Another month, another period of wiki projects being eaten under the massive advancement the Brotherhood is seeing. Most of the wiki update projects have taken a back burner to just trying to keep up with all the revamps and explosions of awesome that have been happening all over the Brotherhood. And yet, the wiki must go on.

Updates

Over the last month, the biggest change for the wiki has been on an appearance level. With the main site updating to a new layout, the wiki was brought along for the ride as well. However, feedback has been mixed to negative with the Sith layout implemented on the wiki. (This has been most pronounced amongst long time wiki editors who have been conditioned to see red links as an evil that must be eradicated. There were in fact some nervous breakdowns here and there, but those people are getting the help they need.) Given issues with readability and such, James has designated one of his evil minions to work up a viable CSS system for the wiki that won’t make people twitch too much. This process is also going to involve cleaning up and centralizing the wiki formatting CSS, so expect it to take more than a couple of days.

WotM & Featured Article

Another month, another Wikipedian of the Month and Featured Article.

This month, our Wikipedian of the Month is a guy that’s constantly cleaning up after everyone on the wiki by doing things like adding categories and fixing formatting. Given his long tenure as Wiki Tribune, it’s no surprise that Aidan Kincaid has continued to be there to help us all out in our wiki work. I know that Shad has a few of these already, so at this point I guess he could just build a little fort out of them. (Fort Bending?)

As if it hasn’t been getting enough good press lately in places like Evant’s Voice report, this month’s featured article is the page for the new fiction society, the Inquisitorius. It’s a great example of a good article bursting forth fully formed (Much like Athena from Zeus’s forehead. Somebody check Evant, make sure he doesn’t have a hole in his head…). There’s a lot of good info there, and I just couldn’t resist yet another plug for the Fiction Society.

Projects

• Accessibility: Lead: V’yr. The first phase of this project which will consist of developing the magazine style table of contents system for our Clan category pages. Once a tentative plan is in place for a standardized system, we’ll be working with the Clans to make sure their specific concerns aren’t steamrolled by the march of progress. Work will also be proceeding on a redesign of the wiki’s front page to meet the same goals for the overall wiki itself. V’yr’s been a bit distracted by the massive mountain of HRLD work, so I think we can excuse him. A mockup of how the Clan page table of contents may be formatted can be seen here.
• Tutorial/Policy Organization: Lead: Andrelious. Right now our wiki has a lot of duplicated and, often times, contradictory data when it comes to policies for such things as character page creation. With the help of the staff, I will be looking towards taking the current information and condensing it into single articles, as well as placing all the disparate pages together into specific categories. Additionally, development of the Manual of Style document will be part of this project.
• Archivist: Back burner for now. I feel that making the wiki easier to learn, navigate, and use is a higher priority at the moment than recording event plots. That isn’t to say that clans and their members can’t take some of this project on for themselves, as that sort of work is often a really great option for Dark Jedi Knight promotion requirements. hint hint
  

Wiki Tip of the Month

A lot of people have asked me about how to go about creating a new page on the wiki, which can be less than intuitive for new or less experienced users. There are basically two ways to go about doing this: Either running a search on the wiki for your desired page title or typing the page title into the address bar of your browser and navigating there. In the first case, when you run the search and return page name results, the wiki will display “Create the page "________" on this wiki! See also the search results found.” above the search results. The blank will be filled in with your page title name and will be a hyperlink to start creating the page:

If you type the page name URL for your desired new page into the address bar, you can navigate to that page and you’ll see the following:

Both of these options will allow you to create your new page (either by clicking the link to create the page in the first option or the link to edit the page in the second).

Final Words

Hopefully we’ll see some more progress on some of the long term wiki projects, but I’m not counting on it too much in the next month. Half of the staff is being buried by sooper sekrit graphics work (Damn that Sarin guy for making the Brotherhood more awesome and giving us work! shakes fist), so we’re trying to fit things in on this where we can.