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)

Is there a 'wiki developer' discussion to be found somewhere? I'm finding that template standards, wiki coding techniques, etc. seem to be discussed on a per-page basis, rather than collectively somewhere that the knowledge could be shared. --Blake Rathen 19:47, 11 September 2009 (UTC)

Sorry for the lateness in replying to some of these, but the option to receive email on watched pages seems to be taking a vacation. The YARR team are aware of all of these issues, however nearly all of them are outwith our control.

As for a discussion on templates and suchlike, there is currently no other place than discussion pages on the EVElopedia where you can confer with YARR - although I agree that it would be handy to have. I will be watching this page from now on if anyone else has any further questions, failing that feel free to email us. ISD Erilus Nex 00:19, 14 October 2009 (UTC)

Thank you for your reply. I was promised one three months ago from another member of your team, so if you have a free moment, kindly thrash him or her with a suitably-heavy instrument to express my disappointment.

I think what it really boils down to is—and correct me if I'm wrong here—the Web team at CCP got told from On High to add a Wiki, saw it involved PHP, hacked it together as best they could, and then immediately fled back to ASP.NET, where they felt comfortable.

The solution, then, is to hire someone who is a talented Wiki developer, with good ties into the Wiki community, and give them wide license (or at the very least, a thorough and open-minded ear when making suggestions) to change the software and its configuration.

I'm very serious when I say that it would only take a very little bit of effort to catapult this resource into the premier source for information on EVE. Remember this? Those are customers being bulldozed off. Some of them might not be "hardcore" enough for EVE. But many were simply unlucky enough to have their first corp be a bunch of *******, or their first offer to help in a mission result in them getting their ship blown up, etc. The exact sort of thing that a well-maintained EVElopdia could prevent.

As a business case, hiring a Wiki developer now, not merely "Soon", cannot be argued against. As a player-relationship move, to this player at least, it would be an excellent way to expand the ranks of those playing this game we enjoy so much, which ultimately means a better world for me to play in. Pilk 01:50, 14 October 2009 (UTC)

"correct me if I'm wrong here" - you're wrong. Development has been contracted to a third party - CCP does not handle evelopedia related development in-house. --ISD Salpsan 16:21, 14 October 2009 (UTC)

Ah, thank you for the correction. In that case, the issue is that the fixes we need are line items in CCP's view. I know all the business school mantras about focusing on what you're good at and contracting out the rest, but this is one circumstance where that is not the ideal solution. Only by having a Wiki developer in-house can they internalize the Wiki's mission, and make the sorts of changes you might not even think to otherwise request (like enabling ParserFunctions).

The other nice aspect to having an internal developer is that it allows you to tap a huge and motivated base of potential employees. Right now, an EVE player who loves the game, but has experience on the LAMP or WAMP stack cannot contribute meaningfully to the company. Posting an opening for this job would trigger a flood of eager applicants, many of whom would be willing to work for a below-market wage in return for the opportunity to be a part of CCP.

As a last option, you can try opening things up to the playerbase. Any custom code for things like the Item DB import, your settings file(s), etc., could all go up in a separate Wiki namespace. We, as a community, can then suggest or make changes in ways that result in an absolute minimum amount of billable time to implement.

The reason that I'm so vocal on all of this is that I feel that EVElopedia is at an inflection point. Soon, players will be making a final decision on EVElopedia—will they point their new corpmates at it, or at some GoonSwarm training videos on Youtube? Soon thereafter, the information will start to stagnate, and GMs and ISD staff in the help channels will stop (if ever they started) pointing people at it in response to questions. Not long after that, the whole thing, which will only be getting new content from a small number of corporations interested solely in self-promotion, will be folded up and officially abandoned.

Just take a look at (what little there is on) Recent Changes. Drastic action needs to be taken. Soon. –Pilk 17:40, 14 October 2009 (UTC)

Here's the kind of user you've already lost: John Caldarius. He's clearly knowledgeable about Wikis and motivated to improve the site. But in its current format, he couldn't, so he stopped after one try. As time goes on, more of him will be lost, and what will remain will be YARR and this guy.

For anyone still arguing that the current EVElopedia isn't broken, try editing as your non-administrator user simply by hitting "random page" and fixing any errors you find. Half of the errors you'll want to fix will be in locked pages. Pilk 13:02, 18 October 2009 (UTC)

I don't think anyone here said that the EVElopedia is perfect. We know it has issues and we (we as the YARR team) are trying to minimize them as much as possible. We didn't choose the way the EVElopedia works, and do our best to transmit suggestions and improvements to the dev team. I have big hopes things will improve in the coming months, but I'm not in a position to guarantee anything. We still need player's help and collaboration, and taking in account your suggestions. No reply doesn't mean it's not on our suggestion list. --ISD Elumiel 14:14, 18 October 2009 (UTC)

I was going to update Deadspace, since I wanted to improve on this edit by making things into a nice table and adding in all the missing entries. However, I am stymied by the lack of approval of the current changes to article. So screw it, it can stay wrong. Who cares? Evelopedia is a failed experiment in CCP's eyes, but I know it's only because they never gave it a fighting chance. Pilk 15:26, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Hi Pilk. If you wouldnt care you wouldnt have posted this here. By all means, sir, i would love to tell you folks all the stuff that is coming for the EVElopedia on is next big update, but im not allowed to. So, bet on it that there is a lot of stuff coming that makes it far easier for you to use the EVElopedia without hassle. We try to cover the Moderation queue 24/7 but as we are all individuals that need some time for their other life outside of EVE there could be some delays on approvals on the moderation queue. Which usually are not that long. --ISD Eshtir 14:08, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

Then why not let the users help? Also, ETA on that update? --ingenting 11:51, 14 December 2009 (UTC)