User talk:Wolfie

Moving to Guild Wars Wiki
As one of the early people to sign up to the original GuildWiki ( User-ID #43 ), having invested a lot of time and energy into updating the wiki, and battling to maintain consistency of article formatting etc, stayed through the turbulent times when it was "sold" to Wikia and various other upheavals, have come to a point where it just doesn't seem to be any point to it anymore.

A number of issues lead up to this decision: So after 5 1⁄2 years, I am migrating to GWwiki. --Wolfie (talk|contribs) 06:41, 24 May 2011 (UTC)
 * The primary issue was over quest article formatting. I was in the process of recording and updating every quest article on GuildWiki (involved screen capturing every line of text and dialogue, testing every option (when the quest branches), and then updating the page on the wiki).  Was up 564 of 858 known quests at the time, when one of the admins just arbitrarily decided to make a significant change to the formatting standard, and in so doing invalidated all that time and effort.  Worse, the changes would have made the articles appear less appealing to the eye (and having spent a number of years in and around the publishing industry, have learnt a thing or two about page layout and design), made the "flow" of a quest article more confusing, and simply 'why do it?'.  A vast majority of the articles were already cleaned-up and conforming to the accepted format, changing it added no benefits (IMO), it appeared to be more about an opportunity for the admin to "stamp their presence" on a major aspect of the wiki.
 * Would not have minded if there had been a comprehensive survey of opinions over the old vs new formats, or if there was some overwhelmingly good reason to make the change (maybe the layout could be tweaked to allay some of the visual problems), but it was changed first and then only a light-weight discussion held after. Ironically, while appeals to revert back to the established standard went unheeded, after the admin changed only a few articles, stopped and nothing further was done to ensure consistency of the quest articles.  So it was ultimately all for nothing.
 * GuildWiki has been split a number of times, the latest forked an entire copy of the wiki, just cannot see that there is enough of a community left to support so many wikis, therefore inevitably active maintenance of articles will dwindle out and we'll be left with out-of-date articles.
 * This finally lead me to decide; Guild Wars Wiki services a wider audience, if for no other reason than it has hooks into the game itself. While I still wrestle with how ArenaNet (as a commercial company) get to benefit off the unpaid volunteers time and efforts to provide themselves with effectively a free extensive in-game manual, that said, it's mutually-beneficial to the community as a whole too, so time to "come out of the cold" and provide what content and support I can.

After exodus template
Was that really necessary? A simple AE is not hard to add onto pages. Not only that, but the template forces overlinking on articles which have the AE used multiple times, and per general formatting, overlinking=no (or to quote: "avoid linking subsequent appearances" . IMO, the template is 1) unnecessary, 2) easily confusing to new wiki editors, and 3) goes against the general formatting guideline. -- Konig / talk 09:32, 1 June 2011 (UTC)