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Guilds on the wiki
Regarding Guild article on the wiki and how they came to be:
I have no idea of the background (and I've looked). Guilds existed here when I first learned of GWW (that was soon after I started playing, but long after GWiki was sold to Wikia and after ANet offered to host this wiki officially).
It makes perfect sense to me that ANet would like to host an area that included Guilds (since the game has no tools to do this). Unfortunately, the original implementation created so many special rules around the pages that maintenance of the guild space has always been a nightmare...and the system has such a bad reputation that there's huge resistance at GW2W to doing anything like that for GW2.
However, the wiki isn't the best place to host a guild: it provides only a fraction of the required tools: there's no forum, no blog, no sign-up calendar, no RSS, no shoutbox, and it forces people to be public with their ideas/names/etc. What the wiki can be good for is making it easy to recruit/find guilds, but because of the original policies, it's been difficult to gain any traction on ideas that expand the use of the guild space beyond it's current "this is our guild" functionality.
I suppose there's an opportunity to change that now: many of the people who strongly objected to evolving the guildspace are gone...and we've scrapped some of the worst rules that created unnecessary maintenance nightmares. But I think it would be a lot of effort with insufficient benefit. (Still, if you have some ideas, I'm happy to discuss them with you and help you flesh them out and perhaps even get them rolling. You might even change my mind about whether it's worth the effort.) – Tennessee Ernie Ford (TEF) 16:14, 9 July 2012 (UTC)
- Okay, let's swim here a bit. The policy is at Guild Wars Wiki:Guild pages, shortcut: GWW:GUILD and the talk page Guild Wars Wiki talk:Guild pages has six archives. This is going to take me some time to submerge.
- Maintenance is covered in Guild_Wars_Wiki:Guild_pages#Inactivity.2C_clean-up.2C_and_deletion.
- Setting self-goals. I will try to find which were the "nightmares".
- Resistance in GW2W: I'm not sure if I will be buying it so I may not care about it at all (due to "-Dying is okay.-" "new" "philosophy???" (can't remember the name of the game developer saying that in the promotional trailer but want to punch him in the face (male, slim and tall).), JQ Bots pawned ANet, no physical dimension for characters, etc.).
- The wiki isn't the best place to host a guild. Completely agree, I myself have trouble to find a good free server. Currently using forumer but that site's new management is a total disaster. Maybe ANet could host itself an exclusive free server of Guilds.
- Recruiting and finding: This is something I'm interested with at the moment, not as a user but as a bookkeeper. I was just checking the Category:Guilds and found out that several (historical) guilds are still listed due to Categories and strongly believe they should be removed so that the listing is fresh and updated...or delete the page itself.
- Which were the "worst rules"? A lot of effort with insufficient benefit: I have seen User:Ich bin marc working on it Special:Contributions/Ich_bin_marc. I don't know which is the progress status. At a first glance in the guild policy , deletion section: I find 3 months wait period to tag {{inactive guild}} is too long. I believe players may completely forget about it. Should be monthly in my opinion and should also have an automatic mail system (no-reply) to notify it's creator to update it. Since Guild spaces are maintened by their members, all wiki bookkeepers should be able to pass the maintenance "ball" to guild members instead. I don't recall Administrators deleting Guild pages, maybe because I never payed attention to that. It's funny that Guild Wars Wiki:Deletion policy itself has no exclusive section for Guilds, it should.
- I will start reading the archives.
 Yoshida Keiji talk 21:51, 12 July 2012 (UTC)
- Let me know if you can explain why the guild space was created the way it was from the archives; I've read through them and I can't quite understand the reasoning behind it. The worst rules in my opinion were everything except the minor syntax requirements: article name is guild name (i.e. title case and the tag is in the infobox), the guild uses the guild infobox template, and people otherwise follow wiki policies about talk pages and articles. The rest... required non-guild members to police the guildspace regularly, discover violations, pester the article creators to fix those errors, and punish repeat transgressors. No wonder so many hate it now.
- Originally, the policy was that any guild page that wasn't kept up to date got tagged, possibly merged to "historical guild," and sometimes deleted. I think this is a waste of time. There's no reason (imo) for the wiki community to care if a guild page is stale or not, since it has no affect on anyone else. The wiki can have 40,000 guild articles and it's not going to slow things down. You say three months is too long? I say let's stop worrying about it altogether. The policy now says we can delete stale articles whenever we like; the tag is a matter of convenience (makes it easy to find the stale ones) and politeness (give people a chance to remove the tag). The old policy required several intermediate steps, so it was worse still. (And yes, there used to be regular move/deletion of guild pages, depending on the policy at the time.)
- There are a couple of folks (like Marc) who periodically go through and tag stale guild articles (probably using a DPL script to find them...and accidentally generating a lot of RC traffic, btw). But they really needn't bother because the policy allows stale articles to be deleted after 12 months; there's no requirement to tag them for deletion. – Tennessee Ernie Ford (TEF) 22:20, 12 July 2012 (UTC)
- Honestly though, like I said on GW2W (I think), you don't want 40,000 guild articles, because then it interferes with people being able to find guilds to join. If that's your only stated goal of the section, then you want to fight bloat as much as possible. WoW wiki had server pages/subpages where guilds could put their name up, in theory to make it easy for someone to find them - but when I started playing in 2009, the vast majority of them had disbanded or quit playing, and it was impossible to contact them regarding an invite. When a guild breaks up, they rarely (if ever) strike their name off the wiki's list of guilds, so it gets bigger and bigger and less and less useful for actually finding a guild. At that point, it just becomes a terrible half-archive of a portion of the guilds on any given server, without any real reason why, and it's nowhere near complete and they vary in writing quality and it's just... pointless, really. Not having a section at all would be far better for the wiki than having one without any way to prune it. -Auron 00:57, 13 July 2012 (UTC)
- Auron: Now that you mention "When a guild breaks up, they rarely (if ever) strike their name off the wiki's list of guilds," withing my GW life, I had been officer in several other guilds before creating/leading my own guilds to finally succeed with [ASIA]. Everytime I did return to wiki to clean-up this would happen:
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- Why does the Wiki Community find these pages useful to keep? Clearly, a same player cannot lead 5 guilds at the same time. I wander which would be the percentage of total guild-100% and non-existing guilds-???% that the Wiki could reduce its listing.
- Considering the tools we have at our disposal like for example the HoM Calculator, any player can type somebody else's character name to check their progress. Couldn't a feature alike show others the status of a guild? Like: No results found (guild doesn't exist anymore). Last login of their current leader and the present time number of Officers? Yoshida Keiji talk 13:48, 13 July 2012 (UTC)
Archiving
First, thank you very much for all the archiving of talk pages that you have been doing. I always mean to get around to it, but something else always comes up.
Second: the long standing practice has been to name the archives 1, 2, 3, 4... but I find this makes it hard to research. So, when I move stuff, I still call the articles Archive 01, 02, etc... but in the archive box, I try to specify the dates (you can see my talk your page for an example). There's no policy about how to do it, so it's entirely up to you if you prefer the easier-now method (what everyone does) or the easier-later method (what I do).
Thanks again for doing the work. – Tennessee Ernie Ford (TEF) 07:12, 11 July 2012 (UTC)
- Ok, I feel particularly dumb, since if I had looked at your talk page first, I would have realized you already do this. In that case, I'll just leave you with my thanks. – Tennessee Ernie Ford (TEF) 07:15, 11 July 2012 (UTC)
- LOL at Edit Conflict in my own talk page. Yes, I totally agree dating links is better than numbering. I will proceed this way from now on, atm I'm just giving priority to catch up with Recent Changes since I have fallen behind due to real life. Yoshida Keiji talk 07:21, 11 July 2012 (UTC)
Ignoring spam in RC
There's a trick to ignoring some types of RC spamming: typically ,the changes take place in one wiki-space (not several). On the RC page, choose that namespace and then tick the invert selection box. You will see all RCs, except those in the spammed arena. For example, I use this when someone is setting up their character pages (even with show preview, a user with 12 toons using Wyn's templates is going to make 20-30 changes easy). It also is helpful when someone is fixing a template or updating guilds within an alliance or... Hope it's useful for you. – Tennessee Ernie Ford (TEF) 08:28, 11 July 2012 (UTC)
- Great tip, thanks. I just used Invert Selection with User and could find the edit in Urgoz's Warren/Map...now a new question comes up... Why we can only use one option instead of two? That would significantly reduce the list of retarded spamming. Yoshida Keiji talk 08:49, 11 July 2012 (UTC)
- YW.
- Because, alas, that's how MediaWiki wrote the RC filter. You could use DPL to create your own list of recent changes. (In fact, you could probably construct to ignore edits from a specific person; you definitely could ignore edits to certain pages or to pages with specific words, e.g. ignore edits to pages that begin,
User:Tennessee Ernie Ford.)
- On GWiki, Dr Ishmael set things up so that a registered use filter out changes by one specific user. This was at a time when several people were adding interwiki cues to autolink articles to the corresponding French and German versions of GWiki (since there never has been official versions of GWW for foreign languages, as there are for GW2W). That's a clear example of RC spamming that should be encouraged and is going to interfere with everyone's ability to find specific changes. (And one of the reasons why I don't care if people spam RC for other reasons.)
- Also: do you use your watchlist? – Tennessee Ernie Ford (TEF) 09:22, 11 July 2012 (UTC)
- Yes, within my account's Preferences Watchlist tab, I have the last three options ticked-up.
- Add pages I edit to my watchlist.
- Add pages I move to my watchlist.
- Add pages I create to my watchlist.
- Can you link me Dr Ishmael work so I can create (duplicate) my own Recent Changes? I would love to have a Special page: Recent Changes without retarded spamming. Yoshida Keiji talk 10:31, 11 July 2012 (UTC)
- I'm wondering if you use "enhanced recent changes"; found under the "Recent Changes" tab under the Preferences settings?
 Chieftain Alex 11:10, 11 July 2012 (UTC)
- No, I don't use "enhanced RC", I just tried it to see how it would look and... ewww... Yoshida Keiji talk 11:48, 11 July 2012 (UTC)
- "Can you link me Dr Ishmael..." Sure, let me Google that for you. You'll have to chat with him, because the actual code is fairly complex. (Although it might be possible for you to copy that last bit of stuff into your personal common.js page — I don't remember if it's specific to GuildWiki or if it will work on any MediaWiki site – Tennessee Ernie Ford (TEF) 16:04, 11 July 2012 (UTC)
- LOL that code is waaay... complex for me. Either the Wiki Community itself helps bookkeepers or bookkeeper don't worry thaaat much. I'm here, present and accounted. Can't we just have a Special:Recent Changes version 2.0 that removes Feedbacks retarded spamming and Userpages retarded spamming so that we can deal with Game content better? Yoshida Keiji talk 16:20, 11 July 2012 (UTC)
- RC is a function of MediaWiki; it's not something that GW2W or GWW controls directly (aside from clever ppls like Ish creating clever widgets).
- (Incidentally, there's really just a tiny number of situations in which RC is affected. It's not spam, it's almost entirely people learning how things work or doing something that cannot be done without trial and error. It's annoying, but it's never intentional and it's never ...retarded. Between invert selection and the watchlist, I honest never have a problem ignoring the occasional issue.) – Tennessee Ernie Ford (TEF) 16:33, 11 July 2012 (UTC)
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