User blog comment:Cosmicsilver/State of the Wiki/@comment-3186827-20141022154727

If there is one thing I've learned about wikis is that people will only contribute regularly if their heart is in it. Its very hard to coax or gather people who are simply not interested. The Recent Changes page always gives a good indication of the regulars. Personally, I edit in-game stuff I know about right now, and I feel its like that for most. I can however help or advise in the creation of policies or manuals, as I have experience in this before.

Even the best wikis out there have quiet times, like on uesp.net right now. ESO is out, but the wiki activity is largely the regulars. There are likely a multitude of reasons why this wiki is quiet:


 * The existence of two competitor wikis
 * Game interest dying down
 * People not sure how to edit correctly
 * People have had a bad experience here in the past
 * People don't like a certain aspect of the site
 * Lack of leadership
 * Etc

This list can go on. All we can do is try to minimize the issues we have control over. For example, when I first joined and started reading the DS2 pages here, the first thing that surprised me was the lack of consistency across similar pages - the DS1 content was great. Consistency was (and still is) a big issue. This is something that we have control over, and a Manual of Style would give people direction that this is how the page needs to be done and would minimize edit wars.

Its hard for me not compare our setup to the practices of other wikis I have been part of. Example: both and uesp.net and elderscrolls wiki have a consensus policy. It outlines exactly how community discussions should take place and what happens next. This would help in the unfinished discussion on the forums we have.

Generally, I think this wiki is lacking in a lot of policies. We only really have Media and Chat rules. Everything else is unclear. Most of the time I look at DS1 pages and go from there. We should really have solid policies on Neutral point of view, Copyrights, Sourcing, Etiquette, Edit Wars, Templates, File Naming, etc. Its a giant pain in the ass to do this, but it really needs to be done and more importantly - enforced.

For personal experience, I know staff promotions can help out ailing wikis somewhat, but its certainly not a long term, fix-all solution. On the wikis I've been on previously, we had Patrollers. Users whose job was to patrol the Recent Changes page and rollback bad edits and mediate issues. I know activity is low anyway, but most of the time new Admins would be nominated from people who have experience as a Patroller.

Another thing I should note, the main page of the wiki is (no offense) a complete disaster. If that's the page new readers see when they first get here, its a problem. It needs re-done by someone with a good wikia back-end code knowledge... and here lies the problem. Last guy I knew who was good at that stuff was Balagog.