Forum:General proposals/Archive 1

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Forum:Proposals

I propose that we use this forum page instead of using the community portal or its talk page. If anyone has any really good suggestions for alternative names for this page, please do say, because Forum:Proposals is a bit stuffy. PenguinofDeath 19:53, 20 February 2012 (EST)

Let's see if this works. LightningBlue: Need to Balance 20:24, 20 February 2012 (EST)

What's the point of this page?

I don't get what the point of this is. Historically all proposals have been on either the related talk page or as individual forums. Toomai Glittershine The Steppin' 20:36, 20 February 2012 (EST)

Actually, historically, proposals were also made on SmashWiki:Community portal or on SmashWiki talk:Community portal. But the community portal is more of a help center, so archiving it would be difficult given the amount of non-discussion material on the page, and the associated talk page shouldn't be used to discuss the wiki, it should be used to discuss the community portal itself, because that's what talk pages are for. This way, we have a dedicated wiki discussion page, like a lot of other wikis have. PenguinofDeath 09:39, 21 February 2012 (EST)

If we want a page devoted to discussing the wiki itself (which is not a bad idea, sicne it seems that [Talk:Main page] is currently being used for such), it might be better named something like "SmashWiki:Metadiscussion" or "SmashWiki:Wiki discussion". I image people would still rather have individual pages for new proposals, which could just be linked to from there if necessary. Toomai Glittershine The SMASH-GINEER 09:57, 21 February 2012 (EST)

I agree with Toomai. It is much neater and better organized to have proposals or whatnot to be on a page by page basis. If there isn't a place for a specific discussion, an entire forum page can be created for it, a better alternative than having one messy forum page with all of the discussions. Also, PoD, you mentioned that a lot of wikis have a dedicated discussion page. Look at Wikitroid's RfC page. It is much more disorganised than the way we do things here, having discussions posted on their individual talk pages or forums. DoctorPain99 _{ROLLBACKER} 12:22, 21 February 2012 (EST)

Dr. Pain: Wikitroid's RfC is objectively more organized than the way we do things on SmashWiki; are you really saying that having each proposal on a different page is more organized than having them all gathered in one place?

Toomai: I would be opposed to calling it SmashWiki:Blah because then it'd have an associated talk page, and we'd have exactly the same problem that we had with the community portal of people seeing SmashWiki:Blah and thinking "I shouldn't edit this page directly, I should leave a comment on the talk page." The current best proposal I've heard was from Shwido on IRC which was to create a subforum (like the Watercooler, Brawl talk, etc.) called "Wiki Discussions" or something like that and to have at the top of each page on the subforum a notice saying that the subforum is not to be used for frivolous discussions, only if someone has a serious proposal for the wiki. This would be fairly easy to implement. All we'd need to do is make a new subforum and make each new page on that subforum automatically have a modified version of the Forumheader template on it which would also put the forum page in the SmashWiki category. What do you think? PenguinofDeath 15:58, 21 February 2012 (EST)

But creating a subforum defeats the purpose of collecting everything in one place. That would lead to separate pages for each topic, which is what we were trying to avoid. Toomai's proposal sounds better because we wouldn't be making talk pages/the forum obsolete, but instead creating a dedicated single page for general wiki discussion that might not fit on any specific talk page or necessitate its own page in the forum. As for the "people editing the talk page" issue, can't we just protect only the talk page and redirect it to the discussion page? Mousehunter321 (talk · contributions) 16:07, 21 February 2012 (EST)

What I'm trying to avoid is having lots of wiki discussion pages in the SmashWiki namespace that all do the same thing, and which are mixed in with actual policy and guideline pages which are nothing to do with them. And the whole point of creating a subforum is to gather everything in one place... It's the best of both worlds: each proposal gets its own page, and all proposals are gathered in one place. Why would we go to the trouble of creating a SmashWiki: page, and redirecting and protecting its talk page when we can just use forum pages and avoid that problem altogether? PenguinofDeath 16:25, 21 February 2012 (EST)

I follow your thinking, but it's not like that forum pages don't have talk pages. How would using a subforum eliminate that problem? Wouldn't it create more issue with multiple talk pages? Mousehunter321 (talk · contributions) 16:32, 21 February 2012 (EST)

As I said before, when people see page in the SmashWiki namespace they think "I shouldn't edit this page directly, I should leave a comment on the talk page." but there's no such conditioned reaction towards Forum pages. Quite the opposite, in fact, as everyone knows that forum pages are for leaving comments on. PenguinofDeath 16:39, 21 February 2012 (EST)

Does anyone actualy use the subforum feature? I don't even know how. Toomai Glittershine The Incomprehensible 16:43, 21 February 2012 (EST)

Click on "Forum" in the Participate box on the left, that will take you to the subforums, then you can click on any of the subforums which'll take you to all the forums created in that subforum. The "Add new topic" box will create a new forum in that subforum.--Shaun's Wiji Dodo talk 16:50, 21 February 2012 (EST)

Forum:Proposals proposed rename

Could we call it Forum:Discussionss? Mousehunter321 (talk · contributions) 20:57, 20 February 2012 (EST)

Yeah, thinking about it, "Proposals" is a bit misleading, as the page is more for discussing the wiki... If there are no better suggestions, and if Toomai doesn't overrule me on the existence of this page in the first place, I'll change the name this evening. PenguinofDeath 09:39, 21 February 2012 (EST)

Why can't we make it SmashWiki:name? In my opinion, titling it "Forum" makes it sound too informal. If there's a concern about people using the talk page instead of the page itself, we could just make the talk page a redirect and protect it. Current options:

• Discussion Center
• Discussions
• Proposals
• Watercooler
• Rest Area
• Final Destination

Mousehunter321 (talk · contributions) 15:32, 21 February 2012 (EST)

Updated:

• Discussion center
• Discussions
• Metadiscussion
• Wiki discussion
• Proposals
• Watercooler
• Rest Area
• Final Destination

Mousehunter321 (talk · contributions) 16:38, 21 February 2012 (EST)

Removed some bad names

• Discussion center
• Discussions
• Metadiscussion
• Wiki discussion
• Proposals
• Watercooler
• Rest Area
• Final Destination

If no one comments within 3 days, I'm moving this to Forum:Discussions. Mousehunter321 (talk · contributions) 23:03, 22 February 2012 (EST)

Wiki Discussions > Discussions. Just discussions on its own could mean practically anything. Toast ltimatum 07:43, 23 February 2012 (EST)

Yeah, Forum:Wiki Discussions sounds a lot better. PenguinofDeath 12:24, 26 February 2012 (EST)

Agree. Sounds better. ..... The Pikachu 14:09, 26 February 2012 (EST)

Ambassadorship

If you've ever been touring around other Wikis, you may have spotted that some of them have a user rights setting called 'ambassador'. As an example of what Ambassadors can do, I'm going to list the features that Icaruspedia's ambassadorship rank offers;

• Rollback
• Autopatrolled rights
• The ability to patrol other edits
• Suppress redirects

Before elaborating why I think rights like this would be useful, I'm going to diverse away for a second. Remember that RfA I made? Yeah, spur of the morning thing, had I thought over it properly, or just woken up a bit, I probably would have decided against. But my thinking behind making that RfA at the time was; "SmashWiki is my main hobby, I might as well enhance my experience of it" Now you can't become an admin just on the basis of being a good editor. But an ambassador could. Abilities such as being autopatrolled, redirect suppressing are the kinds of things that can be entrusted to any member of the community that we know can handle them (additionally, this Wiki doesn't really manage patrolling, having looked through the Log, so more users with the ability to patrol edits would be beneficial). As things stand, the only way to obtain these abilities is by becoming a full-blown admin.

Another problem with that would be that Wikis generally try to refrain from having a high amount of admins, and SmashWiki is no expection. As I said before, you can't just be rewarded with it. But with ambassadorship, there's no limit on how many users can have this right, just as we have no limit on the amount of standalone rollbackers. Becoming an admin grants a user a whole bunch of responsibility, but ambassadorship is nothing more than enhanced editing tools. The exact reason morning-me made an RfA.

Quite how ambassadorship could be earned, I do not know for sure yet. It could be earned in an RfA-style way, or simply distributed to trusted users, but that isn't the question right now. For the time being, I only need to know if anyone else would be interested in having an ambassador user rights group. Of course, we don't have to implement it in the same way as the Icaruspedia example I gave. Rollback may not have to come with it, or maybe there's some other abilities that could be granted by this.

So that's the concept, any thoughts? Toast ltimatum 19:17, 1 June 2012 (EDT)

I agree with you that we should grant greater tools to trusted users, and I see little issue with creating such a group. I also believe that the ability to view deleted content is a useful tool that would belong in this group. Mousehunter321 (talk · contributions) 00:23, 2 June 2012 (EDT)

Could you explain the difference between ambassador and administrator? Can you also tell me what auto-patrolled is? Avengingbandit 01:55, 2 June 2012 (EDT)

Ambassadors can not block users and delete/protect pages. Auto-patrolled allows you to mark an edit as patrolled, which lets other users know that someone has checked that edit. This saves time for multiple people. As for the ambassadorship, I agree with having it. MegaTron1XD 02:03, 2 June 2012 (EDT)

@Bandit You know on Game & Watch Wiki that edits that weren't made by admins have red ! Marks in front of them? That means an edit has not been patrolled. You can then patrol said edit to show that this edit has been verified. Auto-patrolled means that all of your edits are automatically patrolled. Toast ltimatum 11:53, 2 June 2012 (EDT)

Per Mousehunter. This sounds like a really good thing for trusted editors to have. Unknown the Hedgehog 22:48, 3 June 2012 (EDT)

So you're basically proposing a sort of "trusted", "janitor", or "jr. admin" group? ("Ambassador" as used by NIWA's other wikis implies that it's given for free to admins of other wikis.) If so I think you should split this into a new page, because that's relatively major. Toomai Glittershine The Hammer 23:24, 3 June 2012 (EDT)

First we have to come up with some sort of name for it. Other Wikis, namely Wikitroid, call this user right "Patroller". Would that name be appropriate? DoctorPain99 {ROLLBACKER} 23:41, 3 June 2012 (EDT)