Not sure if this really fits in this forum section, but I figure it fits more here than elsewhere (website related).

The suggestion: An official wiki (or wikis) hosted by Atelier 801.

ex: en.atelier801.com/wiki/ (single wiki) or multiple wikis per game en.transformice.atelier801.com/wiki/ or en.transformice.com/wiki/

Those who know me most likely know me from the Fortoresse or Transformice wikias. While allowing fan sites to flourish is great, having official resources is always nice, and allows some additional control for official staff. Here are some pros/cons as I see them:

Pros:
- Official - Makes it an official resource. Also being official would allows you to tie accounts to edits.
- Editing Requirements - Unlike Wikia, an official wiki could require a certain number of cheese / time played to edit.
- Moderation - Since users are tied to their official accounts, moderation would be made easier, and more official. I imagine this being either yet another staff type, or just Sentinels.
- Revenue - Wikia uses a ton of ads. by having it hosted by Atelier 801, not only would ads follow their seal of approval, any extra revenue (even if a little) would go towards them.
- Control over data - There have been a few cases of staff requesting their personal info be removed from the wiki (understandable). This would make it much less a "request", and would allow those viewing the pages history to see the information was removed by an admin and should not be re-added.
- Fluid layout! - Most wikis (like wikipedia) take up the full width of your screen! Wikia however doesn't for various reasons (TL;DR of it: money), although this can be turned on a user-by-user basis (or using special links) (Default Wikia vs Fluid layout). You know that larger screen you bought? It'll actually allow you to view more!

Cons:
- Incorrect information - I've been under the impression that some companies don't like official wikis, because it may make people think all information on there is 100% factual and correct, and accepted by admins as such. While I don't believe this is the case, it's something to think about.
- Wikia - Yah, Wikia won't just take down a wiki just because they've moved hosts. There have been a few notable cases where people have tried (wow, kingdom hearts, and others), and Wikia will try their hardest to fight it. Wikia uses the "CC-BY-SA" license so exporting and then importing articles is alright, but they retain the right to keep the information on their network, which would cause two wikis; one official, one not, both vying for views. However, so long as the new wiki is official and most / all editors move over to the new wiki, shouldn't be an issue.
- Server Security - Having Atelier 801 accounts tied to the wiki and using an popular wiki code base should address most of these, but it's something that would have to be looked in to.
- BOO, Atelier 801 staff sucks! Don't let them control our data!11!1! - Oh shush! Official wikis rarely have staff going around locking every single page and banning people for no reason. Usually. I don't see this being an issue, but while control over data is great for Atelier 801, it does mean we lose some control. But as stated Wikia will still be around, so go nuts and make it #1 for all "classified" data.
- Loss of Wikia features - This would come at a lose of some Wikia features (blogs, wikia-style forum, comments, mobile support, quick support time, etc). For the most part these are either not that important (Traditional wiki forums work fine, and not used often anyways, and user sub-pages work fine instead of blogs), others work to some extent in modern MediaWiki (talk pages function largely like comments, etc), or can be added with wiki extensions. I'd miss some of these features, but most of theme are negligible.
- One more thing for devs to worry about - Even if almost no issues appear, it would be one more thing for Atelier 801 to have to deal with, when it's something that can easily enough be dealt with as a fan-based site.

Concerns:
- Development time - Setting up a wiki isn't necessarily to hard, and if MediaWiki is used, most resources used by Wikipedia / Wikia could be used. And if Atelier 801 accounts are tied to the wiki and require specific conditions to edit, that also takes care of a decent number of cases of having to worry about people spamming / trying to take down the server with unreasonable number of edits from multiple accounts. Most development should only have to be for improvements, not upkeep. And most improvement would most likely be installing a MediaWiki plugin.
- User Name change - The name change feature could screw this up a little. There's a wiki extension for name changing, but integrating it into the name-change tool could be annoying I imagine. But the sheer number of name changes could make it a pain. Even if the changes were hidden with a bot flag, the edit history of certain users could get messy. I'm sure this issue has appeared on other wikis, so rather than theorize on solutions, I'd leave leave this to the admins to figure out / decide for the most part. But most likely the wiki account would be tied to your Atelier 801 account, but name changing on the wiki would be unrelated / loosely related to game name change.
- One wiki or multiple wikis - On Wikia, I (and others) have chosen to go the route of multiple wikis. To this end, the Atelier 801 Wikia was created as a sort of central hub. It is not uncommon for 1 wiki to cover multiple games, but usually those game are either closely related (sequels), or are smaller games, and having them in a central location makes more sense. But both work, and have their own pros / cons. I prefer multiple in this case (since they are so different), but that's me.
- Wiki community split - A potential issue. I do not represent all wikians, and cannot say everyone would gladly migrate. I'd say it's less of an issue than some wiki communities (we aren't all that big a wiki community considering), but I figure we'd gain some editors by being an official resource anyways.

I'm sure I forgot some issues, but here's what I've come up with for now.

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Just for the record, this is my suggestion and does not necessarily reflect the ideas / opinions of editors on Wikia (and most certainly not Wikia itself =p). While I like Wikia as a wiki host, and have no "problem" that has driven me to make this thread, I feel an official wiki is something to consider, and offers some inherit benefits.

Con: I wouldn't be a wiki admin =p Which is honestly fine by me, I'd only really miss being able to easily delete pages, and control the actions of everyone who enters my domain.

yes please i want this to happen

I think we got enough wikis

It's a good idea.

cheesezwheel a dit :

I think we got enough wikis

we have one, not counting cfm's

this is actually a really good idea, not only because it'll help attract more players to the wiki but also because it'd become more developed and it'd be a means of informing players on how to find certain content and more importantly finish events while still allowing announcements to be a bit more vague. it'll let players know that there's an option to either figure out how to play the event yourself or look at the wiki whenever you feel the need to (because you'll know that there actually IS a wiki for tfm w/o needing to verify)

puffpapa a dit :

cheesezwheel a dit :VoirMasquer

I think we got enough wikis

we have one, not counting cfm's

this is actually a really good idea, not only because it'll help attract more players to the wiki but also because it'd become more developed and it'd be a means of informing players on how to find certain content and more importantly finish events while still allowing announcements to be a bit more vague. it'll let players know that there's an option to either figure out how to play the event yourself or look at the wiki whenever you feel the need to (because you'll know that there actually IS a wiki for tfm w/o needing to verify)

One is enough

/no suppi

cheesezwheel a dit :

puffpapa a dit :VoirMasquer

cheesezwheel a dit :VoirMasquer

I think we got enough wikis

we have one, not counting cfm's

this is actually a really good idea, not only because it'll help attract more players to the wiki but also because it'd become more developed and it'd be a means of informing players on how to find certain content and more importantly finish events while still allowing announcements to be a bit more vague. it'll let players know that there's an option to either figure out how to play the event yourself or look at the wiki whenever you feel the need to (because you'll know that there actually IS a wiki for tfm w/o needing to verify)

One is enough

/no suppi

The wiki would just be moving for the most part. The old one would still be around, but wouldn't be actively maintained, and most/all editors would move to official one.

So do you believe we should get rid of this forum? After all, there was like 5 forums before this one, plus there's the CFM forum, among others. One is enough!... Except an official forum is better for numerous reasons, of course, right? As such, "one is enough" really isn't a solid argument by itself. I can assume a few reasons why you may wish to only have one, but I'd prefer to hear you to actually explain why you, specifically, feel this is a bad idea. It doesn't really help us "fix" the issue, or to agree with you that this is a bad idea if you won't elaborate (and since you replied against this twice, I assume you have reasoning fairly solid reasoning behind it).

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Another small pro for an official wiki in my opinion is it would prevent future Transformice wikis from spawning. Like when I originally took over the wikia, there were actually 2 large wikia Transformice wikis, both fairly inactive. They are now merged, but an official wiki would have stolen focus off of either of these really being developed in the first place. And in the future, it's not impossible someone will choose to create yet another wiki network, or some other domain (maybe micetigiri or something). Plus wikis in other languages may be created, but not necessarily the same wiki network. So by creating an official resource, this would simplify this and basically make ANY secondary wikis a fairly moot point, since the official one would be better regulated, have more editors, etc.

I REALLY gotta work on shortening my replies...

A few more things to consider with any kind of implementation like this:

• Would it be worth it? It'd take a considerable amount of time to make a decent implementation that will cover all of the features Wikia or other wikis already offer.
• What would happen with guides on the forum? Right now, event guides, the guide for Viprin's editor, etc. are all mainly on the forums and have a lot of purpose there, both as user-created guides, and generating a significant amount of discussion for people on the forums,
• What markup will it use? Wiki markup is generally unknown and hard for people to get into, while these forums already use BBCode for everything - would it make use of this BBCode?

Atelier801 has been really bad in hosting anything reliable and stable. Better let Wikia take care of that.

Shamousey a dit :

A few more things to consider with any kind of implementation like this:

• Would it be worth it? It'd take a considerable amount of time to make a decent implementation that will cover all of the features Wikia or other wikis already offer.
• What would happen with guides on the forum? Right now, event guides, the guide for Viprin's editor, etc. are all mainly on the forums and have a lot of purpose there, both as user-created guides, and generating a significant amount of discussion for people on the forums,
• What markup will it use? Wiki markup is generally unknown and hard for people to get into, while these forums already use BBCode for everything - would it make use of this BBCode?

For your first and last point, just using a standard mediawiki would save on dev time (as you can just install a basic working wiki from mediawiki.org), and would make installing extensions fairly easy. It should use wiki markup; nearly all modern wikis use it (since wikipedia uses it), and using forum BBcode would require extra work for Atelier 801, and would most likely cause issues with any mediawiki extensions they'd want to implement. Wiki markup isn't that unknown / hard to grasp, any more so than BBCode is. Advanced stuff might be tricky, but you don't need to know advanced stuff for standard editing. Plus using BBCode on the wiki would drive away knowledgable wiki editors, as THEY would have to relearn everything. So it will require some dev time, but so long as they just use a standard wiki implementation, it really shouldn't take all that much time to setup or maintain. Edit: Basic wiki text is basically this, knowing how to display file on the page, tables, and basic template usage (if not how to make them). There is also a mediawiki visual editor available, and various wiki patrollers would help fix incorrect / broken syntax other users make.

As for your second point, guides still exist on the forum even with the Wikia. And I try to link to the guides at the bottom of the page when possible to make sure people can view them. Wiki articles are a good community resource, but often don't replace forums / forum guides entirely, as people may wish to have control over the content of their guide, not be constrained by things such as keeping the article NPOV (Neutral Point of View), keeping it free of usernames, etc. If in some cases the a wiki guide "replaces" a forum one, then that just means the forum one wasn't up to snuff. But as an official wiki certain official guidelines could be setup, like a template on a wiki article that informs the viewer that there are one or more active forum discussions about the topic.

It would be nice to know who edited something.

Yes, Great idea Fewfre!
Well, also CFM is closed. There was good info about transformice, but now it's closed. We need something, where we can find all information quickly, example, readable e.c.
Hope they will think about it :3

2147483647% support!

/support zS

/support

Igotbannedxc a dit :

Yes, Great idea Fewfre!
Well, also CFM is closed. There was good info about transformice, but now it's closed. We need something, where we can find all information quickly, example, readable e.c.
Hope they will think about it :3

transformice.wikia.com
anvilgod.com/wiki