As some of you already may have noticed, the OblivioWiki Merger is finally here. This brings mixed tidings for our wiki. It is great in the sense that it brings a lot of Oblivion-related content onto our wiki. It is bad, in the sense that it means there is a lot of work to do for the next little while. The focus of myself, Kacj, and Mbjones (who is/was the Administrator of the OblivionWiki) for the next little bit will shift temporarily from Skyrim onto the Merger.
There are a number of things that are going to be happening over the next few days and weeks, and I felt it important to let everyone know, to keep you in the loop. Mergers can be a very complex process at times. For most of the time, one of us will be on IRC to help communicate what needs to be done.
To begin with, though, a number of pages will be removed, as there are a number of duplicate pages from the OblivioWiki and our wiki. Do not be alarmed at this. For now, we are deleting only the stubs pages, and replacing them with the fully fleshed-out versions on the OblivioWiki. Obviously, by its very nature, the OblivioWiki is much more game-focused than our wiki has, and, when there exists two pages that are fully developed, a process will need to be worked out where we can incorporate the information on both. If you see that a page you have edited or created has been deleted - rest assured that the information is/has been incorporated into the page that it has been merged into.
Images have not yet been transferred over fully to our wiki yet, and this will be done in the next few days. Later on, we will need to work out whats happening with regards to the overall structure of the wiki, the templates and the categories. This is going to be done shortly, but has not yet been undertaken. (We are still in the initial phase of the merger right now).
I have a request though. If you wish to edit a page pertaining to the Oblivion game, to improve upon its quality, please be careful when doing so. Remember that a lot of pages exist right now that existed on both wikis, and that the page you are editing is quite possibly going to be merged shortly. (I say this not to try and discourage editing, only because the process of merging involves incorporating data from two pages, and one has to be deleted in the process - and 99% of the time, the OblivioWiki page is going to be kept as the "original" page, for the simple fact that it has all of the easy navigation markers already included.
The final note here is a note to the Administrators: First of all, be careful - merged pages should be merged from the page itself, not the "rename" window, to ensure that the page you are deleting does not have any unincluded content on it. Other than that... Get your game-face on. Its work time :)
How You Can Help[]
- Start looking for pages thould should be merged. The OblivioWiki pages have a prefix of "OblivioWiki:Merge/<pagename>".
- Combine as much of the information as possible into the OblivioWiki page
- Put {{Delete|OblivioWiki Merge}} on the main page names (This makes sorting categories a lot easier)
- Hold off on adding new pages for the next few days - It is going to get messy ont eh "Recent Changes" for a little while.
- Look for pages that are duplicated pages that had similar if not exact names. (i.e. book pages sometimes have different names - our wiki uses "Book I", whereas theres uses v 1, for instance, so they are different names, and add {{Merge|OblivioWiki Merger}} to them to let others know they need to be merged
- Make suggestions as to other things you can do to help out ... or ... better yet - do them :)
~Timeoin