Tribune got a holocron - Commission by NatishaMR

Gotta love them Holocrons, at least if you’re character is the Tribune of the Holocrons I guess. This month was another eventful one for the staff, with some changes and the completion of a long standing project. Also, is there a competition on the horizon? It’s a possibility...

Clan Category Table of Contents

After what seems like forever (my bad), the clan category revamp has finally gone live. The new table of contents have hit both Naga Sadow and Plagueis, and will be rolling out to the other Clans soon. Part and parcel of that project will be having the staff implement the category restructuring for the remaining Clans so that the ToC’s actually have something to link to for many of their entries. The goal of this change was to make the categories a bit more approachable and interesting for new members and to highlight important sections of a Clan’s presence on the wiki itself. Additionally, while each section does have a default text description, the template does also include support for each clan to customize the text of those sections to make them better reflect the unique info contained within those categories from Clan to Clan. Suffice it to say, I’m really happy to have finally gotten this project to completion.

Staff Changes

Skar recently came to me and let me know that he would be stepping down from the staff due to real life commitments. I’d like to thank him for his service to the Wiki Staff, always there and ready to offer input into our ongoing staff discussions, and generally being a positive guy to have around. I’ve received some inquiries about filling that staff slot since then, but I had already decided that in the not too distant future that I’d be reducing the size of the staff anyway. I’d made the decision to increase the numbers of the staff beyond what had been the status quo levels at the end of last year due to the increasing amount of project based work that we would be seeing as The Force Awakens shook up the timeline, but always with the intention to return back to those normal staffing levels once that task was completed. So, for the moment, I won’t be looking to hire any new staff members with the day to day work receding back to normal levels, but I’d encourage anyone interested in joining the staff at some future date (as staff turnover will always be a thing) to just get out there on the wiki and make your mark. There are plenty of things here and there to update and revamp, almost none of which require staff admin access to work on. The mediawiki system was created as a user generated system, and the staff is mostly there to keep things on track here and there so to speak. Don’t hesitate to look for opportunities to get on our radar! (That is, after all, how most people end up on the staff in the first place, myself included.)

After a lot of planning, I’ve got the framework decided for a Wiki focused competition series for the latter half of this month. The staff and I will be working to offer several events over the course of a number of different competition types, all focused on or related to the Wiki and/or it’s fictional lore. My current target for the start date will be September 19th with a two week run time, and the line up of competitions should include several individual competitions as well as at least one team event. Expect more details in the next week, with updates as information becomes available!

Featured Articles & Wikipedian of the Month

This month’s featured article is Satsi Tameike Erinos. Atty and Uji have done a solid job crafting an NPC article here. It includes a good background while also making some room for CS style aspect information. Normally, with almost any other character article, this would be a no-no as it would simply be duplicating information found on the DJB website itself. However, for a personal NPC that lacks an official, system supported CS, having this information can be useful if others are going to be writing that character frequently. All in all, another great effort here..

As for our Wikipedian of the Month, this month that title goes to Armad of Clan Naga Sadow. Over the month of August he worked on a number of basic housekeeping tasks for his unit (from policing the Members of Naga Sadow category to putting together a Clan timeline article). These are tasks that are often uninteresting and generally all sorts of boring, but can be important to keeping the wiki an up to date snapshot of a Clan. It’s often the “little” things that most often get overlooked, but not this time!

Projects

• Wiki Competition: Lead: Selika & Entire Staff. The staff and I are looking at running a major, wiki focused competition. Look for competitions to appear (and further announcements) in the next week.
• Category Updates: Lead: Zachary, Assistant: Xolarin. With the completion and implementation of the new Clan category ToC’s, we will now be expanding out from the currently completed work in CNS and PLA updating all categorization and adding the new ToC’s as well.
• Archivist: Lead: Laren Uscot. Even with the new canon changes, the stories of the Brotherhood still need to be updated. Depending on how far we go with old events in the area of bringing them in line with new canon, this project’s responsibilities are somewhat in flux.
• Legends Dungeon: Lead: Selika. Sorting, sorting, and more sorting. There’s a lot of work here, so this is a long term project that is to be ongoing for some time.

Wiki Tip of the Month

This tip is somewhat an extension of last month’s tip, in that it also has to do with adding liscencing tags to image uploads. This is probably something that should have been implemented in the past, but it is now possible to select all the various license tags from a drop down menu on the image upload page. This means that you don’t have to manually add {{fairuse}} for example to every image that is uploaded any longer, but can instead just select it from the menu. It is my hope that this will make the process a bit more intuitive (dare I say… accessible?) by making it easier to see all the different license options available beyond just Fair Use. I hope that this will cut down on the number of images for, say, commissioned artwork that are often uploaded as Fair Use, in addition to raising the visibility of alternate licensing options such as Creative Commons.

#AskTheWiki

It’s time for questions again. Maybe even some answers as well.

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Rins'zler asks: Are you in the Wild Wild West

What do you think?

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Nero asks: What impact will possessions have on the wiki?

Well, there’s the impact I hope it has and the impact I think it might actually have. With possessions becoming a thing, it’s actually my hope to have fewer stub articles about things that a character owns than we have in the past (see the number of old ship articles that basically amounted to the infobox and a name). It won’t be up to the wiki to keep a running tally of each and every thing a person or a unit owns, so in that respect I hope that there will be a higher ratio of substantive articles about “things” compared to really short stubs. I can, however, forsee the explosion of those same short, stub articles minus any real content as people start to own more and more things, so it is my hope to strike a happy medium if at all possible.

On the policy side, I think it will be easier to police the “things” that members claim to own on the wiki since there will be a formalized system in place in the Brotherhood to regulate that. The staff will, moving forward under the banner of possessions, have a far easier time with making sure that we don’t have members creating articles for that Star Destroyer (or fleet) that they’ve decided they own. It’s almost a requirement once possessions hits the scene to do that, because if people can still continue to pull random things they own out of their back pocket on the wiki, why worry about possessions at all in a lot of ways? Formalizing a structure of possession ownership will leak into many other areas of the DJB, and the wiki will be one of the ones that will be most impacted.

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Laren asks: What do you consider to be an important aspect of maintaining a quality article?

There are many qualities that go into having a quality article, but most of it really comes down to comparing your article with things you might see on Wikipedia. A well written article will, in general, feel like you’re reading an article on Wookieepeida where the subject is something DJB related instead of Canon or Legends. Encyclopedic tone is a must, as you wouldn’t expect to see incredibly informal language or fiction staring back at you from the pages of your Encyclopedia Britannica or Wikipedia. Another thing is a good use of images that add to the article’s subject (the saying goes a picture is worth a thousand words, after all), but in such a way that they don’t overwhelm the text. Often times people want to include images in the text at such a large size that they detract from the article or make physically reading it hard. Always remember that the wiki system allows for images to be clicked on to be viewed at full resolution, so resist the urge to throw something in at full size or even reduced down to 300-400 pixels. The wiki isn’t an art gallery, the art is there to serve the content of the article instead of compete with it. Those are really the starting points for an article when you’re looking to get it to quality or especially featured status. Aside from how it’s formatted and presented, don’t fall into the trap of thinking an article has to be long to be good. All a quality article should strive to do is to comprehensively cover the subject matter. If the subject matter doesn’t end up having a huge amount of content to cover, it can still be just as much a quality article as one that’s four times as long. Many times, I’ve seen people try to stretch content in the article to make it feel longer and therefore appear “better”, but (much like in the ACC or fiction in general) writing more mostly makes things worse if you’re not really saying anything.

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Laren asks: Do you hide any easter eggs throughout the wiki for the keen and detailed to find?

Not as such, but I can’t speak for my predecessors. The wiki is so darned big that few have ever plumbed its depths, but there could be treasures galore!

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Ernordeth asks: What would be your dream project for the wiki?

The biggest update/audit the DJB has ever seen, one that would make the combined SA audits look tiny in comparison. I’d love to see a DJB Wiki that’s as close to 100% up to date as possible, but I know it’s not really a realistic goal. The issue with our wiki (as opposed to other wikis about fictional universes like Memory Alpha or Wookieepedia) is that ours isn’t just chronicling past events, it’s trying to provide the “current” version of the DJB. On those other wikis, character articles would never have to move between the Rogues and their unit categories for example. But, the staff and I will always be doing what we can in our own never ending battle.

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Lexiconus asks: If a member wanted to find the past consuls of their clan in wiki records, how would they do it?

This is something that should be found on either the Clan wiki page or Clan history wiki page. It’s really up to each unit, though, to keep their leadership rolls updated in each of their articles. User generated system and all that.

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Laren asks: What can the general membership do to help maintain the Wiki?

In general, just help keep the little things up to date. Some of the things this months’ WOTM member did are exactly the sort of things that qualify as small things that are a big help. Keeping Clan member categories up to date, things like that. The other option is to fix things that you see on the various maintenance reports (which can be found on the Special Pages page), such as broken redirects, uncategorized files, etc. So much of the system is editable on the user level that very little outside of some complicated templates or Dark Council office policy isn’t accessible.

Final Words

Just another reminder that the wiki staff as a whole is always here to give you a hand with wiki questions. Hit us up on telegram (many of us are on there often/always/too much), and even if the staffer you catch doesn’t know the answer they’ll track me down and make sure you get an answer. We’re there to help you guys out, so don’t hesitate!