User:Stephane Lo Presti/News/May-December 2012

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Testing of page counters - December 17, 2012[edit]

Hi everyone,

You may have noticed some strange numbers appearing at the bottom of articles and in other places. This is a configuration update to the "page counter" feature part of MediaWiki and we'd like to test how these numbers work. So that change may be temporary but please let us know if you see any issue, either on the Guild_Wars_2_Wiki:Reporting_wiki_bugs page or my talkpage.

For those who know what I'm talking about: the views you'll see are currently not accurate and we're looking into how accurate they are given the architecture of the wikis. This is a big work in progress as this is a fairly complex topic. Let me know if you have any question ( talkpage).

Thanks.

Scheduled maintenance on Wednesday December 19 at 4PM PDT - December 14, 2012[edit]

We're going to install Semantic MediaWiki extensions (see request) on the GW2 wiki. This will happen on Wednesday December 19 at 4PM PDT and should not last very long. Some pages may not be accessible during that short period of time. If you have questions, concerns or issues, please jump over to my talkpage.

Thanks.

Quick maintenance today - December 11, 2012[edit]

We're going to run a quick maintenance today to fix the issue of the Captcha extension not working on the Guild Wars Wiki, causing issues with account creation in particular. The maintenance will happen at around 4PM PST (12AM GMT / 1AM CET) and should take no more than 30 minutes. There will be no interruption of services but it may affect page access and edits intermittently. If you have questions, concerns or issues, please jump over to my talkpage.

Thanks.

The Lost Shores and the Guild Wars 2 Wiki - November 6, 2012[edit]

Hi everyone,

As you all know, The Lost Shores is coming in just 10 days! We're pretty sure that the wiki community will do an outstanding job on documenting all this new content, as it did for the Halloween event. And this time we'd like to leverage this effort and promote the page to our global player base. In order to ease this effort of building an event page that can act as a good guide for the content, we're thinking of seeding in advance some information about the content on the talkpage of the The Lost Shores article.

If anyone in the wiki community has any general issue with this, please let me know on this section of my talkpage. If you also have ideas or suggestions about what's needed, let me know (although I cannot make promises about what we'll be able to share or when). It'd be fantastic if we could have a group of players that are ready and willing to use that information to start building the structure of the page, once the update is live and the various phases are deployed.

Another important point I want to mention: part of The Lost Shore event will be one-time only (see here) and we think that it would be very beneficial if this was highlighted in the The Lost Shores article, but this is simply a suggestion.

Thanks everyone! Stéphane.

Post-maintenance feedback - Thursday, October 25, 2012[edit]

Hi everyone,

We're back from our maintenance which was a success and I'm happy to report that Semantic MediaWiki is now available on the Guild Wars 2 wiki. As this was a rather long, complex and important operation (and I may not be very responsive on the wikis during the next few days), I'd like to make sure that the wiki community can report bugs and provide us feedback. If you observe a strange behaviour on a page, a feature not working, or have comments about any aspect of the wiki following this maintenance, please use either of these means to report it:

  1. Edit the page Post-10-25-maintenance feedback and give us as much information about the issue you're describing; we'll very probably not be able to reply to you on that page, so make sure that no information is missing from your message;
  2. Send a tweet at the Guild Wars 2 twitter account if there's any emergency, make sure to mention it's about the wikis and point to the relevant information about the issue.

Thanks everyone for your collaboration!

Possible long wiki maintenance on Thursday - Tuesday, October 23, 2012[edit]

Hi everyone,

I'd like to give you an early warning that we will possibly run a long maintenance on the English wikis this Thursday October 25 from 10 AM PDT, for an expected 8 hours period. I'll confirm (or infirm) this as soon as I have all the pieces locked down, which I'm hoping is going to be in the next few hours, or possibly by tomorrow morning (Pacific time). If this maintenance is not happening on Thursday, it'll have to be rescheduled to sometime later, in 2 or 3 weeks (due to the unavailability of key staff).

This maintenance will put the wiki in read-only mode for the whole duration. We'll be working on making the maintenance period as short as possible.

This maintenance is the last phase of our operation to bring the English wikis into a new technical environment (closer to the ones of the German, French and Spanish Guild Wars 2 wikis) where we'll be able to bring updates to the backend, MediaWiki and its extensions in a more streamlined way. This is going to bring the Semantic MediaWiki extension to the Guild Wars 2 wiki. This will also allow us to work, starting next month, on upgrading the MediaWiki software.

We're very sorry about such a long interruption of services and that we could not confirm/infirm it to you earlier than now, but this is the final piece of a complex operation that will help us and our wiki community to move ahead with some cool projects and ideas.

Let me know on my talkpage if you have any questions or concerns. Thanks.

A few quick notes - August 6, 2012[edit]

I would like to give a quick follow-up on the topics addressed during the first WikiChat:

  • Administrative requests, I just posted some news here
  • Legal text under the edit box: here's a proposed text to be added to all wikis:
By clicking the save page button below, you represent that your contribution is original and does not infringe upon the intellectual property rights of any third party, and you agree to license it as follows:
 You agree to license and/or assign your contribution pursuant to the terms set forth here: [[Guild Wars 2 Wiki:Copyrights]].
 You may also post content obtained from ''Guild Wars'' or ''Guild Wars 2'', its websites, manuals and guides, concept art and renderings, press and fansite kits, and other such copyrighted material that ArenaNet has made available to the general public, to the Official Guild Wars 2 Wiki. All rights, title and interest in and to such content shall remain with ArenaNet and/or NCsoft, as applicable, and such content is not licensed pursuant to the GFDL.
  • it seems that some wiki editors were not happy with the new design? We like it a lot and would also like to propose to integrate the "top bar" of our new website to the wikis, to allow smooth integration; please let me know if you are against this;
  • Fansites list: I'm working with TEF on this, please feel free to join the effort here
  • Mobile version: as I said before, not a priority given the very low interest from the wiki community.

As always, please let me know your comments on my talk page.

Another topic I'd like to mention in passing: Wikipedia's Guild Wars 2 page. I think it could get some love, but I'm not sure how this can be done. It's a page that could be seen by a lot of people and it lacks information (although it was updated recently). So if you feel like spreading the knowledge, feel free to update the page (careful about not copying/pasting content between wikis as it could be breaking licenses). A funny anecdote in passing: we noticed last week that wikipedia's page on Cantrip had a reference to GW2, very cool!

Cheers.

Logs, summary and follow-ups from the First WikiChat on June 13 - June 14, 2012[edit]

Hi everyone,

Now that the first WikiChat is over, I'd first like to point everyone to the logs from the 3 chat sessions:

I've got a few action items that I need to process as soon as I can. My overall conclusions about the 5 topics on the agenda are: - ITEM1: we (ArenaNet) needs to follow up on these requests; - ITEM2: no questions/issues, a draft of the legal text under the edit box will be circulated; - ITEM3: everyone very happy (some follow up questions about font, currently under discussion); - ITEM4: we agreed to start discussing this (see link below); - ITEM5: I think there was not strong support for this, it's definitely a low priority request (see follow-up link below).

Two follow-up discussions were created, please free to participate (after having read the chat logs):

Overall the WikiChat is definitely something that I'd like to do again. I may propose only two sesions (morning, afternoon, PDT times) if the idea works for most of the people. I'd also like to try something different from IRC next time to see whether more people can show up (I don't think that the relatively low number of participants was a bad thing).

Feel free to leave your questions or comments on the talkpage. Thanks again to everyone who participated in this first WikiChat.

First WikiChat on June 13 - June 7, 2012[edit]

Hello everyone,

Now that the one-week discussion period on my previous news is over, I'd like to propose that move ahead with the first "WikiChat".

1) Date and time

We'll meet on Wednesday 13 June and will have 3 discussions, all on the same agenda so that everyone has an opportunity to comment (whatever the time zone). The first 30 minutes of each discussion is for the Guild Wars Wiki community, the next 30 minutes are for the Guild Wars 2 Wiki community.

Times are:

  • 10AM - 11AM PDT (19h - 20h CEST)
  • 1PM - 2PM PDT (22h - 23h CEST)
  • 5PM - 6PM PDT (2h - 3h CEST, next day)

2) IRC instructions

The discussions will take place on the #gw2wMeetings channel on the Gamesurge IRC server. It's actually very easy to log in from any browser, just go to this page: http://webchat.gamesurge.net/

You could just type in a Nickname and enter "gw2wMeetings" in the "Channels" field, then type on the "Connect" button to be in the chat room. However your host name will be used to display information about you and I strongly advise against you doing this. The alternative is simply to create an account on the gamesurge server, please see instructions below (I'll advise you to do this well in advance): https://gamesurge.net/newuser/

We can always discuss details of this on my talkpage. If people think that it's too much trouble for a WikiChat, I can try to work on simpler alternative. And if this does not work, we could always try to do this on a wikipage. (but feedback from my initial news seemed to indicate that IRC was ok)

3) Agenda

This agenda is asymmetrical, leaning more towards the activities on the GW2 Wiki, but this will give more time to discuss those on the Guild Wars Wiki.

  • ITEM1: Status of administrative requests

See gw1:Guild_Wars_Wiki:Requests_for_technical_administration and Guild_Wars_2_Wiki:Requests_for_technical_administration

  • ITEM2: About the few legal questions that were asked

See gw1:Feedback_talk:Stephane_Lo_Presti#Copyrights, Guild_Wars_2_Wiki_talk:Community_portal#Copyright_text and User_talk:Stephane_Lo_Presti#Non-English_wiki_support.3F

  • ITEM3: GW2 Wiki interface redesign

See Talk:Main_Page/editcopy#Implemented

  • ITEM4: List of fansites

The current list of GW2 Fansites has been trimmed down but I'd like to discuss the possibility to take a new route, which would include us linking to this list from our sites.

  • ITEM5: Mobile version of our wikis

Someone mentioned installing an extension to make the wiki easier to access from mobile/smartphones and I'd like to assess whether: 1) there's a lot of people interested; and 2) there are major arguments AGAINST it. (This is by the way not an acknowledgement that we'll be doing that or that we're working on related projects, please no second-guessing ^^)

4) Let me know if you have questions, comments or suggestions!

Thanks and I hope that the WikiChat will be the great opportunity to talk to you "face to face"!

(also, wishing you a great Beta Weekend Event 2 if you're playing ^^)

Meeting with the wiki community - May 31, 2012[edit]

Hello everyone,

Now that we released the brand new German and French wikis, I'd like to spend some time with the GW and GW2 wiki community. I'd like to propose that we meet on an IRC channel for a quick chat about the few important topics I've got on my list (status of administrative requests, a few legal questions that were asked, interface redesign, etc.). I'd prefer to use this method rather than set up a page and have a long discussion so as to keep the focus on the topics at hand and simplify the process of decision making.

The basic format of the chat I'm proposing is the following: have 3 discussions at 9:30AM PDT (18h30 CEST), 1PM PDT (22h CEST) and 5PM PDT (2h CEST, next day), ideally on a Wednesday (June 13 if possible). This would happen on an IRC channel I've reserved for the occasion and I'd give precise details on how to do this. Note that this would not require any special program, it'd use this website. I'm thinking of inviting both wikis to these discussions, let me know if separate meetings make more sense.

Since it's a first, I'm going to give the community a week to discuss this idea on my talkpage. Take it as if it was a wiki page: everything can be edited in this proposal, well almost since we still need to make this happen, one way or another. ^^ Feel free to contribute constructively to the discussion here:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/User_talk:Stephane_Lo_Presti#Meeting_with_the_wiki_community

Thanks and I hope to get in touch with many of you soon! Stéphane

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