GuildWiki:Community portal

Welcome to the community portal. This hosts recent clarifications, general discussion and so on.

Growing pains!
GuildWiki's in a unique place right now. There really hasn't been another wiki of its type that has been so huge, so successful, and so beloved by its community. Everyone really cares about it, and that has caused quite a bit of tension in the last few months.

Recently, Phil (Gravewit) and Michael (Nunix) added a little splash page to suggest that IE users switch to Firefox. They had their reasons for this, but that's not really the issue; the problem, as it turns out, was that they were still thinking the wiki was just this fansite, you know? It was huge and awesome and had so much content from so many users, but.. still just a site like any other. So modifying the server code to do this splash is no big deal, within their rights, and how could anyone possibly have a problem with this?

Wow!

The thing is, this isn't just a fansite, it's a wiki. It's open to everyone to add, subtract, and modify. That is its function! And suddenly adding this new thing, which only two people could change.. well, that, as it turns out, really is a big deal.

So!

There's still two guys, two server administrators, who've got access to all that code, to the hard drive. That's not going to change, and they maintain the right to do something like this in the future. However!


 * Phil and Michael accept that they have the ability to do anything I wish to the GuildWiki, but they choose to do only those things either:
 * 1) necessary for the maintenance of the GuildWiki, including its server and database, or
 * 2) put through some sort of community process before implementation.

We love this thing. It's huge. It's new. And there's no way it could have ever gotten here, to this place, without each and every reader and contributor. There are bound to be more growing pains as time goes on, but we hope everyone can stick with us - and each other! - to make it bigger and better. If you guys ever have any questions or issues you'd like to take up with us, please continue to do so. It's what keeps the GuildWiki the awesome resource it is. --Nunix 23:18, 6 January 2006 (UTC)

Writing down our traditions and guidelines
I invite all to come contribute to Category:GuildWiki policy, with a good entry point being Guiding principles. This sorely needs to be done, but doing it all myself would eliminate the point. :) &mdash;Tanaric 17:57, 6 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Were you aware of the existing Policies and guidelines page? --Rezyk 18:40, 6 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Actually, no, I wasn't. Sorry about that; didn't mean to step on your toes there!


 * That said, I prefer the style of mine better; I'd like to see the GuildWiki forming its own set of policies and standards, rather than detailing how we differ from Wikipedia. Your policies page is still very useful, especially were it moved to, say, Differences between the GuildWiki and Wikipedia.  Would that be an acceptable merger of this process for you? &mdash;Tanaric 19:07, 6 January 2006 (UTC)


 * I would really prefer not to do things that way, especially not for the process of initial construction/ratification. I think it will be easier and much safer for policy to take baby steps starting with a minimalist approach (and I have been pondering over the best way for 2 months while waiting for enough people to realize the need for this).  My strong suggestion is to keep things minimal and easily digestible at least until we can reach a consensus on what is a fair documentation of current policy/tradition/guidelines.  Then again, I might not be being fair to your style because I'm not quite sure exactly how it is supposed to work (for example, are we writing what reflects current policy, or what we think is good policy?).  --Rezyk 20:07, 6 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Whoops, never mind that last question.. I was getting confused by the "Only revert once" you added (I assumed it was like Wikipedia's Only revert once). --Rezyk 20:19, 6 January 2006 (UTC)


 * How much more minimalist can I get? I only wrote seven articles.  That's *nothing* for me! ;)  More seriously, I agree with you on the baby steps bit.  That's why I wish to do it this way.  With your method, we slowly diverge from Wikipedia, adding in our own flair slowly as we go.  This would be great if we designed our inital policies around Wikipedias so long ago; the problem is... well, we didn't.  It started as Gravewit, Nunix, Lord Biro, as well as me and everyone else around last May started doing things in a standard way.  Hence our vastly different revert policy, as well as the much more pronounced role of admins around here.  We never attempted to incorporate Wikipedia policies into daily life here (we were initially most like the A Tale in the Desert wiki, which is the first wiki I've ever used, and since most everything I suggested became accepted here, well...).


 * You mentioned "ratification." Such a process is unnecessary, I think, since we already have well-known standards and traditions.  I'm just trying to write down what already exists.  There are plenty of things I think should change (especially item and skill capitalization), but what we've got has actually worked really well for the last 7 months.  My only desire is to express these traditions in a concrete way to new contributors to the site; we didn't have >200000 hits per day when this started, so such documentation wasn't necessary. :)


 * Please give a more expansive argument if you still disagree, as I may have misunderstood your first one. :) &mdash;Tanaric 23:03, 6 January 2006 (UTC)

Everyone, there is also a discussion about admin policy starting at GuildWiki talk:Mission statement. --Rezyk 20:48, 6 January 2006 (UTC)

Search
As you might've noticed, I've changed the Search function in the siderbar to use Google Search. There's a very good reason for this: Mediawiki's built-in search was just killing our server. Just changing the sidebar dropped server load by a substantial margin. You can still access normal search by going to Special: Search. Don't abuse it. Gravewit 14:17, 31 December 2005 (UTC)
 * I was wondering about that, spent 10 minutes searching my computer to see if it was a setting in my browser that was doing that (since I have the google toolbar & deskbar). The only problem I see is that that Google seems to find articles that no longer exist. For example Kyla doesn't exist but if you search for it it comes up as a page. Weirdness. --William Blackstaff 16:15, 31 December 2005 (UTC)

Task List
See the Task List for a list of current GuildWiki tasks to help with (or add to the list to ask for help).

New Contributors
With the recent influx of contributors, there has been an issue with 3 or more sequential edits (see Signet of Capture history) changing only a few characters. At the very least, it would be nice for a "This is a minor edit" to be checked, and even better, "Show preview" (which even I forget a bit). Is there any obvious way to notify the newcomers to do this? - Lunarbunny 02:43, 26 November 2005 (UTC)
 * Probably not =D. --William Blackstaff 02:51, 26 November 2005 (UTC)

As of 10/30 There has been a few changes to the Article "How to form a Guild" as of recent updates have restricted this action within Pre-Searing Ascalon City-Guest Edit: Guild Capes are no longer made in Pre-Ascalon

Issues for Debate
How categories are handled, at Category_talk:Categories, as well as proposals for new skill categorisations at GuildWiki_talk:Style_and_formatting/Skills.

The "New" skill template: Looks the same, but changes the way it's coded at Template_Talk:Skill_New.

Last but not least, right here is the debate over whether this new page makes any sense. I'm going for a mostly informal style: This is, after all, a "Community" page for a relatively small community. Personal pronouns are the norm, first person is the view to take.

I was hoping somone would post an article on the various slang used in guild wars such as "LFG", "KD/AS", "Battery" etc


 * See Category:Slang & Terminology. ;) --Eightyfour-onesevenfive 23:16, 12 Sep 2005 (EST)

Quick page &amp; category links
On Wikipedia's main page there are some small links, linking to new pages and categories (see Wikipedia:Template:Newpagelinksmain), I find this useful; could we have a similar thing here? I converted it to GuildWiki flavour URLs here User:Skuld/new-links-testtpl --Skuld &Dagger; 19:00, 17 Sep 2005 (EST)


 * I would like to see an overhaul of the Main Page completely. The page as it is at the moment does not really look very appealing, and overall seems a bit cluttered. If you look at wikipedia the main page is very clear and concise. 06:20, 18 Sep 2005 (EST)


 * I've made the change, but since this topic relates to the Main Page directly it should be discussed on Talk:Main Page :) 06:39, 18 Sep 2005 (EST)


 * great =D ok. thanks for the tip --Skuld &Dagger; 06:53, 18 Sep 2005 (EST)

Questions
If you have any questions that aren't relevant to a specific talk page, head over to User Questions and add it.