Forum:SPECIAL ROUNDTABLE: COMMUNITY FUSION

Forums: Index > The World that Never was > SPECIAL ROUNDTABLE: COMMUNITY FUSION

There have been a number of IRC discussions regarding the potential benefits of the re-merging of The Keyhole and KHWiki.net into a single encyclopedia wiki at our location. The Keyhole will be supported by our joint community as a complementary website. This means that, as it was original proposed, there will one encyclopedic site and one fan-news and community site run by a single community. In this way, we hope to solve our mutual problems, which include flagging activity, as well as the way-overplayed and unnecessary drama.

Naturally, the process would be complicated. There are many issues that would need to be carefully addressed, so that's why:

SPECIAL INTER-WIKI ROUNDTABLE THIS FRIDAY, DECEMBER 23rd

The roundtable is currently set to be held on #KHWiki-noticeboard. Staff from both KHWiki.net and the Keyhole are strongly encouraged to attend, if at all possible. The rest of our users are also welcome to attend, but we ask that if you do so, you conduct yourself appropriately. This is looking to be a long and complex process, so we need to keep serious on it. In particular, there will be a zero-drama policy. If you're attending and you have drama, be sure to dump it before you come by.

The roundtable will cover such topics as:

• The combining of Staffs
• Merging article content
  • Includes the use of tabbed subpages
• Images and renders
• Fusing policies
• Template and other general issues regarding coding
  • Includes Main Page revamp
• Combining Forums
• Walkthrough space

Thank you for your patience. We look forward to getting our community back together!

--Neumannz, The Dark Falcon 06:11, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

Meeting log Be wary: There's much unrelated discussion in there. Chitalian8 14:29, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

Update: The meeting will be held at 7 PM EST, on Friday the 23^rd. Please try to attend if you can. Chitalian8 00:55, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

Caveat

Neumannz — ATTENTION, DUELISTS! If you could all stop staring at my hair for a moment... TALK — Those child-grabbing classes were worth every penny! — 20:30, 20 December 2011 (UTC)   I shouldn't have to say this, but I will, just to be safe. We are not having any drama on this. If you disagree with this move, do so politely and with persuasive argumentation. If you start flaming us, the Keyhole, or the re-merge, we will have no sympathy, and any hateful comments posted below will be removed.

Discussion

UxieLover1994 Cuando la vida te da las herramientas, a construir motos libración — 07:23, 20 December 2011 (UTC) Problem: Wikia will refuse to delete wikis, unless it's a wiki ment to bully other users. So, either way, they'll still be a KHWiki at Wikia, which will get far more views than all of SEIWA's wikis combinded.

Pea14733 Knowing it in your head doesn't mean much if you don't act on it. — 14:42, 20 December 2011 (UTC) Starting time of the roundtable?

Neumannz — ATTENTION, DUELISTS! If you could all stop staring at my hair for a moment... TALK — Those child-grabbing classes were worth every penny! — 14:59, 20 December 2011 (UTC)   There appear to be steps we can take that Wikia will allow. We don't want or need to delete the Keyhole, and Wikia hasn't completely hogtied us in making changes to it. And the hope is that once the community is back together, the two sites will direct visitors to each other for their respective purposes. Stay tuned for meeting times.

AS IF! The world is garbage! CRUNCH! I've wanted this to happen for a long time, but didn't know how to best present the idea. If the Keyhole and this wiki have basically the same purpose, why not have all the people who want to contribute to the mainspace come here and make the Keyhole into a fan-oriented site? I'm all for it.

LightRoxas - "I fight for the Users!" TALK - "I'm also better than you!" I agree with you As If. Both wikis have their share of dedicated workers and things they do well, why not combine them like intended? Seems like an obvious decision. And yeha, no need to delete The Keyhole, we can certainly find good uses for it (Theory space, spot to host the Mirage Arena, etc.)

SilverCrono Well, I can tell who you are. — "Looks like you're prepared." "What is with you and picking up stray puppies?" — 20:25, 20 December 2011 (UTC) ...wait, is this forum for discussing the merge or the roundtable?

Chitalian8 Say... — And here's me, playing the world's tiniest violin. Your face is priceless. — 20:47, 20 December 2011 (UTC) Just the Roundtable, I believe.

SilverCrono Well, I can tell who you are. — "It wasn't a compliment." "From where I stood the only thing you drew was a big L on your forehead for "Loser," "Lame," "Laughable"..." — 20:49, 20 December 2011 (UTC) Then...can we make a forum for discussing the merge? I'm sure there is much discussing to be done here.

Chitalian8 Say... — Only by allowing strangers in can we find new ways to be ourselves. Life's little crossroads are often as simple as the pull of a trigger. — 20:59, 20 December 2011 (UTC) I'm pretty sure that over on this side, we're generally all for the merge (except you, Crono). Maybe we could just stop by the Keyhole's forum and drop an opinion there.

..Oh. Alright then >_> --Ag (Silver) - 47 107.8682 amu ~Crono 21:02, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

The Inexistent - All the world's a puzzle, and I the one who made it so... TALK - EVIL has come... at last... Well, as some of you may know way back in late September/ early October, DE and I discussed this very same thing. In response to this, I wrote up a "contract" of sorts, about the combination of the wikis. So, here it is. Imagine that the topic had been suggested by me in a forum titled "Remerging with the Keyhole" sometime in late October. I'm putting this here now because I probably can't make the meeting, so I included everything I could possibly have an opinion on... hopefully. Some of you may be reading this forum title and thinking "is this about how our wiki is dead and The_Inexistent wants us to merge back to The Keyhole?". Well, I am here to inform you that that is not the case. In fact, it is the situation in reverse. For those of you who still edit on Wikia, follow the Wikia staff's blog, or have admin rights on a Wikia wiki, you might of heard or were contacted about Wikia's brilliant new idea to steal Facebook's layout. They are currently in the process of going through all of their wikis and replacing all user talk pages with their new "message wall", an [undisableable] feature that removes all content from talk pages, replacing them with locked archives. So, long story short, Wikia has succeeded in driving away the community of the Kingdom Hearts Wiki twice, yes, that's right, twice. I found out about this the first day Wikia unveiled their plans for it. I was on #wikia-kingdomhearts, and Sove linked it to me. Dark-EnigmaXIII and I then started to discuss it, and the fate of The Keyhole. DE and I were essentially on the same page, both finding the same flaws and hating the same errors with Wikia's new "update". From there, it stemmed into a conversation about DE's thoughts for the future of The Keyhole. He then mentioned that, if this feature was moderately unbearable/ unfixable, he thought the wikis should remerge. I, of course, loved this idea; it would combine our nearly inactive wiki and their excessively active wiki; our cold wiki, and their hot wiki. It would take officiality and combine it with content, that, while not needed, people simply enjoy. So, in my flurry of excitement, I wrote up a draft of what would happen if the wikis merged, as it, by that point, was a serious possibility. I showed it to both DE and Sox, and we discussed it and revised it as necessary. I aimed in the middle; not too conservative, not too liberal. </inadvertantlystartingpoliticalargument> In the end, the plan shouldn't be too shocking to either party. It should make KHWiki a far more enjoyable and active place. SO... Articles 'The Best revisions of major pages will be kept, and then revised until they are of a high quality. This one should be obvious, but I had to include it to be thorough. Articles like Sora, Riku, and Master Xehanort will obviously be updated, while pages like Glut and Piglet probably won't need much change. Quote pages will be kept KHWikians: have you looked at these? They show us to things: 1, that their community has brilliant ideas. 2, that they are willing to watch YouTube videos for hours just to get some quotes for their wiki. Plus, these things are fun to read, and add a great depth of understanding to the character of a character. These would be a wonderful supplement to any article, and show the devotion of the community. The KH3D articles will be kept. Yes, all of them. HOWEVER, they will all be thoroughly cited and speculation free. All stubs will be kept. Even if there is little to them, content is still content. And content draws. The same can be said for redirects and various other pages. Images Renders will be used as the lead image if the official image is of low quality, does not encapsulate the subject, or is incomplete. Guys, a lot of the official images suck. And a lot of the renders rock, which brings me to my next point, which is really a sub point: ALL of DE's renders will be kept, and must be incorporated somewhere in the article, if not as the lead image. Yes. I mean really, his stuff is great, and is almost, if not on par with Shard's, which, as well all know, is great. The galleries need to be kept from the Keyhole. Mostly because they are really full, and encompass a lot more than ours do. User The Lanes Between will be kept But only if the owners want to. I don't know if it should be official, or if it could be a personal arena, or whatever. All other personal things will also be kept, because they really are a lot of fun, and, as I've seen, don't really distract the dedicated editors from editing (ex. The Puzzling Aqua). Let it also be noted that I'll discuss FU with Roxas. Staff Bureaucrats: Kryten, Neumannz, DE, and Sox. Admins: All current Mods: All current I think the best plan is just to mash them all together. Some elections might need to happen, but that can be addressed later. Walkthroughs User generated walkthroughs will be linked to. I... I really don't know what to do with these. I just feel that user walkthroughs need to be shown off. KHWiki: pages Main page will be redesigned. Seeing as we've danced around this for months, we might as well do it now, using elements from both pages. MediaWiki Sox/ Erry will be in charge of the skins, and they can discuss it. Yup.

Chitalian8 Say... — Only by allowing strangers in can we find new ways to be ourselves. Life's little crossroads are often as simple as the pull of a trigger. — 04:21, 21 December 2011 (UTC) I have two adjustments to suggest to this contract, which otherwise looks fine. First off, regarding the KH3D character articles, both wikis are on different levels with those. For example, compare the two Rhyme articles. While our Origin section for Rhyme is clearly superior, The Keyhole has an Appearance section and a Story section, two things our article lacks. I recommend that instead of just using The Keyhole's, they be worked on from what .net has right now, maybe bringing over certain sections from The Keyhole. Secondly, you neglected to mention what we're gonna do about Templates. Now, I hope it's obvious to everyone that The Keyhole's templates are far superior to ours. I propose that, if Sox allows it, we use some of his coding for revamped and improved templates, e.g. Game templates.

KrytenKoro - "Because I knew something he didn't. I knew that I was lying. Seriously, sir. 'No silicon heaven'? Where would all of the calculators go?" TALK - I can agree with most of this, except that fan-made renders will not replace the lead images unless the official image is absolutely abysmal. Otherwise, any fan-made renders we want to have, and we can have as many as desired, should be placed in the article's gallery. Re:quotes: I absolutely agree with how they set up quotes now, and it would work pretty well to have the quotes be set up to be a subpage, similar to how this article covers the different incarnations of the character. It would actually work very well for us to more cleanly set up subpages, so that we have "Character", "Gameplay/Boss", "Gallery", and "Quotes" tabs, and it would be better than having huge messages that take up the top of the page. The only thing I would suggest is wording the quote description more as a description of the context, rather than simple "after/during X". Hell, we could go whole-hog and allow humorous descriptions of the quotes, as done here. Re:walkthroughs: I still have yet to see a finished user walkthrough for any game, and they uniformly fade away, never to be found. I really, really think we need to use all of the user walkthroughs as material for the main walkthroughs, cannibalizing everything. The Destiny Islands format is nearly done, and the editors at the keyhole should be able to bring a lot of expertise in aesthetics in perfecting it...once that's done, I think we can really make the walkthroughs great. But yeah, we should bring all the existing user walkthroughs over...but again, I think they would be best served by being eventually cannibalized. Re:staff: As people have said, there's two ways to go about this: replicate the staff on both wikis, or hold new elections. Personally, I feel there are a lot of people who are currently staff who aren't active enough to remain listed as active staff, and there are a lot of wonderful editors who absolutely deserve to be promoted. Furthermore, we have KH3D coming up, and both sets of staff have complained from exhaustion. I don't think simply replicating the staff is the correct method. Personally, I don't see why people have a problem with their being "too much staff". Other than the bcrat powers, the various powers that staff have are fairly useful tools that I feel we could trust a lot of regular editors to use correctly. On the other hand, there really isn't much use for a ton of bcrats. The only unique powers they have are ones that barely need to be used. So, here's my proposal. We don't need more than three bcrats -- large enough to prevent a fatal situation if the bcrat goes rogue or missing, but small enough to prevent things from getting out of hand. However, for the admin, mod, and artist ranks, I think we can easily work with let's say fifteen admins, ten mods, and ten artists. And I really think that it would be best to put everyone up for new elections, to get an accurate view of the community at large and to get a fresh start, which would help prevent the staff from splitting along party lines. I'd also like to say that, in that situation, I refuse to keep being a bcrat. If we simply merge staff, then I guess I'll have to stay.

Dark-EnigmaXIII - Ones born of the heart and darkness, devoids of heart... TALK - Those who ravage all worlds and bring desolation... 05:52, 21 December 2011 (UTC) Well, I discussed most those terms with The_Inexistent back in its time, and I agree to them, and the changes soliciticed by Chitalian and Kryten without further ado. However, as for the staff situation, I agree on everything but the number of cbrats, as I feel 4 to be a more suitable number. Why four? for a simple and at first stupid reason, maybe: The remerge of the community. While its true that bcrats holds power that are not needed that much, due to the current situation in wich the wiki will be, of both communities merging into one again, 2 bcrats representing the Keyhole community and 2 bcrats representing this community might prevent the creationg of an "inferiority" feeling in the community with less representation in the staff, somenthing that while is not important regarding the actual labors of the staff, in the situation of the remerge of the comunnity, I believe its important to make both of them feel as confortable as possible. So, that's my only suggestion. 4 bcrats, 2 from each community.

LegoAlchemist - They changed "Snipe Magnet" to "Magnet Grab"? Who's translating this game, 4kids? TALK - Friendships are in direct contravention of mercenary conduct as delineated in your contracts, and on a personal note: I am very, very, disappointed with you. Did anyone remember to log the discussion at #wikia-kingdomhearts on Monday? Never mind.

AS IF! The world is garbage! CRUNCH! I completely agree with DE. Just some more things: What will we do about the roleplay? I propose linking to it from this wiki, so long as it doesn't lower anyone's activity. But seeing as how it's fanon, there is reason for debate. Who will deal with organizing the re-synching of images and articles? What we did last time worked perfectly; we just need someone to make a new page for it. I personally do not want the Lanes Between to be brought over, at least without some rule changes. This is because the Mirage Arena and the Lanes Between are EXACTLY the same, but with different characters and themes. Why have two wiki-sponsored arenas that are identical? I propose that the Lanes Between stay at the Keyhole. I mean really, unless we're planning on leaving the Keyhole to the vandals and trolls to destroy, we have to have something there to attract new fans, right? It's already successful at drawing in new users; let the Lanes Between stay where it is so that the Keyhole can have its life somewhat sustained. Which brings me to my next question: what will happen to the Keyhole once everything and (possibly) everyone moves here? Will we abandon it? Make it a fansite? Something else entirely? That's all I have to say for now.

Chitalian8 Say... — Only by allowing strangers in can we find new ways to be ourselves. Life's little crossroads are often as simple as the pull of a trigger. — 16:16, 21 December 2011 (UTC) The plan discussed was to make The Keyhole a fan/news site that would link and direct people to this site. However, it all depends on if we can find people to maintain that site or not, or what Wikia will think of this.

UxieLover1994 Nya? — 16:41, 21 December 2011 (UTC) I'd say something about this, but I fear that it will just add too much drama. But I am awhere that the Wikia Staff will not be happy about this change.

LightRoxas - "You shoot him, I shoot you, I leave both your bodies here and go out for a late night snack. I'm thinking maybe pancakes." TALK - "I don't like feeling like Team Chuck's little fat kid!" As far as staff goes, I would say that we should have elections after the merge, like Kryten said, but only for admins and mods. Bcrats could be limited to four total, and include our two and the Keyhole's two. Of course, Kryten seems adamant that he should not be a bureau, which I think we should honor. For this to be the case, we would need to promote one of our active admins to bureaucrat.

ShardofTruth Once you believe, truth and lie are quite the same thing. — 01:54, 22 December 2011 (UTC) After reading the horrible long log and the page at The Keyhole, I now feel ready to post some thought of my own: Firstly I think the merge is a very good idea because the articles are stagnating somewhat on both wikis, although I think it's worse here (with the exception of the walkthrough and KH3D articles). I won't elaborate this point further, I just think the problem's core is the shrunken userbase. We moved here because we were unhappy with Wikia's choices. I and probably all other moved users thought that the left over Wikia site would become desolate and obsolete in the end. Now that did not happen (causing most of the conflict potential between the wikis as a result) and there are various reasons it did not turn out like this. The most important one is that the users over there wanted to do things differently or didn't agree on how the wiki worked before in the first place. The outcome was a slightly more fandriven but in all other areas competitive wiki updated by excellent and resourceful users of their own. Now I feel we've come full circle and are at a point again where decisions are made that could produce yet another schism. I feel that we (the khwiki.net) have to become more open and make concessions to unite the userbase. To make a standardized and well written encyclopedia is a noble cause but hardly done alone. To keep the target audience of Kingdom Hearts interested we have to create more space for communication and socializing and relax the no fanwork rules in these areas. Making the The Keyhole a fanwork, community and news platform ("for real" this time, completly ignoring the Kingdom Hearts Fanon Wiki again) may not work out this time too. The merging process itself will be a lot of work. Thanks for pointing out the basic working sites The Inexistent, but there are many areas that need to be discussed. The Keyhole goes different ways in the article design by now and it would be a real shame to diminish all their effort and hard work just to get our way across. On the other hand our image renovation and renaming project is 99% complete and that was a real pain to achieve.

DoorToNothing — I dreamed last night... I got on the boat to Heaven! And by some chance, I had brought my dice along! — 02:06, 22 December 2011 (UTC) Firstly I am trying very hard to resist using my Vriska theme. So, so hard. The effort alone is draining. Wikia never said they will not allow for us to delete pages. They said they will not allow for us to delete content. That is extremely different. For example, take a look at the Final Fantasy Wiki. Instead of having individual articles for every weapon and accessory from each game, they use List Articles. Examples are "List of Weapons in Final Fantasy VI" or "List of Armor in Final Fantasy XII". This retains all content, since weapon and accessory articles are most quantitative data. All of the qualitative abilities and descriptions can easily be described very briefly in one column of such lists. This would allow hundreds of articles to be taken out of KHWikia without losing content itself. Now, as far as the terms of the merge go, let me say this: this wiki is not "inactive." We are not trying to "absorb" KHWikia at all. Rather, we're going to combine efforts on both URL's while completely reallocating our division of space across the two wikis. Rather than having two wikis with one being more fan-oriented and relaxed than the other, one site will function as an encyclopedia, and one site will function as a fan site. As far as TI's contract thing goes, I'm all for what he says as far as articles go. Images, however, I have to side with Kryten. While a fan-made render can be aesthetically superior to that which SE produced, fans will recognize an image produced by SE much easier. We also don't want to start producing material as just fan-made that could appear as official. After all, we are a professional wiki covering official topics, and therefore official media should be used whenever possible. Personal things, like the arena and Puzzling Aqua, I would like to see kept on the fan site, moreso for the latter than the former. I think puzzling games and forum contests really do not belong on this wiki, especially if we are trying to divide up content on professional wiki vs. fan material. I mean, that's just going right against the flow we are trying to create. I suggest we move these contests and such over to KHWikia's forums. The arena is the only thing that is a personal contest for the fans that I would allow to stay here, simply because of its ties to the professional wiki. Even then, however, I would not object to leaving it on KHWikia. However, two arenas on one wiki is just unnecessary, especially for the wiki side of the collaboration. The same goes for roleplay: absolutely, 100% not on the wiki side. Please leave that completely on the fansite. Staff needs its own discussion. I am going to say this as honestly as I possibly can: we have too many staff members claiming to be active when in reality they do not even check or appear as "online" hardly ever in the Recent Changes. It is unfair to the wiki and more importantly to this community for staff positions to remain unopened because a few individuals do not want to do this place justice by admitting inactivity. Yes, inactivity. Not retirement, guys! I just went inactive. You can still edit all you like and you don't even get placed with all the retired users. Forreal. It is for this reason that users who work their rumps off on this wiki cannot be promoted, which is quite frankly unfair and unjust. The reason I bring this up is because if we fuse staffs due to size, we are making an extremely skewed judgment, because our staff realistically is not as large as the page says it is. Forreal. Walkthroughs. I have always supported user-generated walkthroughs, but KHWiki also likes to produce official, wiki-created walkthroughs. I suggest we compromise and just allow both to be made and advertised, but with the wiki-created ones being notated as "officially" by the wiki's community as a whole. Please clean up the Main Page. I've said this too many times so asdfjkl;. Also, the skin should not be the job of just two users. I think this should be held in a large forum between the two wikis with perhaps a few users orchestrating the coding and creation of it. The ideas and brainstorming should be done by the entire community. And I didn't even use Homestuck speak once!!!!!!!! ::::)

KrytenKoro - "Punch your lights out, hit the pavement. That's what I call entertainment. Causin' problems makes you famous - all the violence makes a statement." TALK - Personally, my biggest problem with fanart being on the wiki was that it inevitably got uploaded to the main articles. We had fanart constantly being uploaded to Paopu Fruit, Xehanort's Keyblade, and Vanitas's Keyblade. Even the talkbox images would get uploaded to galleries because people were irresponsible about how they named and categorized them, and people couldn't tell that they were fake. I really, really want to make sure that if we end up allowing fanart, that it has to have a strict naming policy to keep that confusion from ever happening again. On the Digimon Wiki, which I also run, we have a pretty straightfoward rule (though it is made easier by how difficult it is to fake stuff there): any fanart that gets placed in a main article is deleted and banned from being uploaded again. If we decide that fanart will be reallowed...then we're going to have to make a strict rule about the naming. I'm just straight up not willing to put false info in the articles, whether it's the text or the image. Furthermore, most of the fanart that people put on their pages would be easier to just use the direct-linked url from the wikia, instead of reuploading it, like what I do with the cats on my user page. That being said, renders are not fanart. They are fan-posed, certainly, but not fanart. It's totally fine to move over all of DE's stuff, I'm just...not totally comfortable saying "his art has to be on every single page", for various reasons. If the official art is totally unusable, then fan-renders are fine. Otherwise, they should go on a gallery page like all of the other art. Per the wikia page organization: Yes, they have some pretty good ideas with that that I would love for the merged wiki to integrate, with even more additions. I've said it before, but separating character pages into tabs works really damn well. This could either be done as a separate template, or it could be easily integrated into the infobox template I've been working on.

maggosh ...the flint is struck. — "Maybe I should punish you after all." "Come on! Show a little backbone!" "Wikia never said they will not allow for us to delete pages. They said they will not allow for us to delete content. That is extremely different. For example, take a look at the Final Fantasy Wiki. Instead of having individual articles for every weapon and accessory from each game, they use List Articles. Examples are "List of Weapons in Final Fantasy VI" or "List of Armor in Final Fantasy XII". This retains all content, since weapon and accessory articles are most quantitative data. All of the qualitative abilities and descriptions can easily be described very briefly in one column of such lists. This would allow hundreds of articles to be taken out of KHWikia without losing content itself." This was covered months ago on The Keyhole. Such blind arrogance, like the naked emperor.

Erry - I've got a fever, and the only cure is more dead angels! TALK - You want to touch me?! ~ 09:29, 22 December 2011 (UTC) @maggosh, yes and pages such as Firagun Bangle and Firagun Wrist do not exist on such a page that lists them. They're still separate pages.

Pea14733 Listen up, Phones. The world ends with you. If you want to enjoy life, expand your world. You gotta push your horizons out as far as they'll go — 16:25, 22 December 2011 (UTC) The roundtable is tomorrow and we still haven't appoint the time yet?

AS IF! The world is garbage! CRUNCH! Well, seeing as how I can't make the meeting, make sure you get things done!