User:Pling/The failures and misgivings of a Guild Wars Wiki

For those of you have been living in a cave for the last ... however many months, the wiki has had its more than fair share of problems. Election policies, adminship policies, personal attack policies, user page policies, more election policies, and harassment policies; wiki drama, trolling, idiocy, asshattery; a general atmosphere of hostility, pretentiousness and politics.

Funnily enough, on this wiki created for the documentation of Guild Wars, the surges of drama come from that which is supposed to ensure and improve said documentation -- policy. How long has it been since Guild Wars Wiki:Article retention was updated? Did we ever create five drafts to improve the finer touches or rework it altogether? No. Is it because the mainspace is successful? Perhaps; the main improvements that could be made to the mainspace of the wiki is to what we already have, or adding the subtler things in the game. Policy on content is pretty much sorted, with just a few changes that could easily be made.

Why, then, do we feel the need to redraft, rework, re-discuss, re-examine, review and re-propose Guild Wars Wiki:Adminship, Guild Wars Wiki:Elections, Guild Wars Wiki:No personal attacks and ... Guild Wars Wiki:Adminship? Is it to improve our content and our mainspace? Hell no. It's probably to govern the user base... except is it even necessary?

Point out to me, please, the last time Zerpha The Improver, Liche or That Sounds Risky needed to discuss policy? Have they ever delved deep into the talk pages of ADMIN, ELECTION or NPA? No. And why is it that I can only think of three people off the top of my head that only edit (or used to, in the case of Liche) the main namespace? Is that not pointing out the faults of our wiki? Only two people out of the entire active Guild Wars Wiki userbase edit solely to improve the documentation of Guild Wars? (That's not to say that others don't edit the main namespace -- my point here is that the majority of the wiki don't edit for the sole reason of improving content.) Policy, "that which is supposed to ensure and improve said documentation", seems to drawing us away from the mainspace. It's certainly not the case that the main is full and our attention on it is not needed -- we have a lot of stuff that needed filling out, uploaded and un-stubbed. It's not directly disruptive users that draw us away from it either -- if policy and politically motivated users did not restrict administrators to the extent that they could not deal with disruption without the impending "[crucifixion] in an orgy of wikidrama," we would not need to spend our time on arbitration cases or discussing the minutia of user activity and policy. We would be improving the NPC stubs, reuploading the required images or updating images.

Then we get the people that only come online, or appear online, whenever there is some policy discussion or dramatic scene taking place. These people hardly ever edit the content, yet they have just as much of a say in how policy is formed -- as I said, policy is supposed to improve the main namespace, and those who edit the main namespace. So why is it that these people have just as much of a say in what affects the wiki as a whole, when they do not even edit the wiki? Policy, that which is supposed to ensure and improve documentation, is decided by those who do not contribute however directly or indirectly to documentation? Sorry, but democracy in the hands of those who aren't here to feel the effects of the community and documentation simply doesn't work.

Yes, yes, I know -- there are other aspects of a wiki other than contributing directly to the mainspace. The majority of us discuss and contribute to things that still have an effect on it though -- templates, categories, the useful policies, and maintenance. We also chat on talk pages, and that's fine; we need some fun, after all. It's the pointless stuff that we need to throw out before we get stuck in the hole we've dug ourselves in: unnecessary bureaucracy, politics and heated discussions that don't have effect on the reason we should be here.

We could probably solve this by starting anew with the political-barebones that make a MediaWiki wiki. Give sysops sysop tools and trust them to use them properly. Give bureaucrats bureaucrat tools and trust them to use them properly. Keep something on "civility" to show newcomers that we don't accept incivility, personal attacks or harassment - without going into the minutia of every occurrence of every incidient. Keep whatever is already successful in maintaining the main namespace, and in letting newcomers know how and what the wiki documents -- Article retention, Image use, Copyright, Builds, Deletion and formatting guidelines.

-- Brains12 13:10, 17 May 2008 (UTC)