet. Otherwise, change it to an inter-wiki link like this: newsreel or Shada.
There's a few other things that need updating that right now only I can work on, but I would appreciate any input you have on them.
- Is there anything we need to add or change in the menus at the top of each page. There's a lot of room for quick links.
- Rearrange and condense categories for consistency in how they're named. We also need to move away from TV Tropes-style categories and categories that are adjectives like "arrogant"
- For anything that can be considered "community business" like this blog, resolving issues or applying for user rights, needs to go into a blog or on a wiki-style forum. They should not be conducted in the Discussions area. The reason for this is Discussions and replies to them are not recorded like a standard edit. Once they've been deleted, they are unrecoverable. Community business needs to be recorded so they are publicly viewable and if necessary, recovered if they had been deleted in the past.
That's where we stand and I hope to see us come together to help get this wiki in better shape for the future.