The Sims Wiki talk:Community Portal

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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.

Old email draft

Hello <NAME> <a href="http://sims.wikia.com/wiki/The_Sims_Wiki">The Sims Wiki</a> is a collaborative encyclopedia for everything related to The Sims series. We host over 4500 articles and keep on growing since our founding in February 2005. The wiki format allows anyone to create or edit any article, so we can all work together to create a comprehensive database for The Sims series. We have created a page detailing your Sims site and would like for us to become affiliates. If you are interested, please add our link and banner to your site. Note that you're most welcome to register at Wikia and contribute to your site's page as well. Click here to visit the article about your site on The Sims Wiki: <LINK TO THEIR SITE> We're looking forward to seeing you. Sincerely, the users at <a href="http://sims.wikia.com/wiki/The_Sims_Wiki">The Sims Wiki</a>. HTML: <a href="http://sims.wikia.com/"><img src="http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20100625062640/sims/images/8/8d/Duskey_wiki_logo_microbar_88x31b.png" border="0"></a>

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:

Hello <NAME>

<a href="http://sims.wikia.com/wiki/The_Sims_Wiki">The Sims Wiki</a> is a collaborative encyclopedia for everything related to The Sims series. We host over 4500 articles and keep on growing since our founding in February 2005. The wiki format allows anyone to create or edit any article, so we can all work together to create a comprehensive database for The Sims series.

We have created a page detailing your Sims site and would like for us to become affiliates. If you are interested, please add our link and banner to your site. Note that you're most welcome to register at Wikia and contribute to your site's page as well.

Click here to visit the article about your site on The Sims Wiki:
<LINK TO THEIR SITE>

We're looking forward to seeing you.

Sincerely, the users at The Sims Wiki, http://sims.wikia.com/wiki/The_Sims_Wiki



HTML:

<a href="http://sims.wikia.com/The_Sims_Wiki"><img src="http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20100625062640/sims/images/3/35/Wiki_logo_88x31.png" border="0"></a>

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)

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

Examples

Did you know...

• 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?

and so on and so forth. Duskey(talk)(blog) 13:20, July 8, 2010 (UTC)

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':

• Ghosts in The Sims can't climb stairs. (3)

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 <choose> 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 <choose> 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 <choose> 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): [1] -- 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 <choose>'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)

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)

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)