Forum:Merging with the Customized Sims Wiki

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Forums: IndexCommunity discussionsMerging with the Customized Sims Wiki | Post

First off, if you're reading this, welcome to Miraheze! This is the first discussion thread started on the Miraheze wiki, funnily enough before the migration was ever officially announced.

Anyways, I've messaged Jawusa and M.M.A.A., some of the founders of the The Customized Sims Wiki, and they both are on board with the idea of merging with The Sims Wiki on Miraheze. This move will help resolve the long-standing problem they've had with lacking support from experienced editors and having no access to our library of templates, and will hopefully restimulate the custom content creation community's interest in having a wiki to document their work.

Actually migrating the pages should not require too much work, as there aren't a lot of pages on the TCSW. There are, however, some questions that will probably need to be discussed:

  1. Where should their pages be moved to? I have considered creating a new, custom namespace on the wiki for custom content. One issue raised on this thread is that we don't really have a suitable namespace for their content. We don't generally allow custom content in the mainspace (with some exceptions) and "Fanon" doesn't really fit their needs, as they're not really creating "fan fiction" content, but rather have standards similar to our article space but for custom content. Wikia allows for custom namespaces, but it requires an annoying level of bureaucracy to go through; Miraheze, on the other hand, lets us create as many namespaces as we want with a simple-to-use interface. In terms of naming this new namespace, I've thought about naming them Custom content or Custom. This means that a page on Widespot would be located at Custom content:Widespot or Custom:Widespot. I think the new namespace approach works best, so the main question is whether or not we should use Custom content or Custom as the namespace name. Custom content works, but I fear it's too long, while Custom may be too short.
  2. What are the policies surrounding the creation of custom content pages? As far as I can tell, there are no policy pages on the Customized Sims Wiki, so we'll need to have a discussion on what should be allowed (and not allowed) in the custom content namespace here. Some questions that may be worth asking include:
    • What, if any, requirements should the custom content have before an article can be created for it on the wiki? Should there be a notability guideline that needs to be met for a work of custom content to be considered notable enough for an article here? (I was thinking at the very least that the custom content should be publicly accessible, or at least, downloadable from somewhere)
    • How should custom neighborhoods/worlds be organized? The TCSW was created primarily to document Sims and lots in entire custom neighborhoods/worlds. Per the nature of a wiki, anybody can edit these pages, and anyone can create new ones. How will we handle naming conflicts? For instance, if a Sim named John Doe existed in Neighborhood X, and then some time later Neighborhood Y was released by a different creator that also had a Sim by the name John Doe, how will naming conflicts be handled? (I was thinking doing as we do in the fanon namespace already: turning "John Doe" into a disambiguation page and then creating "John Doe (Neighborhood X)" and "John Doe (Neighborhood Y)" to separate things.
  3. As mentioned earlier, we do have some articles on custom content in the mainspace, like the InSimenator and the FFS Lot Debugger. These were created due to their high use and notability. What should be done with such articles? (I was thinking moving them into the custom content namespace for consistency's sake) We also have articles on notable creators, like Mootilda. What should be done with those articles? (I'm a bit hesitant on this one, since our article on Delphy, founder of Mod The Sims, most certainly would look out of place in the custom content namespace)
  4. What should happen with the old wiki? Since the TCSW is a much smaller wiki, there might be the possibility that Wikia won't even notice if we were to post links on their site pointing to the migrated wiki. I don't know how much traffic the wiki gets on a regular basis, however.

Thoughts? —k6ka 🍁 (Talk · Contributions) 18:31, 8 April 2019 (UTC)

Discussion

In regards to the above-mentioned questions:

1. Where should their pages be moved to? - I'd say Custom is a good generic name for such a namespace.

2. What are the policies surrounding the creation of custom content pages? - Without diving too in-depth into specifics, I'd say that pages should: only be about projects that are available for download to the public at large; meet some minimum standard of notability (not sure what that'd look like, but I don't think we want pages on every Tom, Dick and Harry's custom recreation of Veronaville clogging up the wiki); be open to contributions from all people, not just the custom content creator(s); be written in an encyclopedic manner, not merely as a storytelling vehicle (bearing in mind that if the particular Sim/family/neighborhood had a background story attached to it, such a story could be included in the article). If the intent is to keep Fanon, then we'd also need to formally distinguish between the two types of content.

3. What should be done with [existing custom content articles]? - I think pages about CC creators should remain in the main namespace as encyclopedic entries about a specific person as opposed to a creation of theirs. I'd also lean in the direction of keeping pages about third-party utilities, like package editor programs, in the main namespace. I think game mods generally speaking would fall under Custom.

4. What should happen with the old wiki? - Assuming that the original wiki editors would support a merge, I'd suggest simply abandoning it, maybe trying to sneak in links directing to the new site. If CSW were merging into the Wikia TSW, I'd say it would be possible to contact staff and have them merge directly (with support of the original wiki creators) and there's a decent chance they would approve it. But if staff knew that we were trying to close it down in order to redirect off Wikia, there's no way they'd approve it.

-- LiR (talk) 19:11, 11 April 2019 (UTC)