User blog:Auric Drake/Introduction and plans

Hi, I'm Auric Drake.

First, a recap for those who haven't been following recent events. I haven't been on this wiki for long, but when I started editing I noticed that it had a lot of issues: incomplete pages, wanted pages, pages that were duplicates of existing pages etc. Some of these issues can only be fixed by someone with admin rights, but none of the existing admins had contributed for years. I tried messaging the wiki's founder and then-bureaucrat, User:Ars Oboro, to grant me admin rights, but received no reply. I therefore made a request on Community Central to adopt the wiki, which was accepted. As a result, I'm now the sole admin and bureacrat of this wiki.

In this blog post, I outline ways I think this wiki could be improved and give advice on how to do so.

Adding to incomplete pages

There are plenty of pages on the wiki that are far from complete. Take one example, Lux Arcadia. Despite being the page of the main character of the series, most of its sections are incomplete - the Plot section only covers the first part of the first volume. These pages need to be filled out. It may seem like a daunting task at first, but that's what the community is for. Don't worry about trying to fill in everything missing on a page in one go - limit yourself to one or more sections at a time. Other people can always add the rest later.

The Insights section is your friend.

Insights is a group of lists of pages that should be edited for one reason or another. These are a good place to start improving the wiki. Unorganized templates and Portable Infoboxes require considerable technical knowledge of wiki editing, so inexperienced contributors need not bother with these. Popular Pages is a list of the most viewed pages, which need frequent editing to remain up to date. The rest are lists of pages with something missing (in the case of Wanted pages, they are pages that are missing). For details on how to contribute, follow these links: Help:Categories, Help:Photos, Help:Links, Help:Formatting pages, Help:Infoboxes.

Adding References.

References are something you've probably seen on other wikis. They take the form of little superscript numbers at the end of a sentence. References are a good idea to help ensure that information on the wiki is accurate, as they encourage editors to look at the source material while they're editing. A general guide to adding references can be found here. For more specific advice, I recommend that references on this wiki have the format of "Light Novel Volume [X], Episode [X]", "Anime Episode [X]" or "Manga Chapter [X]", depending on whether the source material was the light novels, anime or manga, respectively. For an example of a page with references, see Sacred Eclipse.

Capitalisation

Knowing when to capitalise certain words can be tricky. In my opinion, they should only be capitalised if they are also capitalised in an English translation of the source material. To give an example from the Abilities section of the Lux Arcadia page, "Reload on Fire" has the first and third words capitalised in all translations I've seen, as it's the formal name for a skill, but "Master swordsman" isn't capitalised (aside from the first word, due to it being first in a sentence) as it's a generic description of an ability that Lux has.

Deleting light novel content pages

There are a number of pages which are direct copy-pastes of the English translation of the light novels. An example of this is Prologue_-_The_Black_Hero. I believe that copies of the source material (even a translation of the same) don't belong on a wiki. If people want to read the light novels, they can find the translations easily in any search engine. I therefore want to delete these pages, but I'd like to get everyone's opinion first.

UPDATE: I've now deleted these pages.

Achievements system

I recently put in a request for Achievements to be enabled on this wiki, which was granted. For those unfamiliar with this, it's essentially video game-style achievements. Users get badges whenever they accomplish certain things, such as making their first edit. These are divided into bronze (gives 10 points), silver (50 points) and gold (100 points). The wiki has a leaderboard listing users in descending order of their point totals. Note that the achievements are limited to this wiki and are purely cosmetic.

Recruiting more admins

I can't handle all admin-related affairs on my own, nor is this expected of a wiki admin. I'm therefore encouraging anyone interested in becoming an admin to nominate themselves in the comments. Before doing so, please read these pages first to understand what being an admin involves: Help:Administrators' how-to guide, Help:Best practices for administrators

''' And finally... '''

I have to emphasise that I've only been on this wiki a short time. While I have more experience at editing wikis in general, I'm not that familiar with this one. Because of this, I'm open to any suggestions on how to better run the wiki.