The Sims Wiki talk:Community Portal

Public Relations
Hi there, I made a forum post about getting some banners to other sims sites. Say we create a page for their site on the wiki and we kindly ask them to link to us in return. Forum:Site banners

What I need from the community is taking a look at the banners and maybe jazz them up with mad paint skills. Duskey ( talk )( blog ) 23:08, June 20, 2010 (UTC)


 * I'm gonna try and formulate an email which we can send to potential affiliates.

How do you like it? Duskey ( talk )( blog ) 02:17, July 10, 2010 (UTC)


 * Two suggestions. One, add a link to the page for that particular site - for example, if this message were sent to Carl's Sims 3 Guide, somewhere in the message give a link to the article page. Second, 'aswell' should be 'as well'. Otherwise, it looks awesome to me. --Patrick (LostInRiverview) (talk)(blog) 22:45, July 10, 2010 (UTC)


 * It's already there, I added color for emphasis and fixed the spelling. Maybe this should be signed and sent out by an admin? I'd wait for a handful of thumbs ups before sending anything. Duskey ( talk )( blog ) 01:20, July 11, 2010 (UTC)


 * It needs a link to our main page where The Sims Wiki is first mentioned and then the url under the salutation. Great job! --a_morris (talk) 14:35, July 11, 2010 (UTC)


 * Added urls and gave the link to their site a lineskip for emphasis. I assume people accept HTML emails these days. The microbanner should probably get a new name, something like File:The Sims Wiki Microbanner.png. Duskey ( talk )( blog ) 20:12, July 11, 2010 (UTC)


 * I think most email programs and web-mail interfaces will parse a URL into a clickable link even if it's not HTML-ified. Dharden 07:40, July 12, 2010 (UTC)


 * I'm gonna go ahead and assume we all like the microbanner and will use it as an offical micro-banner for The Sims Wiki. Also, should an admin send this out or is it ok if it's just a user? And does everyone think it's ready? Duskey ( talk )( blog ) 14:53, July 16, 2010 (UTC)

Alright an update. My email (hotmail, I know I know) apparently has had some brute force hacking attempts on it and now it's lost in the support hell of Microsoft. Not sure when/if I get it back, I wanna see if it can be salvaged before I make a gmail account. But in the meantime I need someone else to send out some affiliation emails. I reconfubulated the standard email abit:

Duskey ( talk ) 17:02, July 19, 2010 (UTC)


 * I created The Sims Wiki talk:Affiliates. Duskey ( talk ) 17:18, July 19, 2010 (UTC)


 * I've begun to send out email. Hang on. Duskey ( talk ) 20:25, July 22, 2010 (UTC)


 * Future discussion should be taken to the affiliates talk page. Duskey ( talk ) 14:53, July 24, 2010 (UTC)

Wikia
I'm confused with the whole wikia login thing... So, my wikia account can be accessed from any wikia but are my discussion page and userpage the same on every wikia? --Nman649 02:20, June 23, 2010 (UTC)


 * Your login works for wikis in Wikia, but your user page and talk page is exclusive to each wiki. So your pages on this wiki will be different than pages on any other wiki. (Someone correct me if I have this wrong). LostInRiverview (talk)(blog) 02:26, June 23, 2010 (UTC)


 * Looks correct to me. Duskey ( talk )( blog ) 03:57, June 23, 2010 (UTC)

'Did you know...' section
How about a 'Did you know...' section on the frontpage similar to on the Harry Potter wikia, it should contain information such as on Snooty Sims' 'Did you know...' page Did you know... and so on and so forth. Duskey ( talk )( blog ) 13:20, July 8, 2010 (UTC)
 * Examples
 * that you can free a burglar after he has been caught by the police?
 * that drilling with the Miner near the police station will trigger a prisoner escape?
 * Astronauts only work 1 day a week?
 * Good idea. It can go up when there isn't a poll. I like the idea of having the community suggest dyks but do you think it is necessary to vote on them? Also, I was thinking they should be change randomly instead of manually. --a_morris (talk) 16:08, July 11, 2010 (UTC)
 * I like the idea... how often would it change? Would it change every so often (once a month, week, etc.) or would it change every time someone visited the page? -- Patrick (LostInRiverview) (talk)(blog) 16:15, July 11, 2010 (UTC)
 * I like it. They should mention which game(s) they're for. For example, "Astronauts only work 1 day a week?" is only true for TS3, even though the job title also exists in TS2. Dharden 17:03, July 11, 2010 (UTC)
 * Yes, they should obviously mentioned which game they're from. Either 'Astronauts in The Sims 3 etc...' or use vgversion. Ideally the wiki should select 3, 4 or 5 lines from a long list, but I have no idea how to set this up. They should be rigged to change automatically once every week or month. I vote for every week. CAN you even set that up on wikia? As for when to display it: Shouldn't is be always? The new bi-monthly contest thing either presents a vote or a featured article doesn't it? Duskey ( talk )( blog ) 19:47, July 11, 2010 (UTC)


 * I've set up The Sims Wiki:Sandbox/Did you know to add facts to a list before we implement it. There's still abit of discussion and development to do, but now we can add facts if you've already got some ideas or some across something interesting you don't wanna forget. Duskey ( talk )( blog ) 20:03, July 11, 2010 (UTC)

Should we sneak in some stuff about the wiki? Like 'Did you know can create and participate in competitions?' Duskey ( talk )( blog ) 07:19, July 12, 2010 (UTC)


 * I poked around on the HP wikia and found that their template is quite manual, it just links to 5 lines. On the talk page they nominate, vote and discuss new DYK's. They also have subpage called archive to store the old ones.


 * Personally I'd love ours to be randomly selected though. Doing it all manually seems like an administrative waste of time and I don't think we can stretch our admins much more. I also don't like their archive, it means some people won't see most of the DYK's without looking for them, but I DO like their idea of people being able to see the full list if they wish to do so.


 * Now, how to set up a template which fetches 5 random lines is another matter. I have no idea how, but I'm sure it can be set up using the parser functions. Duskey ( talk )( blog ) 12:27, July 15, 2010 (UTC)
 * I must say, this gets very complicated very fast. After digging around a little bit, I found this extension on MediaWiki... but that's as far as I can really go on my current level of technical knowledge. -- Patrick (LostInRiverview) (talk)(blog) 15:22, July 15, 2010 (UTC)
 * After poking around a bit more, I've found something else which is already installed into this wiki. Let me display an example....
 * All choices are from The Sims Wiki:Sandbox/Did you know. I've numbered all options as well (1-7 currently). Hopefully, this function will select one of the seven options at random. I don't know how often it will re-randomize, or if it will do so automatically.
 * Below is a random 'Did you know':

* Astronauts in The Sims 3 only work one day a week. (1) * The Ecological Guru in the Natural Science career in The Sims 2: University has a 21-hour workday, though they only work once a week. (2) * Ghosts in The Sims can't climb stairs. (3) * Any user can create and participate in a contest. (4) * You can talk to any user, even unregistered ones, using a user's talk page (5) * You can discuss changes to any article using that article's discussion (talk) page (6) * We're always on the lookout for new articles. If you have an idea for a page that should be on the Wiki (and isn't yet), you should create a page for it! (7)

That looks awesome, almost what I was going for. Once it's ready to launch I say we slap a template on the front page (eg. DYK). This template then has all the DYK's on The Sims series. We then add another template named DYK-wiki. New additions once the initial list is complete can be discussed on the template talk pages. If the can be set to display a number of lines, then we're pretty much there from a technical standpoint. I suggest 4 sims series DYK's followed by a single sims wiki DYK. At the moment the chooses a new once every time you load the page, but not on an update (F5), at least that my test experience. Once all the technical mumbo-jumbo is set up, we can create a news article asking the community for help on adding sims DYK's and have them add them in the blog comments or a talk page. Duskey ( talk )( blog ) 14:24, July 16, 2010 (UTC)


 * Also where did we get the from? It doesn't look like regular HTML, I can't see it in Special:Version nor is it available on Wikia's Extensions or Wikipedia's. I don't see anything in Common.js either. Where did it come from? It'd be nice to have it display a number of options instead of just being locked on one. Duskey ( talk )( blog ) 04:54, July 18, 2010 (UTC)
 * To be honest, I don't quite remember. I found it named on Special:Version; this is a link to the extension (RandomSelection from MediaWiki): -- Patrick (LostInRiverview) (talk)(blog)(random page) 05:03, July 18, 2010 (UTC)


 * That one still can't output more than one line. It'd be code nightmare if we include more 's and then we could end up with the same one being chosen. I say we test RandomArea it looks like it's up for the job, it's even easier to keep a list then with the already mentioned alternative and can produce more than one output AND has support for alternate namespaces. (btw no inter-wiki link to mediawiki.org?) Duskey ( talk ) 06:15, July 18, 2010 (UTC)


 * I sent wikia an email, asking if they were up for adding RandomArea as an extension, let's see what they say. Duskey ( talk ) 14:51, July 24, 2010 (UTC)


 * Bang bang, they shot me down, bang bang, that awful sound (Bleeh won't get the reference). Request for the other extension denied. I see two possible solutions to this if we want the discussed format of DYK's:


 * Make 4x with different DYK's on all of them to prevent the same ones being chosen and add one choose with the wiki DYK's.
 * Do it manually, sort of like monthly featured stuff. Maybe put it to votes similar to how they do it on the HP wikia which I linked to earlier, but someone will have take responsability for it I think since it needs to be updated at least once a month or it'll die.


 * Not it. Duskey ( talk ) 16:00, July 25, 2010 (UTC)
 * I prefer option one... but we'd need to make sure we have a LOT of DYKs to choose from. -- Patrick (LostInRiverview) (talk)(blog)(random page) 16:12, July 25, 2010 (UTC)


 * Yes, when all the technical stuff was out of the way (which it is now) I was thinking we made a news post, encouraging players to add their DYK's to a big main list. When we feel there's enough, we can split the list in four pieces and implement it. We will then still encourage people to add more DYK's and update the lists from time to time. Duskey ( talk ) 16:52, July 26, 2010 (UTC)

Changes to galleries
I thought the galleries looked abit different. Seems the standard max width or height of gallery thumbnails were increased abit, standard grey background color was removed and a blue border has been added to gallery thumbnails. This means we might have to customize our galleries. Can we fiddle with our site CSS to make it look abit more like the standard galleries? I do not like the larger thumbnails nor the blue border. Makes it look like a page from 1992 before people learned the border=0 HTML command. Duskey ( talk )( blog ) 14:13, July 16, 2010 (UTC)

Additional: This is what one of the staff had to say about changing the standard gallery: We are listening to your feedback, but we are unlikely to reduce the default width down again. It's not as if 120px was ever a magical "correct" number. Images are cool, there's little need to restrict them to be so small (and within giant grey boxes).

That being said, we recognise the issues with mixed orientation sometimes producing very tall galleries (due to there being no height restriction). We're looking at reintroducing some kind of limit at the moment. Apologies if your wiki was particularly badly affected (it works pretty well if you have a images in a generally similar orientation, which most wikis have). Duskey ( talk )( blog ) 14:16, July 16, 2010 (UTC)
 * Created Gallery tweaks. Thoughts on implementing this as standard? Duskey ( talk ) 14:09, July 20, 2010 (UTC)
 * It looks like there won't be coming anymore gallery changes from wikia now. How do we feel about the new galleries now? I'd still like us to discuss the changes we can make through CSS as displayed to the right. Images with white or transparent backgrounds will look much nicer and losing the blue frame for portrait and landscape images is neglible in my opinion. Duskey ( talk ) 16:55, July 26, 2010 (UTC)

Changes to the logo
Added voting on the file talk page. Duskey ( talk ) 08:25, July 28, 2010 (UTC)

Proposed change to Featured Articles
I think that having the Featured Article change monthly is too long. I think we should consider bumping it up in frequency; something like once a week or once every other week. I've done some very rudimentary number-crunching:


 * According to Special:WikiaStats, this wiki has about 3,000 articles as of June. Even if we assume that only 10% of articles on this wiki are of "Featured Article" standards, 300 articles (and growing) is enough to last for over 5 years if the article is changed weekly; if the featured article is changed every other week, there will be enough "good" articles to last for over 11 years!

My hope is that increasing the rate that the article changes will keep interest in the Featured Article, will attract more attention to more pages (which is the point of the feature, isn't it?), and will focus the feature more on selecting quality articles over articles related to their favorite Sims, or articles that aren't worthy of receiving a Featured Article title.

Thoughts? -- Patrick (LostInRiverview) (talk)(blog)(random page) 00:47, July 19, 2010 (UTC)


 * Well featured stuff is a manual task, so the admin team will have to be up for it. It's true larger wikis even have articles/files of the day, 'of the year' and 'of the month' in portals. I have to be honest, I'm not quite sure our wiki is large enough for that. And I also thinkg that people will always nominate and vote for sims/stuff they like instead of voting based on the usefulness of the article. Duskey ( talk ) 10:03, July 19, 2010 (UTC)

Close to the 5k
We're getting awfully close to the 5,000 content article mark, thanks to JM9193 who's been creating pages on Twinbrook sims WITH pictures like crazy.

I wanna suggest we do some sort of event or thing or something for the community once we do hit the 5k. Let's spitball some ideas:
 * A contest of some sort
 * Reveal something when we hit it (wallpaper, custom content, made for the sims wiki)

Keep the ideas coming. Duskey ( talk ) 16:46, July 27, 2010 (UTC)


 * I created Slidedown I think it's pretty neat myself. Took me some time to make those tables behave, but it was worth it. I'm aware there's a little white space in the red line, but I can't fix that. It's not in the image and borders & cellspacing are turned off. I tried feeding it some other numbers and it works when the number of articles increases. It looks like it'll stop growing past 5k since the table has a fixed width, so that's cool. Any objections to putting this on the front page soon? Duskey ( talk ) 23:43, July 27, 2010 (UTC)
 * Awesome! What about adding it to MediaWiki:Sitenotice as well? Can you change the message when we hit 5,000? --a_morris (talk) 00:05, July 28, 2010 (UTC)
 * Adding the slidedown to sitenotice? Hmmm, I'm not sure if it'll popup again everytime a new article is added of it requires us to save the sitenotice again. About changing the text, I was thinking we'd just leave it and write: Yay! We did it! below. But let's keep throwing out some ideas on how we can celebrate and reward the community when we hit 5k. Duskey ( talk ) 00:37, July 28, 2010 (UTC)
 * I've read up on the sitenotice some more, it only pops up again if we change the sitenotice_id. I say we throw the template in sitenotice then, soon'ish. I don't want it there for 3 months, blocking all other messages :p I also suggest that we change the ID once we're close (~10-20 articles missing) to the target 5,000. Bleeh is working on some goodies for the community when we hit it. This is no rush really, 88 content articles is still many articles. Duskey ( talk ) 03:01, July 28, 2010 (UTC)
 * I put up the twitter notice for now, but will change to the 5k countdown friday or so. I also created The Sims Wiki:5000 articles and encouraged creative people to send in previously unreleased stuff they may have for The Sims series. Duskey ( talk ) 07:45, July 28, 2010 (UTC)

The Sims Wiki on other sites
Should we register TSW on other sites? I'm thinking facebook and twitter and all that. I'm gonna list some pros and cons:
 * Pros:
 * Might attract more visitors.
 * Can help relay info without people visiting the site.


 * Cons:
 * Shared password.
 * Abuse/vandalism.
 * Inter-admin drama for not gaining access to accounts.

Personally I'm not a facebook man so I can't comment much on that, but I am beginning to see the advantages of Twitter. We could use it to post whenver we put up a blog post which goes in 'The Sims Wiki News' window, this means people following us on Twitter would get an update without having to check the site. It also means people can follow us vis RSS. At the moment our RSS feed is a standard 'recent changes' enabled by default by Wikia. Additionally we can use it for more general Sims 3 news as well, such as 'The Sims 3: Late Night announced, info available on the wiki' or something like that. I'd certainly be up for it. I already registered a Twitter account with our name in my email. If we do go ahead and adopt this idea, we'll probably need a joint email as well. Duskey ( talk ) 21:30, July 28, 2010 (UTC)
 * Comments:

The problem with all this is that is encourages stuff going on behind closed doors, which is really against the whole wiki concept, but I can see where it will come in handy. So far for affiliates I've been using my own email, but we could use a joint on as well. Another problem is, who do we give access to those servies? I mean the email and the twitter. Who should get the password? And I can already foresee the complaints about there being a 'club' within the administrator ranks which new admins might feel excluded from since they do not have access to the same tools as other admins do. Duskey ( talk ) 21:30, July 28, 2010 (UTC)

Yet another hurdle is vandalism or abuse. We need administrators to keep on eye on these external services to prevent abuse and how do we handle it if an admin with password for the stuff goes rogue. I'm quite sure we would be unable to retrieve the accounts. Duskey ( talk ) 21:30, July 28, 2010 (UTC)

Another thing: We'll need a place where we can share the passwords of these accounts. Nicmavr has suggested Google groups, so all you need a is a google account to join. Duskey ( talk ) 14:54, July 29, 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia
I'm in the process of creating a page on The Sims Wiki on Wikipedia, but I'm gonna need a hand with it. It needs to have more content or look less like an advertisement. Here's the link, feel free to edit on it, but WP requires registration: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Duskey/The_Sims_Wiki Duskey ( talk ) 21:30, July 28, 2010 (UTC)

Once it's on Wikipedia, we can put it on these wikis as well: Duskey ( talk ) 20:57, July 29, 2010 (UTC)
 * http://wikiindex.org/The_Sims_Wiki
 * http://www.fanhistory.com/wiki/The_sims_Wiki

The Sims: Medieval
Are we gonna cover this game? Is it part of 'The Sims' series? http://www.simprograms.com/the-sims-medieval-first-screens-and-preview-by-tsr/ Duskey ( talk ) 15:19, July 29, 2010 (UTC)