Board Thread:Wiki Discussion/@comment-4991685-20170904232604/@comment-1073312-20170905101504

Lets not get hung up over the concept of "wiki contributor". It is not a complicated concept, it merely means the user is contributing to SporeWiki, and is likely to stay contributing to SporeWiki. A contribution here is everything outside of editing a user page or message wall. It includes all projects, including fiction, namespace, the taxonomy project and wiki decision making. It can be a mixture of these. It doesn't take long to work out by the user's edit history that they are making contributing edits to SporeWiki. It should be obvious that message walls and user pages be left out, because we do occasionally get users who use SporeWiki to discuss their drama on other wiki's, so it is fair they are left out until they make 250 constructive edits.

I don't we should make the system anymore complicated than it needs to be. By over-defining this system we make it more complicated and error prone. I have a general trust with myself and the other administrators that they have a good intuition as to whether a user is contributing, because all it takes is a look by filtering and counting the user's edits. You can even try this yourself, we looked at the first 250 edits of a number of users new and old, and we discovered it takes generally a week to three weeks for new users to reach this count. The original idea was to look at the quality of the edits (like fiction page) as a criterion but that is far too specific and subjective.

I think the mixed probation is far too lenient and opens a can of worms. Engaging with discussions on Discord should not be a criterion of wiki contributor, especially considering it opens the door to the question of what constitutes as off-topic or less important discussion making by particular users. After-all, I'm not willing to consider "transient users" on the wiki contributors.

I think there is still strong misunderstandings as to the purpose of requiring an edit contributor status. The Discord channel was made for users who edit SporeWiki, it not really a channel suitable as a general community by itself. As an administrator of SporeWiki, I see it as a secondary requirement of my job here to encourage positive contribution to SporeWiki, so I do not think Discord engagement is a fair criterion for contributor when it is better to focus of the user's role on SporeWiki. Therefore using wiki contribution as a measure aligns the channel more with the wiki's interests. I began to see this was important after new users on the Discord chat didn't seem to be aware it was even part of a wiki. It is a tragedy that there is a discord between Discord and SporeWiki when it can be used positively and isn't. Furthermore, its not a really a problem that we get transient users who lurk or just post memes, the problem is it becomes harder to build a community with a wide user-base who only take interest in the off-topic channels. Earth and Grenzaar is tactically left open to give a chance for new users to contribute.

Using this system, we can actually reach out to other communities, like r/Spore where Discord has already been linked without the administrator's notification. We can increase the population of users on our channel, especially who discover SporeWiki through Discord first, and encourage them to come and edit SporeWiki. In my opinion this is the best way forward, and so I do not think being a long-term Discord conversationist is enough.

Solution 3 sounds like a mess, and I won't be administrating any more channels. :P Of course there is nothing stopping every user here from creating their own Spore / fiction community.

However, I think the best thing to debate is the length of the edit count, for the reasons explained above. We've had only a few admins discuss the edit count length, and we were all wiki enthusiasts and came from a different era on SporeWiki. 250 edits doesn't sound like much to me, I can easily roll out 50 edits a day just on a fiction pages, let alone sifting through categories or page maintenance. But I realise this may seem to be a bit of a high bar to new users, especially now fiction in the most obvious thing about our community. I'm very happy for there to be a discussion on lowering the edit count. But it should not be lower than 150 edits in my opinion.