EVE RP Wiki talk:Community Portal

Discussion round mk2 open

I have wiped this discussion page to open a new round of discussion. --ISD Eshtir 13:02, 18 May 2009 (GMT)

The SysOp Jungle

I'm borrowing the term in the header from It'Pannaih because it seems so perfect to describe this Wiki. First, let me establish some bona fides:

• I'm one of the first ten-thousand users on Wikipedia, and have several thousand edits there.
• I'm coming up on 100 edits on this Wiki, including some heavy lifting on the pre-changeover scanning system and a page on deadspace items.
• I run the internal Wiki for my company.
• I've contributed to the MediaWiki codebase used by this site.

What made Wikipedia so powerful was its openness to editing. When I saw a grammatical error, or a factual error, or just something I thought I could improve, I could dive right in and get it fixed, right then. Here, however, there seems to be no thought of that. Instead, we get:

• An opaque revision-approval system—we don't know who approved our article, we often don't know who rejected it and why, and we can't fix an article and then immediately send a corpmate to go read it.

  Suggestion: Disable the approved-revisions systems for all users except trial users. If someone wants to pay $15 (or 400m ISK which indirectly ends up as $15) to you in order to vandalize three times, I think you should frankly encourage that behavior, as it's an excellent money-making scheme as long as it costs you less than $5 per reversion. And if it doesn't, you should probably stop paying your Wiki editors seven-figure salaries.

• Absolutely-absurd login settings—Login lifetime seems to be about fifteen minutes. When I'm logged out, it still helpfully tries to suggest I'm Pilk in the upper-right corner, so I have to hunt for a login link (whereas when you aren't logged in on Wikipedia, you've got a nice, big "log in/register" link there). Indeed, I was actually logged out while writing this!

  Suggestion: Lengthen the login cookie lifetime. Create sensible defaults for links for people who aren't logged in.

• New articles from CCP being created in a WYSIWYG editor, then having their HTML copied wholesale into articles here.

  Suggestion: Force CCP employees to use templates for things like the blue "note" box. It will simplify the page's code (allowing easier editing), unify the styles of both player-written and CCP-written articles, and cause swirled peas. Oh, and while you're at it, enable ParserFunctions.

• Overzealous page protection—Take a look at Talk:Amarr from as I write this. Look at the number of people with frankly-somewhat-disturbing levels of knowledge about the backstory of that Empire. Then explain to me why it's locked, and, in the words of Ginger, "has to remain locked".

  Come to terms with the following facts:

  • Number of potential EVElopedia editors: 500,000
  • Number of potential Wikipedia editors: 4,294,967,296 (approximate)
  • Number of EVElopedia vandals (1:1000 ratio): 500
  • Number of Wikipedia vandals (same ratio): 4,294,967
  • Cost to a Wikipedia vandal to change his identification (IP address) and wreak havoc until (s)he is stopped a second time: $0
  • Cost to an EVElopedia editor in the same situation: $15 (paid to you)
  • Ability to shut down editing of a large, motivated, focused group of vandals on Wikipedia: Pretty much nil
  • Ability to shut down editing of a large, motivated, focused group of vandals on EVElopedia: "Attention players! The next member of Kenzoku to edit the GoonSwarm article for any reason will be permabanned. That is all." I'd say that's right about 100%.

  My point is, your encyclopedia will not be overrun by vandals. If it is, who cares? As long as they aren't editing an account services page to add, "then EVEMail Pilk your password", you really shouldn't care; the Wiki will heal itself. Even if you're so terrified of one new player encountering a goatse picture and quitting the game that you'd rather lock everything down, stop to consider how many new players quit the game every day because of how steep the learning curve is, and then modify that by how much less steep it would be if you had a vibrant player community maintaining the Wiki.

  Suggestion: Remove the protection on anything other than pages that literally and directly deal with RL $.

• The autolinker. Oh, holy sweet Ishtar Jesus, the autolinker.

  SuggestionDemand: Kill it with fire.

Pilk 12:21, 6 June 2009 (GMT)

/signed, hit the nail on the head.

We understand the "need to protect CCP's intellectual property." This is not the place to put original intellectual property (chronicles, short stories, race descriptions, etc). Pages are "locked, official content" are some of the worst pages on the wiki. The races are a perfect example. And the people asking to edit, set a high standard for the characters they portray and have invested years into playing those characters and understanding the background. CCP, you don't have to do this work if you let the community do it for you!

--Dex Nederland 22:11, 6 June 2009 (GMT)

/signed --ingenting 18:06, 17 July 2009 (GMT)