The Imperial Wiki

[Ender]

The Imperial Wiki was first announced here as a lark. As a result, I'm not quite sure if it would fall under the umbrella of the Senate, but at the very least this is as good a place as any to put forth oficial policy announcements about it. Stark and Shep assigned as admins for it, but as you can see on the first page of that thread fromthe onset there was a bit of debate about it and its role. The results have been less then effective. I mentioned this in PSW and Stark responed thus.

Shep and I would agree with you, and moreover policy is thin and I'm not sure how much Shep and I are supposed to do. If people want to make a success of it, it's certainly possible, but some definate plans need to be laid out and we need to choose editors rather than rely on the open-wiki layout which has either failed or created heaps of work for admins/moderators, depending on your perspective.

Simply put, the roles and responsibilities of the appointed admins are not sufficiently laid out and a coherent framework or plan has never developed resulting in it being a headache. I think this should be rectified so that we can get the thing kickstarted. It would be nice to have an effective tool for technical referencing that anyone can access, and as the Official History of SDN appears to have died, I frankly think something covering those forum, who we are and the history here would be nice to have, something akin to the ASVS FUQ and archive.

SO can we either get some clarification or set some policy here?

[Coyote]

I think that the Imperial Wiki should be the dominion of the "Keepers of the Lore", that fgalkin should be the big cheese (EDIT: with Shep & Stark grandfathered in if they want), and he should have a handful of assistants that are Senators willing to shoulder the responsibility of being fair, honest, and devote themselves to the electronic archeology involved in finding references.

I also think that people should post their own entries as PMs to the Keepers of the Lore, they will be posted by the Keepers, and if there is any argument about what is said (some sort of ego inflation or something regarded as a smear) then we take it to peer review here in the Senate.

My 2 pfennigs, anyway.

[Coyote]

A plebe has raised this concern:

The whole point of a Wiki is that it has a large pool of editors that can make changes quickly. Right now there's very little oversight so any idiot can write whatever he wants and it'll stay up until Ted C fixes it, but the opposite - having a handful of moderators who repost articles after checking them - will negate any advantage the Wiki format has, slow the progress of the Wiki to a crawl, and scare away editors.

And idea that was floated when the Wiki was first created is to keep working with a large pool of editors, but have volunteers write a substantial article as a sort of "job application". If the standard of that article is high enough, they get a Wiki account and can go wild. This will make it easier to ban people (no more multiple sign-ups to evade a ban), ensure quality, and keep the advantages of the Wiki format.

[Ted C]

Now that I can post on the subject...

We need a few things for the wiki.

• In addition to administrators, we should probably have a few "patrollers" who can review updated pages for grammar corrections and consistency with our style.
• Related, we need a style guide so admins and patrollers will have an idea what to look for when reviewing content changes.
• If there's anyone who really wants to delve into Wiki-code for designing templates and such, we could probably use an architect.

[Ted C]

On an amusing side note, we have over 4 times as much content and about 20 times as much traffic as that other "versus" wiki.

[Ted C]

Suggestion for articles:

Individual Star Trek episode articles that specifically address what the episode reveals about the technology, biology, etc. of Star Trek.

Similar point-by-point analyses of Star Wars sources could be useful, too, although the longer format may make doing one article per film or novel problematic.

[Coyote]

Suggestion for articles:

Individual Star Trek episode articles that specifically address what the episode reveals about the technology, biology, etc. of Star Trek.

Would using Sonnenberg's Opinionated Voyager guides count? After all, it's not as if we put up some facade of fairness in our loyalties.

Similar point-by-point analyses of Star Wars sources could be useful, too, although the longer format may make doing one article per film or novel problematic.

I see... trouble in the Force. The veracity of EU canon vs. not-canon arguments could be problematic. Let's face it, very few of us are purists one way or another-- most, like me, pick canon by smorgasbord; accepting some tales, violently rejecting others (coughcoughCrystalStarcough).

[Ted C]

Would using Sonnenberg's Opinionated Voyager guides count? After all, it's not as if we put up some facade of fairness in our loyalties.

I think we'll be looking more for specific versus-related information, such as opportunities to calculate power generation, firepower, range, speed, etc. I would certainly link to relevant essays at Sci-Fi Debris, though (as has already been done in various articles).

The veracity of EU canon vs. not-canon arguments could be problematic. Let's face it, very few of us are purists one way or another-- most, like me, pick canon by smorgasbord; accepting some tales, violently rejecting others (coughcoughCrystalStarcough).

This would seem to be a simple matter of noting the place of any given source in the canon heirarchy. Movie-based evidence automatically supersedes novel-based evidence, for instance. I would be inclined to start with the films (which actually have articles that could stand to be expanded) and leave novels to people who have an actual interest in them. If the Star Wars TV series ever actually makes it to the screen, then we'd certainly want to have articles for its episodes, too.

[Ender]

I nominate VT-16 for the first patroller. He spends a lot of time at Wook so he knows how to do style, code, etc.

[Ted C]

I've started a style guide.