User:Poke
Hey, my name is Patrick Westerhoff, I’m a software developer from Germany. Also I’m an administrator here on this wiki and on GWW. I’m often responsible for technical stuff, but happy to do anything really. If you want to contact me, visit my talk page, send me an email or find me on Twitter (that is probably the fastest way…).
Guild Wars 2 Wiki on Twitter
Just like for GWW before, there exists an inofficial Twitter account for the official Guild Wars 2 Wiki, @GuildWars2Wiki. Until now there hasn’t been much on it at all. Apart from a few blog posts that were published when the script was still running in parallel with @GuildWarsWiki’s, I only used it to do stuff for April Fools’ Day in 2011 and 2012. So nothing valuable really. This is changing now.
Stephane had mentioned this before, and I actually had it ready for a long while. In fact the Twitter account has been available since its creation as it runs in the exact same way as the one for GWW. This is also the reason why it was publishing the blog posts for a short time. The problem I just had is that there was never really much content to publish back then (GW2 wasn’t out, and the wiki mostly dead). Obviously that has changed and now I am looking into valuable information we could publish there.
And that’s where you come into play.
Wikichu and You
I want your suggestions and opinions for possible content we could publish over Twitter. While I’ll still be the one responsible for the account to work correctly, I no longer want to be its sole author. I want you to help publish things, being it automated information or whatever you can imagine.
I obviously have a few ideas which I’m going to share with you in a minute, but those things are not set in stone—they are just ideas. Some of them are simple things that will help players to get informed, while others are more focussed on the wiki community itself—which I definitely want to feature more again. And some might be just too annoying…
In any way, I want you to comment on my ideas and also give your own ideas if they are not covered already. I want to make the Twitter account as useful as possible but I won’t be able to do that alone.
Existing ideas
Guild Wars 2 news from the official website
While ArenaNet has gotten better at tweeting their own blog/news/whatever posts, Wikichu is still way faster in finding them.
Game updates
This worked very well for GW1 due to how the whole updating process worked:
- The game was updated and official update notes were published.
- Because the game was updated somebody looked for the official notes and put them on the wiki.
- Wikichu would see the new page and tweet about it.
Unfortunately this won’t work exactly like that for GW2. GW2’s update notes are buried in the forum in a game update thread for the current game release. Subsequent updates (which are not game releases) are put there as a reply. Sometimes existing posts are edited, although it’s nearly impossible to see if anything real was changed. In conclusion: That’s already a mess.
So after somebody found a new thread, post or change of an existing post, the notes are then copied on the wiki, after doing some horrible wikifying because the forum formatting is so terrible (and completely unsemantic and inconsistent). For large updates this is usually me who does this†.
The catch here is that it’s usually ArenaNet themselves who inform about new game update notes—via Twitter. And even worse, they have begun to publish update notes before the game update themselves was applied to the game. So we are somewhat reliant on ArenaNet to tweet about it to be able to put the content on the wiki and then tweet about it as well. If they are always faster this might somehow defeat the purpose, although one could argue that our update notes are way better to read and also have links to all the things (if it was wikified yet†).
† On a completely unrelated side note, I am working on automating that process based on my previous mostly manual experience. This may or may not also include actually finding new update posts and detecting changes in existing ones. We’ll see how that goes.
Dailies
Obviously. We have seven daily activites for GW1, which currently produce 6+1 tweets per day. Six for today’s announcements‡ plus one for additional predictions. As most of the cycles are rather long (30 to 60), it makes sense to provide a quick information about them. In addition a link to the respective wiki article is sent.
For GW2 the situation is—again—different. We have 9 daily changing things (8 if you don’t include Daily Gatherer) with a rather short cycle of 14 days. So dailies are not that surprising. One could possibly even remember a few things about them (at least I do..). In addition, dailies are displayed for easy access from within the game while GW1’s dailies were spread across multiple locations.
And if that wasn’t enough, it will be hard to tweet the data. While we don’t have any links to accompany the information, we still have 8/9 achievements to mention. The shortest combination takes up 157 characters (the longest 200) which is too long for a single tweet. Even if we take out Daily Gatherer and abbreviate most of the other ones I still have 121 characters as a minimum and 146 as a maximum. While this is a lot better, it still won’t be possible to get it in a single tweet, especially not with some kind of introductory text. So we would have to split it anyway. And then decide where to split (5/4? 4/5? 3/3/3?).
So yeah, dailies are not as simple as the daily activities in GW1.
‡ In case you’re wondering (I was as well); there were no tweets about Zaishen Vanquish because the cycle was unknown for so long. I’ll fix that with this update which will make it 7+1 tweets per day.
Daily predictions
This goes in hand with the previous, although it’s a lot more useful, as you cannot look it up in the game. It will have the same problems with the tweet length though, while for GW1 there was a single tweet for all predictions at once.
Monthlies
Given that we have changing monthlies now, it would make a lot sense to tweet those. It’s not likely that they will have a cycle, given that they were often related to the current game release, but some manual tweeting is probably a good idea.
Community portal news
News and hot topics from the community portal would be one example where we could advertise the wiki community a bit more. Unfortunately the CP is rarely updated.
Requests for comment
Very related to the previous one, GW2W:RFC. I would like to see statistics on how many people have that page on their watchlist, how many of them check it, and how many are actually reading the discussions on there. Maybe promoting this a bit more publicly would gather more comments.
Whitelisting
In addition to the “standard” content, I plan a completely new feature that allows a selected group of wiki editors (with a Twitter account) to publish tweets via @GuildWars2Wiki. This could be used to announce some wiki-related stuff that is not covered by other means. For obvious reasons this whitelist would be kept rather small and controllable so that we don’t get any weird stuff published. I will probably have some transparent process to get registered so that really anybody can ask for access but also anybody can see who has access.
Technically it will probably work in a way that you have to send a direct message to @GuildWars2Wiki with a tweet content and if you are whitelisted, that tweet will be published as “DM content ~@yourhandle”. I’m also (still) thinking about having a similar system available from within IRC, but that will probably have some kind of voting system in place before a tweet gets published (while the whitelisted DM-tweeting would be direct).
Anyway
Anyway, this is more or less my plan. And I will be happy to hear about your ideas and suggestions! So visit my talk page and tell me about it!
