User talk:Stephane Lo Presti/wiki editors

This page is for discussing the topc of attracting (and retaining) editors on the wikis.

Gaining and Retaining Editors

I stopped contributing in June after being very active prior to the release of GW2. I doubt much would have changed the confluence of events and emotions which continue to keep me from contributing here. There are, however, a few things which might merit your consideration on this topic. I know many are so wishful they're never likely to come to pass but you're getting them anyway.

• Pride/Ego - while wiki contribution is meant to be without ego I've seen many want to contribute to show off what their characters have done, how much they know, or their other skills. Personally, I particularly like to have a sense of ownership.
  • Subject Matter Experts. Create a template for a high level page (e.g sylvari, skill, structured PvP, WvW stuff that can drift out of touch or people are afraid to edit because of size and detail in content) which indicates a major maintainer of a page. The listed maintainer is guaranteeing they will answer questions on the talk page, encourage contributions to the page and keep the page and their knowledge completely up to date with the topic. This gives a contributor an ongoing sense of ownership of a topic and a limited scope which encourages a knowledgeable editor to contribute in a way that doesn't take much time each week and not necessarily feel they need to keep up with wiki politicking in areas not of interest to them.
  • Wider Acknowledgment. While those active on the wiki know who's done what and may even thank contributors for their effort more acknowledgment can often reenforce and encourage. New contributors who seem to be making a fair number of edits could be thanked more readily, specifically and directly on their talk page. Large efforts could be acknowledged on the main page, community portal or some other way to reach a greater wiki/game audience - this both thanks the user who put the effort in and lets those who are less active see contributing to the wiki isn't completely thankless.
  • Allow Showing Off. Set down a standard for armor/item imagery. The first person who is able to meet the image requirements gets to caption the image with their character name/username. Will require some policing but may encourage quality image contribution which can be slow otherwise.
• Early Access - You've got a new patch coming out. Let some reliable, NDA'd wiki contributors into your test servers/press builds for the express purpose of preparing some content for release alongside the patch. If something like this was a rotating role based on contribution or helpfulness or some other measure the opportunity could present a serious incentive for players to contribute over a long period on the wiki.
• ArenaNet Contributions - One of the exciting things about contributing to the wiki is you've got this slim chance of working with those people who work on the game you can't get out of your head.
  • Feedback. Maybe an editor is also an aspiring technical writer. If they put a lot of work into a page perhaps feedback from someone who writes professionally for the game could be pestered for feedback wrt style, structure of information and so on.
  • Give us Information. Bag drop research goes out of date so easily. I'm sure there are other areas which could use some developer insight. An information dump on a talk page, a quick chat or something like it and I'm sure there will be contributors happy to do the on-page editing to get things up to date. Perhaps having the opportunity to be able to ask for information when there is focus on an article to bring it up to 'featured' status could be empowering.
  • Ease Technical Limitations. while this may have changed in my absence some parts of wiki editing are heavily manual. Skills, traits for example are tedious to check and update. For me this is made worse by the fact you don't always know what has been done (Am I the first or the third person to check this?). With access to appropriate information from the game in bulk formats tedious updates are replaced with (IMO!) more interesting and rewarding automation tasks. Bulk information automatically derived from the game or test servers checked against wiki information can also provide an additional test to make sure patch notes are correct/no unintended skill changes are added.
• In game items, gems, other stuff. Other fan sites get items to give away, perhaps the wiki could get similar items which could be distributed to those people who make outstanding contributions.
• We are not ArenaNet employees - I'm not here in large part because I cannot afford to play the game and document it along with all other things my life demands of me. Remember your contributors are volunteers and while perhaps you'd like to heard the cats to a specific destination, those who find interest performing another task should not be discouraged.

You've already got a great base of fans thrilled and excited to contribute to the wikis of the Guild Wars games they love. Perhaps some of these ideas might help those who aren't already excited about contributing to be. I'm only slightly apologetic about the wall of text. :D -- aspectacle  07:16, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

I have problems with your ownership suggestions. One common complaint you'll hear about Wikipedia is how particular users see themselves as "owners" of pages and revert other users' edits; we don't need to encourage that kind of thing. Ownership is something that puts off new editors, it doesn't encourage them.

Also, regarding putting usernames in articles, I imagine some people would prefer particular revisions just to have their names on display, and not for actual quality purposes. "Image requirements" are subjective, and I wouldn't like to make them hard requirements, which means it'd be harder to know who "got there first". And that's not getting into the issue of providing more-visible credit for some users and not others, in some places but not others. pling 16:28, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

Aspectacle has one thing right: being visibly credited for something is a strong motivator. However, I agree with you that it's not something we should do here. Before GuildWiki left Wikia, they introduced many "features" similar to what Aspectacle has suggested, including adding an uploader credit to image thumbnails. I observed several Wikia communities come to blows and a couple disintegrate entirely because of these "features," and I do not want to see that happen on GW2W.

In lieu of visible credit, we do need to find other ways of motivating people to contribute. Direct feedback and maybe even a barnstar-style system would be a good start. —Dr Ishmael 17:02, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

I think wiki work is in itself pretty rewarding. Since you can build and cteate things, and often see things that you started take from because other people are also contibuting.

Feedback is of course great and positive feedback can be a strong motivator. Many forums I know have a reputation, karma or whatever you want to call it system, where you can hand out one ore many points (in some cases) for a specific post in this case edit. The user sees that he got a point froma user and can display the amount of reputaion next to his/her user name, this would probably be the User page when you are in a wiki. These kind of systems obviously work well in forums but I tink these could work well in wikis too. - Yandere 01:35, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

Go to the character creation screen. Select human. Accept character as it is, change no options. Outfit in armor. Tada - anonymity. I detest any concept of ownership on a wiki. 109.156.14.180 01:42, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the feedback aspectacle. I think it's important we listen to people who no longer edit the wiki and in particular their reasons. I'm not going to say much at this point because the discussion only started, but I can already see that there could be some useful ideas to examine. A few specific replies below:

• • I like the notion of "ownership" as it relates to "being in charge" and helping others, not so much on the topic of pride and ego (behaviors that can lead to a lot of interpersonal issues). Like Dr Ishmael, I'm wondering whether Wikipedia's wikipedia:Wikipedia:Barnstars or wikipedia:Wikipedia:BADGE could help reward expertise.
  • Early access: this is something I already started working on but I've lowered the priority on this because the cost/benefit calculation seems not to be in favor of this.
  • ArenaNet contribution: the Feedback part is probably impossible for us, as the teams are simply too busy with the work related to the game; about sharing Information, this is a complex subject that would require its own discussion; the third point about technical limitations is the same as the previous point.
  • In-game item: I had this on my list but felt that it could be potentially harmful to the wiki community, as it'd attract people more interest in the rewards than in documenting the game (short term gain for the wiki with a long-term loss).
  • We are not ArenaNet employees: I'm not sure what you're saying here, what "other task" do you have in mind?

Let's also be clear that, like Yandere said, working on the wiki should be the main reward and maybe we can find some wiki-related use to karma-like systems. --Stephane Lo Presti talk 02:01, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

An in-game vanity item, like a Wikki hat, would be a great promotion to the wiki and be make wiki users feel warm and fuzzy. You wouldn't even have to edit the wiki to acquire it. Offer it free for a week to allow wiki users and fans to obtain one then put a 50/100 gem (non-prohibitive) cost so people can show support.--Relyk ~ talk > 02:29, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Technical limitations: I know, from off-wiki conversations with a former editor who knows an employee at Curse, that GW2DB exists because said employee figured out how to dump the skill/map/item/recipe/etc. data from Gw2.dat. He of course refused to give me any details, on the grounds of "My friend could get fired if this got out," but I've been able to blunder my way through a little bit of it. Unfortunately, I'm not paid to work on this 40 hours a week (this ties into the We are not Anet (or Curse) employees point), and I have a lot of other things I want to work on, so I haven't done any work on this in a while.

I'm going to bold this, because it's important: We need for the wiki to be competitive with sites like GW2DB. Maybe we'll never track Trading Post prices or anything that fancy, but at the very minimum we should be able to document all the skills in a timely and accurate manner. The skill data was more accessible in GW1, so I wrote some scripts that would compare that data between builds and alert me to any changes that occurred, allowing me to update GuildWiki very quickly (sometimes before GWW, if I was home when the update dropped) with the exact data that was used in the game. If there was any way that Anet could provide a dump of GW2 skill data after major builds, I could set up the same thing for GW2W. —Dr Ishmael 02:51, 14 February 2013 (UTC)