User blog:LOTRMod/Loremaster 2016 - with thanks to Quipp a.k.a. Handles

Well, the year of 2016 has come to an end, and in keeping with tradition, we have a Loremaster Shield to award to the top ten wiki contributors!

I'm sure most of you are familiar with the way this works already, but just in case: this shield is a prize / reward / thank-you that we give to the ten people who have contributed most to the mod's wiki during the previous year.

Only contributions to wiki articles are counted. Not comments, forum posts, forum replies, comments on the Updates page asking for your favourite faction, or suchlike. And it is not simply the number of edits which counts, but the volume of all edits - that is, the total amount of information you have contributed to articles over the entire course of the year.

Now, these lengthy calculations are not my work, but they are done by the wiki admin, Quipp. He spends many hours painstakingly looking through a year's worth of wiki statistics and tallying up the edit counts to find the top contributors. Indeed, were it not for him, these Loremaster shields would probably not exist, so we all owe him our gratitudes. (Sadly, Quipp had some unfortunate technical problems shortly after collecting the results, so I am presenting the results instead of him.)

So without further ado, I will go ahead and announce the top ten contributors of 2016: (I'm not sure if this list is in any particular order.)
 * Flimmity - the Burger King
 * Glflegolas - the traveloguing tree-suggester
 * Ffets - the humble Hobbit
 * Gen. Grievous1138 - hello there!
 * AlteOgre - the tireless ogreseer
 * LysurusPeriphragmoides789 - that spider guy
 * SamwiseFilmore - the Time Lord
 * LOTRMod - it's a fix!
 * MysteryFTW - the enigma himself
 * War Pig1237 - everyone's favourite porcine moderator

Congratulations to you all, and a big thank-you for your work! When the next update (Public Beta 31) is released, you will find a brand new shield waiting to be showcased.

What colour will it be this year? Yellow? Orange? Salmon Pink? Kebab Burgundy? Who knows...

To everyone else who didn't get the shield... don't be upset. These shields are a nice recognition of the people who have done the most, but the real prize is having a better and more complete wiki, and that's something that everyone benefits from. And, well, there's always next year! (But having said that, please don't try to edit the wiki with the goal of accruing as many edits as possible. That can lead to poor edits without regard for the overall quality of things. Improving the wiki should be its own motivator, and the shields regarded as just a nice side-effect of having lots of time to spend improving the wiki.)

Also, you can earn an exclusive shield in other ways - soon after the Easterlings are releasterling, we will be dusting off an ancient ceremony, and running a building contest on the mod page! And there will undoubtedly be special prizes for that. So, keep your eyes open.

And to everyone who contributes here - thank you for your work on this wiki, and I hope that you continue to find enjoyment in Minecraft Middle-earth.