Board Thread:News and Announcements/@comment-25330335-20150908205215

Many of you guys have probably read this, but I want to make sure everyone has, and hopefully provoke some discussion by posting it here. It was originally written as a blog post.

Hey everyone. I am going to preach a short sermon to all you people before going to bed, hoping that it will make some difference.

⇊⇊⇊⇊⇊⇊SERMON⇊⇊⇊⇊⇊⇊
Alright. To start off with, I would like to apologize in advance for any insult what I am about to write may cause. I would say that I am not trying to make anyone feel guilty for not helping make edits, etc., except that I am. I know that some of you put a lot of effort into wiki pages, and I am going to say here that that is appreciated, so keep up the good work. However. I sit here, at my computer, which is so pathetic that it can barely handle "The Battle For Wesnoth" (look it up, it is a good game), and could make hundreds of edits without help from another machine, if only I had the time. Many of you use your gaming machine to go on the wiki, so it is fairly easy for you to open up MC and take some pictures, or do some tests, etc. Some of you know how to decompile .class files to collect data for the wiki. All this is really cool. The only issue is that I don't see much of this effort being put into articles that need it. Right now, we have over 50 pages in the Marked for review category, and they don't seem to be being worked on at all. We have resources like the amazing changelog that Mevans has compiled over and excess of 2 years, and many of our infoboxes have no idea when some features were added (This is something that I plan to take on personally). Any number of pages still could be marked for review, or expanded upon for better quality. Many of our pages need images or even just layout help to keep them up to ever degrading standards. Most pages barely follow the wiki style guide. One more thing. After an update, there is a rush to create new pages. All these pages get created, moderated, trimmed down, and a little flesh added. But many of these pages, especially the ones created from recent updates, are M4R. They haven't been fleshed out. Use older pages to help model what these new pages are supposed to look like, and use the methods mentioned above to help you complete the task.

Now I know that there are people here who want to help. That is not our problem. We have over 200 active users who are ready and willing to meet this challenge. Now, an argument I have heard a lot, is that a lot of people do not know how or what to edit. The information is there. You may have to look a little bit, but it is there. And if you don't know how to do something, or where to find something, just ask one of the staff. That may seem scary, but we are all nice people and we want to help you help the wiki.

Now feel free to critisize this all you want. My goal was to write a call to action. I want you guys to ask questions below, and maybe do some extended forum activity to work on the contents of this blog post. Keep all of this in mind. Thanks for reading everyone!

SamwiseFilmore (Admin)  (Fill My Mailbox) 20:52, September 8, 2015 (UTC) 