Board Thread:Consensus Track/@comment-4787430-20131027000527

Hey everyone, I'm not sure how many of you knew this, but last week I was invited to visit Wikia at their headquarters in San Francisco, California to discuss The Elder Scrolls Wiki and possible ways we can make our wiki more inviting and user friendly to new and current contributors, and also to get feedback on the new features that will soon be released to all wikis.

I don't want to make this post too long, (but it probably will be) but there is a lot that needs discussing and would like to get the community's feedback on these topics and possible changes. I'll list a few topics that were key in the discussions I had with Wikia staff members.

I have underlined questions to make it easier for you to respond with your feedback, and of course if something was left out feel free to ask questions, too.

Making the wiki user friendly
While it's important to make the wiki user friendly to those just editing a wiki for the first time, it is also important to maintain our current contributors. In this section I will discuss changes to our Talk page feature and our Chat/IRC feature.

Talk page vs. Message Wall
I don't believe there was ever a discussion on the pros and cons of Talk Page vs Message Wall in the past. So, this was a topic that was brought to my attention when having new contributors in mind. Right now we use Talk pages to leave each other messages, and I'm sure there are people on here right now (new/current) that see Talk pages as not very user friendly.

You might often times get messages from contributors on your Talk page that are not signed, so you don't know who it came from, and you also may not know that by checking the edit history of your talk page, you can view the last person that edited your page. When you think about all the steps one would have to go through to leave a "proper" Talk page message, it just doesn't sound user friendly. Does anyone else feel the same way about Talk pages? If so, what are some of the other reasons?

There is another option that would get rid of the confusion. The use of Message Wall instead. Message Wall uses the format similar to blog replies and forum replies. You will never forget to sign your messages, because it is automatically signed when you post/reply on someone's Message Wall. That is one of the benefits of enabling Message Wall. How would you feel about the move to Message Wall? Do you think there are any downsides to it?

IRC vs. Wikia Live Chat
As with Talk page vs. Message Wall, there also has not been any community wide discussion of pros and cons of IRC vs. Wikia Live Chat. When I first came to this wiki IRC was already the only type of chat enabled, so that is what I'm most familiar with, although as of late IRC has its downsides, one of which is inactivity. Do you use IRC? If you haven't used IRC what is the reason?

There are quite a few wikis that already use Wikia Live Chat, such as the Fallout Wiki. Do you think if Wikia Live Chat was enabled on the TESWiki that there would be in increase in chat activity? Would you use the chat feature more if Wikia Live Chat was enabled? Or, do you think having Wikia Live Chat would cause problems?

New features
I think this topic is long enough already, so I will make a new discussion about the upcoming features Darwin/Fluid layout and VisualEditor. If you are interested to learn more about these new features check out the links below. I also want to put it out there that this wiki was asked if we wanted to participate in the Darwin beta. It will be released to all wikis at the end of the year, but I think it would be great to be part of it. In short, Fluid layout will give us back our much needed content space. I have been informed that most of the bugs have already been dealt with and that for now they are out of bugs to fix and that so far the wikis that have participated in the beta have not run into any huge issues. So, not wikis have broke due to the change over.


 * Project Darwin
 * VisualEditor

Oh yes, almost forgot. Video will also be discussed in a later topic. I told you there was a lot! 