User:GW-Stabber

Vacation notice

 * Until July 9, 2006, I shall be traveling all over the world (academic conferences) and have only sporadic Internet access.
 * When in Europe during the World Cup season, don't ever say that you "don't follow football" in public. This goes double if you are in Italy. They will sic the bears and robots on you for such apostasy.

Should Arena Net host a Guild Wars Wiki? One opinion
'Note: this section does not describe proposed changes to the GuildWiki. In fact, I strongly believe that the GuildWiki should continue to be a site that meets the community expectations.'

Yes, Arena Net should host a Guild Wars Wiki. It should have:


 * Tight editorial restrictions. Allow access only to:
 * Arena Net staff
 * Alpha and beta testers
 * Selected members of the player community, selected by a stringent application process, who are committed to keeping the information up to date with what is observed in game. These editors must be under perpetual surveillance, and possibly should serve for fixed terms.


 * Limited and clearly elucidated documentation goals:
 * Skill data (attributes, progression tables, acquirement info).
 * Lists of skills organized by profession, attribute, campaign, eliteness, and capture location.
 * Unique Item data, and lists of them organized by type, campaign and method of acquirement.
 * Location data, including lists of NPCs and henchmen.
 * Miscellaneous lists such as a list of titles or miniatures.
 * Game updates.
 * Basic quest and mission information
 * Possibly, maps.
 * Possibly, authoritative rticles on game mechanics such as damage.


 * Original content produced only at Arena Net's whim or request. For example:
 * Match reports.
 * Guild of the Week pages, with a possible guild page editable only by the guilds of the week.
 * A media gallery with links to other websites that mention Guild Wars.
 * A fansite tracker.
 * Essays about the game solicited from top guilds and players.

This wiki should be built from scratch. It is a matter of a couple day's programming to populate a MediaWiki installation with game data from original sources.

This wiki should not contain:
 * Articles on builds
 * Walkthroughs for quests and missions
 * Screenshots of monsters and weapons
 * Information that is not hard data, such as notes on pop culture references

The benefit of maintaining this data in a wiki is that it is easy to keep it up to date. Game developers can quickly update skill pages on the wiki when they implement a change. QA can add notes to quest and mission pages whenever they fix a bug. Player editors can annotate pages with observed anomalies.

This wiki should not be based on the GuildWiki. It should not use the GuildWiki as a source. Some of its data will be redundant with the GuildWiki, but that is unavoidable. I would greatly like to stress that any wiki receiving official support must not have the lax policies that the GuildWiki has.

Suggestions for the GuildWiki
(Arranged in decreasing order of priority.)


 * Get new management, preferably one that is somewhat active in the wiki and communicates with the userbase more often than once every two months.
 * Get new admins.
 * Get rid of the ads become donation-based.
 * Publish downloadable SQL dumps of the database.
 * Transition to MediaWiki 1.7 and PostgreSQL.