StrategyWiki talk:Community Portal/2008/January

Promising Guide of the Month
None of the guides there are in the positive. Please nominate some promising guides (strong team of writers or nearing completion) and vote on them. Votes on the Collaboration of the Month would also be helpful. -- Prod (Talk) 11:29, 2 December 2007 (CST)
 * Guys, Gals, assorted hermaphrodites, we're going to need to have a new 'most promising' up soon - we're a week into January already and still no most promising on the main page. So, speak now and forever hold your peace, else either Drift City or Golden Sun: The Lost Age will be 'most promising guide of the month'.--Froglet 22:00, 6 January 2008 (CST)
 * This type of site activity requires a level of community participation. We've discussed it at the staff meeting, so I won't rehash the arguments about anonymous edits, but continuing to support anonymous edits takes away from the community aspect of the site that helps promote this type of activity.  Lately, site support as been more autonomous and individual, so I'm not surprised that guides haven't been voted on.  Hopefully some of the server improvements will see the return of more community based behavior.  Procyon (Talk) 08:57, 7 January 2008 (CST)
 * Golden Sun: The Lost Age is PGotM; Drift City is CotM. Someone please write up the pages for these as I do not have the time this week or next.  Next months CotM is Super Mario Galaxy, so that can be written up as well (PGotM isn't voted on enough yet). -- Prod (Talk) 10:15, 11 January 2008 (CST)

Requiring registration
As you can probably tell, anons now appear to be able to edit every page now, whereas before we required them to register before being able to edit with the exception of a few unlocked guides. Now, I'm bringing this up because I'm wondering whether we should go back to the way it was regarding registration or allow anons to edit as well. I'm actually for anons to be able to edit everything. Looking through the Recent Changes, it appears that anons that would've added tons of content may have been turned away by the requirement to edit. Of course, we'll get vandalism from the anons too, but we already got that through registered users. So, what do you all think? -- 10:08, 23 December 2007 (CST)
 * Seems great to me.-- The preceding signed comment was added by Rocky (talk • contribs). 10:17, 23 December 2007 (CST)
 * I know that we're going to get a ton more edits by allowing it, and probably more active users too. Luckily we can toggle anonymous edits quite easily.  -- 17:15, 24 December 2007 (CST)
 * Also, I suggest we preemptively block IP's that have a history of vandalism on Wikipedia, such as various public schools in the US. -- 17:27, 24 December 2007 (CST)
 * I'm against that. We should only block an IP when it actually does do something bad. Plus, how many of those vandals are going to come here anyway? -- 18:03, 24 December 2007 (CST)
 * +1 --DrBob (talk) 19:20, 24 December 2007 (CST)
 * So that's why I've been seeing IP addresses in recent changes. Sure, this all sounds good. Baejung92 12:32, 25 December 2007 (CST)
 * I am moved to weigh in on this discussion. I've been trying to stay out of it since I am generally not in favor of this idea, and I appear to be outvoted, so I didn't want to put a damper on the decision.  But I've been looking at the quality of our anonymous edits, and they appear to range anywhere from moderately obvious at best, to ridiculously immature at worst, and the immature contributions are far more common.  I'm against this for two reasons.  One is the obvious issue that sysops are going to have patrolling all of these edits, but if that is something that some of you are prepared to deal with, then so be it, because I don't relish the idea.  The other reason, however is with regards to a difference between SW and, say, WP.  While WP has a well established community, community is not really WP's primary goal.  It's not ours either, but it is a focus.  Allowing anonymous edits sort of provides a method for people to bypass the community aspect of our site (in addition to providing unaccountability).  Some of you may feel that the benefit of the additional edits outweighs the lack of growth to the community, but I would disagree.  Anyway, I'm not suggesting that we change the policy (yet), I just wanted to throw my thoughts out there as food for thought.  Procyon (Talk) 16:45, 25 December 2007 (CST)
 * While I do agree the quality of anonymous edits is not as good as those of our registered users, I do feel that giving them a taste of editing before we push them to create an account might be beneficial as well. Accountability-wise, I feel that anons actually have a tad more accountability than registered users, because they cannot evade bans as easily (of course, 99% of them don't realize that, which is where the vandalism issue comes in with anons). Patrolling-wise, I try to patrol edits as much as I can while I'm online, and I know a few other sysops are as well. Of course, this does divert attention from other necessary tasks as well... although I know of an extension that can automatically assign rights to users, so perhaps letting users at least x days old and with at least y edits become autopatrolled would help alleviate some of that load. As for the community aspect, I do agree with you on that, as having a good, solid community is the only way to collaborate on some tasks. Also, I've revised our EditSubpages extension (the thingy with MediaWiki:Unlockedpages) to work a bit better (still needs more work, though), and I can probably add a toggle to it that allows any sysop to enable/disable the extension (and thus enable/disable anonymous editing) with a simple edit of some MediaWiki page, so if we change our minds a few times, we don't need someone to go edit our LocalSettings.php a hundred times. -- 19:15, 25 December 2007 (CST)
 * This is not working. The quality of these anonymous users is degrading.  We've had our first major spammer, and I just undid some racist's idea of fun.  All that I am seeing is increasingly leading me to conclude that we need to go back to registration.  I don't see the value in allowing anonymous edits if the majority of what we get in return is crap.  This will definitely be on the agenda for the next staff meeting (Jan. 5th).  Procyon (Talk) 10:25, 29 December 2007 (CST)
 * Agreed, I've got the updated EditSubpages extension, so if whoever is able to install it would meet me on IRC, I'd appreciate that. -- 10:44, 29 December 2007 (CST)
 * I feel that we should disable anonymous editing; the bad really outweigh the good right now. -- 21:22, 7 January 2008 (CST)
 * There were two resolutions made at the staff meeting last weekend. One was that Prod and Skizzerz would like more time to implement some more anti-vandalism measures, and they would be given another month to improve the situation.  The other is that ness feels that the site performance has been detering better edits.  Now that the site has been given a nice shot in the arm, we can look to see if that is indeed the case and revisit the matter next month.  Procyon (Talk) 21:34, 7 January 2008 (CST)
 * The reason I haven't been editing or patrolling is because it takes (or did up until a minute ago) 5 minutes for SW to load a page. -- 22:22, 7 January 2008 (CST)
 * I Have to say I am on Procyon's side. From what I've seen, the anonymous users editing the bigger articles are the ones doing the most harm. A few days ago (as you may have seen) we had an orchestrated vandal attack on the MapleStory/Monsters page (from what I've learned, this was a deliberate move led by a known troll from a forum) and I've had to lock that particular page so that only Sysops may edit. I was thinking, why not just Semi-protect entire guides of high traffic? Is there perhaps an easy way to semi the whole guide, or if not, is it something that could potentially be scripted? I know that larger guides might be how to get new users started, since it's more likely they came here to see that, but the amount of vandalism that's occurring is somewhat ridiculous. I'm just thinking this would make it easier, rather than having false information for the 12 hours I'm asleep or at school (which has actually been hurting our credibility :--IsaacGS 19:38, 18 January 2008 (CST)
 * I am currently in the process of writing an extension that can protect all subpages of a page. I should have a working prototype done in a week or two. -- 20:59, 18 January 2008 (CST)

Hmm, the anonymous edits for Flash Flash Revolution/Tokens have been VERY productive... I agree that the only way we can have anonymous edits is to restrict/"secure" them with the various proposed CVN methods. I think the strangest cool thing I've seen come out of anonymous edits is anonymous signing their summaries with an alias - lawl. -- 01:41, 11 January 2008 (CST)