User blog:Cosmicsilver/State of the Wiki

'''Warning: This is a relatively long post, pretty much just outlining a few things I saw fit to get out there to the community. Please feel free to use this blog for further discussion on the topics I bring up. '''

Hey there, as you all know, my name is Cosmicsilver. I'm an Administrator, and I've been on this Wiki for a little over two years now. I'm writing this blog post to give everyone an idea of how I personally believe things are going on the Wiki, and what I think we can do to change and improve. To start, I'd like to go over what is being done correctly. As of now, we are doing pretty well in terms of coming together on various issues and crafting fixes, allowing us to go forward. We have a sizeable community, when referring to the chat and forums, which is great. This larger community does allow for more publicity; but, due to the lack of work done, most people don't stick around. We have some rather dedicated non-staff editors: Jimeee, Zelron, -The Gray Wolf-, and Billy Ho XBL to name a few in no particular order. I'm very grateful towards these editors, regardless of how well or not well I get along with them. They work very hard to improve this Wiki and to help in organization of community discussions, and their help should not be overlooked. As for dedicated staff editors, there aren't many. I know the other Admins are all rather busy with their lives, as will I be in the near future. A couple of our Chat Moderators are relatively active editors, namely LadyinCrimson9 and Wolf of Velka. They show relative dedication in their work, and for that I and the rest of the Wiki are very grateful. Now that I've gotten through with calling out all the editors I'm grateful to, let me get to the faults the Wiki is currently facing. First and foremost, we have a severe lack of active staff members. Currently we only have two active Admins, myself and Volknur, as well as a semi-active Bureaucrat, Fingyer. The rest of our Admins and the other Bureaucrat have more important matters to attend to in their lives, and it's completely understandable that they can't be as active as they used to be. What should we do about this, if anything at all? Do we feel that two fully active Admins are enough? Going on from there, we need to assert requirements for promotion on the Wiki. As of right now, anyone can be thrown up for a vote to become whatever position. Here's how I personally feel we should go about it by position.

Bureaucrat promotions:
 * 1,500 mainspace edits
 * Member for at least 1 year
 * Moderate knowledge of Wiki code
 * Role model to others
 * Must be an Administrator for at least 2 months
 * Nominated by a current Bureaucrat
 * Unanimous backing of current staff members

Admin promotions:
 * 1,000 mainspace edits
 * Member for at least 9 months
 * Moderate knowledge of Wiki code
 * Role model to others
 * Nominated by a current Admin or Bureaucrat
 * Unanimous backing of current staff members

Chat Mod promotions:
 * Member for at least 2 months
 * Knowledge of Chat Rules
 * Role model to others
 * Nominated by a current Chat Moderator, Admin, or Bureaucrat
 * Unanimous backing of current staff members
 * Minimal editing experience is preferred

So yeah, just my suggestions, feel free to suggest changes or ask questions about them.

Moving on to the next fault of the Wiki, we are not good at finishing discussions. There are, at the time of posting, 7 unfinished discussions on the Wiki Discussion Board. They've been open for weeks in some cases, and that's just showing a lack of organization among the community. We need to finish up current discussions before creating more, as this causes more traffic to the boards, causing some of them to be forgotten about.

My last thing I'll be bringing up in this post is that we need to fix the Manuals of Style to make them more useful for users. The Manuals currently don't explain very much, nor do they even come close to explaining or listing all the templates for each section of the Wiki. If others would be willing to help, I will get right to work on improving them, but it's not really something that can be done alone.

This is all I have for now, but I plan on doing more posts like these periodically as I feel it helps with keeping everyone a little more organized and up to date with everything going on around the Wiki.