Board Thread:Battle Bears Wiki Discussion/@comment-5645428-20141009164832

I have changed my username colour to that of a "tribute", one who has served as an administrator in the past. Very close to my retirement, first I must pass on a few things:

Adminship: Who wants to be an admin? Hands up.

Main page: Whoever is left in charge of this will unfortunately have a very hard time maintaining it. Before even Gnifle was controlling it, someone had the idea to use templates to transclude everything onto it, meaning you'll have to go off and find those to make a single edit. I might try and address this once and for all, otherwise go to Special:Log, select the Template namespace and browse to find everything. They are not protected, just well hidden, so anyone can edit them. Keep in mind that certain things require knowledge of HTML and CSS to manipulate without messing up everything. Proceed carefully.

Categories: One thing I always tried to stay on top of. Please try to keep to that established system so quick navigation between pages is easy. All standard articles receive the "Battle Bears" category, one for their game, and another for the kind of thing it is. BBG articles use more categories such as those for class, weapon, etc. I will give one last sweep to the categories, and from then on it'll be up to everyone else. Be intuitive and it should work simply enough.

"Community" pages: The pages with the Community category are non-standard articles. The Community Portal for instance, formally called "BattleBears Wiki:Community Portal", is a page explaining aspects about running the wiki. Whoever is in charge should keep that in mind and attempt to include any related information there. There are others for administrator conduct, policy, templates etc. Use the aforementioned Category:Community to locate them.

Games pages: Try put some extra effort into these pages. They are dedicated to entire games, and compare this to the fact many wikis are dedicated to single games. Stack as much relevant information on them as you can if they are minor games.

Updates page: I might do this myself, but if I don't, transfer the update logs of each game to their own pages. On second thought, the updates page is not necessary (and hard to find) despite having had it for so long.

Stat pages: Weapon Statistics and Status Effects are two very useful pages that can cover for a lot of smaller pages should they be used properly. Currently they apply to both BBG and BBP unless someone wants to split them up, but I don't think you'd need to. I would advise someone good at writing works on them so everything is explained clearly.

Weapon Types page: This page does not exist at the time of writing this. A long time ago I begun describing the weapon classifications such as "Category:Automatic", "shotgun", "radiation" etc. on their category pages. However, this wiki doesn't actively use them with written content. Instead, someone who is very clear on how weapons function and what that means in classifying them can edit the page to include all that information in the same way Weapon Statistics has its own page.

Battle Bears Pro: This is almost angering as to how stupid it is to change the name of a game so shortly after its release. It is none other than the game's wiki that is hit so hard after such a move. This is important for you editors looking for a basic (but long) task, to change all references of Battle Bears Ultimate (BBU) into Battle Bears Pro (BBP). This includes links and titles. I'm not sure if you're forced to create redirects when remaming pages, but I used to go and delete them and correct all the links that used them to the new name. If you can avoid creating redirects by unchecking a tickbox when you rename a page, do so. Special:ListRedirects is where you can find the redirects. Special:WantedPages is the dead link list. This wiki is a fantastic wiki if you can get rid of all of them, no matter where they are.

General editing: Weapons pages of both BBP and BBG. If this wiki is used for anything, it's to get stats. We get them (BBG) from here, but they're no use to anyone within that blob of text. Get them on and get them right, the articles need them, if that's the only thing they have on them.

Badges: Administrators, you still need to source some images for many of the badges. Ensure they are Battle Bears related and briefly reflect the given name of the badge. I would rather the names are not changed from what they are, but that's no longer my choice. Another thing in regards to badges is the custom badge tracks. Mentioning BBP earlier, if you replace the "Battle Bears Ultimate" category, the track won't work, but creating a new track is required if reapplying it to the "Battle Bears Pro" category. There's no comprimise, making it unfair to those who don't have BBU badges because they won't be able to get them. It's a management decision, just remember that once a track is created, it cannot be deleted and all those who earn those badges keep those badges.

CSS: Not until I worked on it did anyone other than Gnifle possess any CSS knowledge to go and edit the CSS MediaWiki page. Only administrators can edit it through their dashboard, but others can view it by typing "mediawiki" into the search and locating it in the results. I have gone and labelled everything, making it a good well easier to edit for those who know how. Hopefully what's been worked up for the wiki's visuals suffice and make it look a lot nicer, but once more, that's in the hands of those next in line.

Getting places: If you want to run this wiki, you've got to know where to go. Special:SpecialPages. The Community Portal has a partial list on it, this has everything. There's also a "toolbar directory" under Administrators on the navigation bar which lets you pin some of them yo your toolbar at the bottom of your screen. Using these links, you can do a lot of things. It's up to you to find out.

Any questions? 