Closed Amnesty for significant old Wiki WIPs?

[Primitive Polygon]

Whilst I understand the utility in removing bloat from the wiki, there are quite a few old 'WIP' articles from before the current standards were brought about. Some which might be considered niche, but are very fluff significant as well as historical/amusing.

Could we perhaps establish some sort of system for formally approving these articles, without having to alter them, even if they don't meet some modern standards? It seems a big waste of time to submit setting elements that have literally been a cross-referenced and acknowledged part of the setting for years. Does it even make sense to waste reviewer time on things like that?

TLDR; I'd like to remove the WIP status from the Mecha-Druidism and Freespacer Terminology articles, but submitting them for approval seems ultra dumb, seeing as I don't want to alter them one iota....

It's not my work!

 

[Andrew]

To clear up some myths. These articles were not moved out of some kind of malice. They were moved because they were clearly marked by their author as WIP. I merely moved them to the WIP bin which is part of my job as a Content Manager.

• They can always be left as WIP, but still linked in as reference (Can put in some OOC Information at the bottom of the articles) (Unlike the belief of some people there is no purge coming, this is entirely fictional and unfounded. Not to mention we look before we remove things and if anything is ever removed accidentally it can be restored.)
• It also wouldn't take much to get those articles up to a point where they can be approved. The main things they lack are wikification (links to other articles) and OOC Information (including credit to the original author) added without any major alteration to the authors work.. (If you want I'd be happy to help with that as I will be doing it with other articles that are at completion/almost completed in the WIP area)

@Primitive Polygon

 

[Wes]

How about I give everyone a window of "easy mode" approval for these so they're not stuck in limbo? I'll post a proposal soon for that.

 

[Primitive Polygon]

Thanks for the response, Wes, Andrew.

No offence intended, I am merely concerned about the status quo of "abandoned but important" articles which may not even have a clear author at all.

Sometimes it is very easy to run into the situation where the distinction between 'stealing' and 'preserving' an article gets a bit too close to combort... I'm sure anybody trying to reference Lorath lore, or something like the Kudhicari who just want to acknowledge something existed, without entirely taking control of them, also run into this problem.

A far more common example is having to provide stats for something old and useless you have no intention of being competitive.

Perhaps some sort of 'B-Canon' or 'Old Canon' format is forthcoming?... If this was 40k or whatever, it would be the equivalent of an old codex with great art and lore, but isn't rules-compatible with the current game.

 

[Charmaylarg Dufrain]

My concern is one I voiced considerably when this first happened in that theres no defacto-person for a lot of these to work them and sooner or later a wip: purge may/will happen and they will be gone.

That few people have as many FMs or players as yamatai to fix these pages and so many of us simply don't have time and this clearly will stacks hours of work onto people like Prim and Skully if they wanted to fix the freeper/nesh articles or risk losing them someday. That it takes away from peoples time to RP.

And Easy mode submission process. while at least an offered thing they can maybe try, still doesnt take away the hours of if one wanted to save, say, 20 articles. Thats 20 articles of forcing them into templates, compliance, and updates since they were made that dimishes some of these articles from their original intent. Hours that could be spent writing here on the forums instead are spent getting burnt out because unlike Yamatai most of the factions dont have dedicated caretakers to watch their parts of the wiki and the playerbase and sheer number of FMs and Co-FMs to maintain it so its never more than one or more of their things at stake while 200 nep articles get ripped down one day, 20 freespacer and more nesh articles get sent back to wip: and if you don't get to them instead of writing (the entire reason we're here) then someday down the line they will be gone and even if out of those 20 15 were old skub articles thats still 20 articles of your faction that were a part of it and its lore and history in some way that are then gone.

I think prims sugestion of some old-canon thing might be a really good idea. Leave old articles alone, dont force them into some desire for format compliance and just mark a lot of the decade old stuff as old-canon; Its old, it is canon but outdated, consider making an updated version of it or a newer version, etc.

(Edit, I realize this isnt the original thread of andrew posting that he did this in the submissions forum or whatever. But the point still stands and its related so I cut it down from a rant!~)

 

[raz]

On the general topic, I do not believe there needs to be some sort of blanket exception for these types of old articles because they exist in such varying states of completion that it's impossible to have a one-size-fits-all solution. Andrew and Wes have handled the issue well.

Moving to the specific topic:

TLDR; I'd like to remove the WIP status from the Mecha-Druidism and Freespacer Terminology articles, but submitting them for approval seems ultra dumb, seeing as I don't want to alter them one iota....

It's not my work!

I have edited the Terminology article to be approvable. It took two backlinks, fixing nesting/formatting (including simple sentences to make the subject headers have required prose), 5 minutes of forum research, and adding an OOC section. Since I was once the Freespacer FM myself, it was an easy and comfortable task. That article was only "wip" at all because the Freespacer community expected people to add to it infinitely. Feel free to submit it for approval if you have nothing to add.

Part of doing the above was referencing the Freespacer OOC Discussion, which within it contains the merged Freespacer Wiki Article Update Thread. More than just providing attribution information that I used above, that thread provides a good reminder that the Freespacers were always a collaborative effort.

@Strangelove (and @Della and @Angelic_Crux) wanted people to contribute to these articles. Finish them. Add to them. The faction's original articles have already been changed and moved to "Freespacer (Old Version)," so it's not as if making these old articles complete is some kind of infringement on someone else's creative work.

For Mecha-Druidism, that article only needs a few words to describe Deoradh thought on the Afterlife and whatever "Alchemy of the Heavens" might be. But if quoting “lol” – nome The Art of Never Again, Chapter 999: wtf as a placeholder for those sections is any indication, it seems like the Freespacers don't think much about those concepts at all.

 

[Primitive Polygon]

Excuse my ignorance for not knowing the wishes of people I do not know, and have never spoken to. I was a small fry when they left.

Lamb most likely left me in charge of this situation, because other people trying to take control of the faction were much worse in terms of re-writing the lore.

This does, however, still leave me in a difficult situation where I am defending things even I don't think should be approved. Just look at the Leyline system's potential abuses. Or Psionics.

The suggestion for an 'old canon' attribute is merely a method I think would be useful to 'let sleeping dogs lie'.

Restructuring and resubmitting things is not only questionable from an IP standpoint, it also makes people immediately jump to thinking you are personally intending on using and abusing it.

Apologies again if you think that makes me some kind of pariah.

I love old SARP lore. I still think the earliest depictions are some of the strongest and most inspirational. Just look at the original Nekovalkyrja manual. I would hate to see them destroyed by the march of progress, simplification, and optimisation.

 

[Wes]

Yeah, I think one of the reasons a lot of abandoned stuff is left abandoned is because it just seems rude to use someone's content that they left behind when they may have left on bad terms. In many cases I think it makes more sense to delete the unfinished content of people who actually quit the site (as opposed to someone like Nashoba, who passed away, and whose projects were are finishing to preserve his legacy).

 

[Primitive Polygon]

Even if the content is effectively unfinished (or more likely a stub that wouldn't be approved nowadays), but important to other developments that occurred at the time?...

I suppose another way of solving this would be a new way of getting stub articles approved, vaguely referencing information about old subjects that aren't really anything but interesting curios these days.

 

[Ametheliana]

All that needs to be done is add a backlink and ooc credit, it's not that it's a stub and needs a whole top to bottom modification or a geriatric label. One wiki link and saying who made it is a molehill.

 

[Wes]

It doesn't look like this suggestion is very popular (score is only 1 after a few months) so I'm closing it.