Talk: Community events/Vote

Keeping events up to date

I'm certainly for including community events with the Wiki. Especially in light of the recent small events that are organized by the new community manager of STO.

However, I think there are certain aspects that should be discussed before the vote closes (and maybe they should've been up for discussion before the vote even started).

1) How are these pages supposed to be kept fresh and up to date? Is there any way to ratify that events are (still) ongoing?

2) Is there anyone willing to commit themselves to these pages in the long-run? I imagine that organizing and fostering this section of the wiki needs a bit of supervision and commitment.

3) Also, are there any criteria for inclusion or can just anyone create an event page?

--Backyardserenade 14:48, 4 January 2012 (UTC)

At the very least, maybe the banner mentioned on the main page should include a disclaimer that information is not up to date. I for one would like to see such pages but since I'm just getting back and have been away for so long, I'll put myself down for an Abstain. --Drmike 18:31, 6 January 2012 (UTC)

1) Yes. The header can take dates and times as parameters and compare it to the current time to determine whether to display it as an upcoming, current, or past event.

The only glitch is there is no way to set the time the page expires in MediaWiki's cache, so the banners would either get updated whenever the cache expires automatically, whenever someone clicks the refresh button next to the "watch" or "un-watch" buttons, or when someone next edits the page (even if they make no changes).

2) I see little need for any significant commitment. The purpose of this vote is to change policy to allow such pages to be created in mainspace, which I expect event organizers will do most of the time. (Though anyone who wishes could do so for any events that aren't fleet exclusive.) I've only seen two cases so far where someone has tried to add an event page in the time I've been here, so it'd take a massive increase before I'd be concerned about the ability of the admin team to manage this.

Added to this is the fact I don't really think we should bother to delete old event pages; we should just clean up links and refresh the header to show the event has taken place. That reduces the need for oversight quite a bit. (Also, I'm likely to use Semantic MediaWiki to mostly automate that too; it would just have the same flaw described above of probably needing to be "kicked" by someone at the appropriate time to refresh.)

3} I see no need for criteria beyond the no fleet-exclusive event rule and any criteria established by our existing policies. I wouldn't be surprised to see some minor glitches with something like page naming.

Like any other wiki page in mainspace, I wouldn't want to see anyone try to "claim ownership" over them. I'm not viewing these as advertisement space; anyone should be able to make good-faith edits to these pages as per good wiki culture. Naturally, vandalism and erroneous edits would also be dealt with as they would be on any other mainspace page. After all, we have an appropriate warning on all edit pages that the writing may be edited mercilessly. — Eyes 12:39, 9 January 2012 (UTC)

Example in place

Since the vote is currently favoring allowing community event pages, I restored one that was previously deleted in accordance with policy and added the new {{eventbanner}} template to it. This is a good example of what this vote is ultimately about. Note that I added a new box to the main page that will automatically include new events that are added to the wiki. I'll leave the vote open for at least a few more days now that there's an example in place of what we've been asked to permit. — Eyes 15:47, 12 January 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for adding this Eyes. In all honestly I'm not sold on the whole community event thing, but I'll back it as it seems most people are in favour. The event banner is good, but I think we think about other measuers to standardise the format. Theres no point ion me prescribing what pages should look like, but perhaps keep an eye on them and come up with some guidelines based on common themes and content.

My worry is that STOwiki is just going to be giving ad space for any old in-game stuff under the guide of a community event. Nevertheless, my fears about anonymous edits ended up unfounded, so I'm prepared to be wrong on this one too! --Zutty 18:18, 13 January 2012 (UTC)

I'm thinking the next step on this will be a rough draft policy so we can address likely areas of abuse. One possibility is to restrict it to open-to-anyone events to help limit the field to legitimate events. I'll try to take a stab at the policy this weekend, along with a simplified deletion policy to get the discussion going on the particulars. — Eyes 18:36, 13 January 2012 (UTC)