Forum:State of the Wiki

Well met all. Since I've done it elsewhere, I'll take the opportunity to talk about the state of the Forgotten Realms Wiki right now. In short, I think it's doing pretty good. :)

The Wikia Activity Monitor shows our statistics are looking pretty good. It has a score of 94.77/100, is ranked 235 out of Wikia's top 5000 wikis, and 107 out of its Video Game category (a bit odd, but we're in Tabletop Games, which is in the Wikia Gaming hub, which is in the Video Games hub). That's up, up, and up from when I last reported these in May last year. Equally, the Quick Stats (on the Admin Dashboard) show an average of ~65,280 views a day this last week, up from ~59,900 views a day last year. So, across the board, we've maintained and slightly improved our quality and popularity, and certainly consolidated our wiki.

Plus, the current Versus Tournament may not be much, but I like to think it shows our high place among the Wikia wikis and makes us a part of the wider community.

Currently, we have 13,834 articles. Our Main Page is regularly updated, with a Feature Article every month and more on the way at a faster schedule, a weekly Did You Know? to present Realmslore from our latest articles, and a daily Today in the Realms to present history, rituals, and festivals, and frequent pictures of the day. So, the main page is worth visiting regularly.

From my random tours, and watching those of others, I'd estimate most of the old unsourced material has been tagged; almost all the copied material has been deleted, tagged, is being rewritten or otherwise known about (certainly very little turns up now); and the homebrew material has been almost entirely removed, putting the problems of the past well behind us. Pages are also being thoroughly categorised by Darkwynters and the one who shall not be named. ;) The new portal work by Niirfa-sa also keeps things organised and accessible. So I'm confident to say the FRW is now a reliable source for a wide range of Realms topics, and very useful and detailed for a handful of specific topics (those that our editors are interested in, at least).

Once again, I've posted stuff about the wiki at the Wizards Community and Candlekeep forums. This should again keep or put the FRW in fans' minds, maybe garner a few new editors, as well as canvas attitudes and opinions of users.

With 5th Edition coming out, and the lore already coming onto the wiki, it's a good time to reconnect with the fandom. We might see another surge of activity as new fans throw in 5e content. At this point, we should be on guard against a new influx of homebrew and copied material. But I think this time we will be ready. (Though personally I know stuff-all about 5e.)

Which gets us to problems.

I've noticed that the FRW regularly attracts new editors. But they go hard for a few weeks, output a flurry of new articles and content, more than I can keep up with, and then quickly fade away. Do they decide wiki editing isn't for them after all, is it burnout, or something else? It's sad that we can't seem to keep many editors. Our regulars are the regulars of the last few years, plus a few newbies. This is a problem, I feel, as we're not keeping editors who could go on to be experienced editors, who could replace us, help clean up and maintain the wiki, or write their own feature-worthy articles. How can we keep them? Should we give more updated help and advice, guide them more as they start, try to reconnect when they stop? The best advice might be not to make so many articles.

And there is still the old chore of cleaning up the old pages, using past tense and a uniform style, improving the language of old articles, just to be nice, consistent, and readable. There are plagiarized articles to rewrite, not to mention those still in Category:Years. There are articles to be referenced, and images to be sourced, categorised, and used.

TBH, it is hard to balance the need to do a lot of tedious clean-up against your desire to write articles about things you're interested in. Hobbies should be fun. But we soldier on.
 * — BadCatMan (talk) 06:54, September 11, 2014 (UTC)