Forum:Reforming wiki projects

I would like to start a discussion about the possibility of restarting wiki projects.

As decided in another forum thread, The Sims Wiki's administrative projects have been retired. Administrative Projects were intended to take the place of normal projects, which have been completely abandoned for several years now. However, APs never took of in their own right, and as a result we now have no active or feasible project system on the wiki.

"Is this such a bad thing?" you may ask. We've seemingly gotten by for several years without an active projects system. I believe that our success in this is largely due to many of our regular editors being jacks-(and jills)-of-all-trades when it comes to editing; many users are proficient in editing Sim biographies, object pages, game tutorials, and wiki templates and categories. I believe it's no accident that so many of our regular editors become administrators; the ability to work across the board in many areas shows just how skilled the regular contributors are on this wiki and how able they are to be good admins. At the same time, however, I think it's worth noting that the wiki isn't as good as it could be. There are a number of improvements that could be facilitated through the introduction of projects.

Right now, there really is no place on the wiki to converse about issues relevant to a group of related articles. Say, for instance, you wanted to set a standard by which all pages about games or expansion packs are written. Right now, you'd pretty much have to start a Community Discussions thread to discuss the pros and cons of taking that action. This has the effect of increasing the number of concurrent threads in the CDF, and tends to drown out other threads in the forum. On top of that, the outcome of that discussion should not have a profound impact on the wiki as a whole, yet treating it as a community discussion subjects it to the principle of community consensus, meaning any decision reached in Community Discussions about a particular local issue would need to be followed as per consensus, and could only be overridden or changed with another community-wide discussion or vote. We see this in discussions right now or in the past, such as deciding how to organize Sim articles with the release of TS4, the creation of new templates for highlighting typos, deciding what to call towns in The Sims 3, or deciding the color to use for TS4 in infobox templates. Often discussions like this are only seeking input or guidance, not looking for a formal decision on the matter. Creating a project page thus would allow these and other topics to be discussed more informally, allow discussions to be held, decisions made and decisions changed without the necessity to get community-wide consensus.

As mentioned above, there is no place at present, aside from CDF, to discuss or coordinate with others. The issue of doing this on the CDF is that CDF articles are high-profile and administrators actively attempt to keep the list of active threads there from getting too long (in order to focus conversation on those threads which are important enough for community-wide input), so threads about small issues tend to be archived before a decision is made. There is really no room in the current system for leaving a thread open to allow ongoing discussion and feedback. For instance, if there were a project page for The Sims 4-era, the discussion page could be used to coordinate creation of relevant articles for the game, identify new sources of information for use on individual pages and determine the colors used in infobox templates.

Additionally, this is a wiki about a game that is still in active development, so information on our articles must be kept up-to-date with new game releases, patches, and other changes over time. When a new game or pack is released, new pages are often created for features or content unique to that game/pack, but other articles are almost always relevant to a new game and also need to be updated. Projects could help coordinate this activity by identifying pages that are part of the project's scope, and keeping tabs on whether information in those articles is up-to-date.

Editors who are part of a wiki project can also help improve the articles that fall under the umbrella of the project using guidelines decided by the project itself. This would allow groups of editors to collaboratively improve articles to meet an established set of criteria, ensuring that articles about a particular subject are at the same level of quality. It's worth noting that the projects themselves wouldn't "own" the articles within their particular umbrella, and indeed one article may be covered by multiple projects, as needed. So, the guidelines established by those particular projects wouldn't be binding or enforceable as community standards. This means that the decisions undertaken in these cases wouldn't require strict consensus and could be altered much more freely and on-the-fly.

Wikipedia WikiProjects often undertake the task of reviewing articles within their project scope, and grading those articles based on their level of detail, adherence to overall style guidelines, and general effectiveness. This activity would at present be very difficult to facilitate on The Sims Wiki, but if we created individual projects, those project members could take on the task of reviewing articles. This has the benefit of making it easier to determine which articles are the most well-written (and thus also a good go-to list for Featured Article nominees), and also identifying those articles in need of help, so that editors with the time and knowledge to improve them can more easily find them.

Ultimately, what I'm proposing is not the creation of shell pages with tons of lists and tons of bureaucracy. I am proposing the creation of a system through which editors can collaborate, communicate, and facilitate improvements across the wiki. The projects would, first and foremost, be a tool of the individual editors. It would be essential for these projects to have active and engaged participants. It would be equally vital for our established members to join and to use these projects, because the projects will not be effective unless they are used. This, admittedly, is the major hurdle of the whole idea. In order for this idea to work, we - the wiki editors who edit here regularly - have to put faith in the idea. That's why I've written out such a long explanation of what I'm suggesting. That's why I've proposed it at all instead of just boldly implementing it. There is a potential for projects to be very positive, constructive places, but only if we embrace the idea. Projects will only work if the project members think of themselves as a team and steadfastly work together towards the common goals of the project.

This idea may seem like a pipe dream, but I think it's totally achievable so long as we as a community put the effort into making it happen. --  LostInRiverview talk ~ blog 07:22, August 26, 2014 (UTC)

Discussion
Personally, I'm not too much of a WikiProject guy. I am, in fact, happy to remain a "Jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none." But it really is annoying to bring localized issues into a wiki-wide community discussion. Wikipedia has many active WikiProjects, and the interesting advantage to this is that most WikiProjects have their own talk page banner. This banner is added to the talk pages of articles that are within their scope. The idea is that this allows editors proposing changes to the page to contact the members of that WikiProject as well, so editors that are interested in that particular topic can respond, and that's how community, relationships, consensus, and most importantly, articles, are built collaboratively. WikiProjects also tend to get involved when several events occur with articles in their scope, such as one of them being tagged for deletion. WikiProjects on Wikipedia are no small deal - many of them have hundreds and hundreds of editors, and many even have bots that do their office work.

Granted, some people on Wikipedia are opposed to the idea of WikiProject, the reason I cannot remember right now, but I think it had something to do with dividing up the community. I can disagree with this point. A city is divided; people in neighborhoods tend not to know people outside of that hood. Yet, they are still connected via the highways, roads, railways, and subways that connect the city with itself. Every neighborhood gets together to elect a new government to govern them, and in times of disaster, the entire city gets together to help rebuild it.

So, I support this proposal. For more help, see Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Guide, and Help:Wikipedia: The Missing Manual/Collaborating with Other Editors/WikiProjects and Other Group Efforts. --k6ka (talk &#124; contribs) 11:42, August 26, 2014 (UTC)

I guess, I too, consider myself a "Jack-of-all-trades"; but I really like the sound of these wiki projects. Not only do they sound fun, but they can also bring a complete new light to the wiki, and it would make the wiki seem a lot more active. Not only that, but the community will be conversing about whatever project they decide to partake in with others and it will be quite cool to see that happen. I do have a few thoughts about the "running" of these projects, but I'm going to keep them to myself until other users approach the discussion. All-in-all, I support this proposal. Beds (talk - blog ) 16:12, August 27, 2014 (UTC)

I want to jump in again and give a few more specifics to what I'm proposing, as well as a little bit of insight into (I think) why the projects failed in the first place and how we can avoid those problems the second time around.

First things first, I would like to completely delete the current project pages we have. There are so many pages right now that have no useful purpose and, if they were edited at all, were only used on a limited basis by a handful of people. Taking the current framework and making it fit into a new system would be difficult and ultimately wouldn't give us the flexibility we need to make a system like this work.

One of the major pitfalls of the old projects system was the proliferation of projects with a very limited scope. I don't want to create a bureaucratic system to manage the projects, but I feel like some sort of basic structure is necessary to prevent projects on really trivial minutiae. My idea is to allow free reign to create wiki projects, so long as another project isn't substantially similar to it. But, projects could be nominated for merging or deletion just like regular articles and templates, and follow the processes we already have established for that.

A main motivating factor in this proposal is to create a project for handling wiki "background" operations. Specifically, this project would take care of standardizing categorization and template use on the wiki, and manage changes to the wiki theme and template themes. A project working on these tasks could help ensure that they are actually achieved, since the wiki's track record of making theme or style changes through the Community Discussions forum is mediocre. Having a project focused on these changes would help to boil down theme ideas into a proposal that can then be voted on by the community at-large.

Aside from an operations project, I don't have any specific projects in mind for creation. In addition to an operations project, projects for each of the four generations of games seems like it would make sense. Beyond that, projects could be created as particular issues are determined, while again making sure that we don't get into splitting hairs too much. The main determining factor in the creation of projects would be whether we have users willing to participate in the projects themselves.

Each project would determine its own ideal method of operation. There would not necessarily be a project leader, just as there are no wiki leaders, but the project members could themselves put certain people "in charge" of some activities in the project. Each project would devise its own standards for commonly-used categories and templates (bearing in mind that the projects do not "own" the templates or the projects and should only make reasonable changes) and for determining how relevant articles are written and arranged.

Hopefully this gives a bit more insight into what I'm suggesting. --  LostInRiverview talk ~ blog 09:48, August 30, 2014 (UTC)