Hey! My name is Atvelonis, and I'm the Fandom Wiki Manager for the Epic Battle Fantasy Wiki as well as an admin on Elder Scrolls. I'm here to help you and the wider community, and act as a liaison between you and Fandom Staff. If you ever have any questions or issues related to the wiki, its features (editing, templates, bots, etc.), or whatever else, feel free to reach out to me on my message wall or on Discord (Atvelonis#9495) and I can help out! —Atvelonis (talk) 16:29, May 6, 2019 (UTC)
Hello, first off I would like to thank you for what you've done concerning the general equipment pages and the like. For the most part, I think you've gone ahead and made a lot of major improvements to some of the negletced areas of the wiki.
That said, I'd like you to refrain from working on the descriptions of the equipment. Don't get me wrong - I appreciate that you are trying, and your efforts do not go unnoticed. However, I have been working on the descriptions and regardless of what is done, I tend to need to rewrite large portions, occasionally needing to just start from scratch. As such, the overly gratuitous explanations (we shouldn't make assumptions about material specifics if it is not in the name or the forging information with certain exceptions; people know where elements are useful, etc.) and assorted other more minor issues usually amount to additional work for me. I wind up reading the whole thing before rewriting because sometimes they are very well done, and that would mean even less work for me to do. Because of this, I would prefer if you could stick to what you have been doing before if you can still do that, or at the very least not go into specifics on materials.
I do want to clarify once more that I am glad to see someone else working on the descriptions, and I am well aware that in a few years or possibly even months you would probably have worked these kinks out. Heck, most of my first hundred or so attempts were shoddy at best. But right now I am actively working on these, and regardless of intention your work on the descriptions is somewhat distracting.
This does not mean I want you to leave the wiki or that I think poorly of you (quite the opposite for both), this strictly applies to the descriptions.
I plan to do one per day and actually some are descriptions of weapons of EBF4, which means that in the last 6 years no one has bothered to do it. And effectively I see that my initiative has some positive effects, if I write something, at least other people correct my bad english.
Generally speaking, I am the only one doing these, and while I do not have much of an issue with that it does mean that "other people" amounts to one, maybe two. I have not tried to stop anyone from editing them before now because no one else was doing them. If they did work comparable to mine, I would have little issue outside of minor changes. Of course, that is improbable...thus, a quandary arises.
I did something like your "initiative" back in the day on my first forays into wikia, and the result was an obscene amount of poor work which functioned as an obstacle to the more experienced editors. But it also was a needed building block for my later works, which is why I am trying (probably poorly) to not disregard your efforts.
I do have an issue with the "at last other people correct my bad english" bit because it suggests that if you give twenty people the wrong medicine, and a nurse catches the mistake for three of them, then the 17 people who still get the wrong medicine are irrelevant. That's acutally more stemming from a personal thing though, so I suppose I should attempt to disregard it?
Also, the fact that some are descriptions from EBF4 means nothing; what would matter is whether there is work being done now.
If you want to try helping with them, feel free to describe the stats. I won't need to decipher the meaning or anything, and if I need to make changes they will probably be minor (like mistaking a Freeze weakness for an Ice weakness, which is understandable given how it is a resistance for the Aquamarine in EBF5). Issues might arise with the descriptions still, but it feels less likely to cause trouble. I'm still going to be editing all of the descriptions, but I would't be dissecting your work and having to toss large swaths, but rather polishing it. Hope you don't mind.
Hello there. Sorry I only noticed it today, but regarding you recent mass edits. Precisely, the part of them that switches all paragraphs on equipment pages from chronological order to the reversed chronological order. The common, nearly universal, practice on Wikipedia and Wikias is to write stuff in their chronological order starting from the earliest to the latest information. And that is how EBF Wiki has them ordered as well and I see no reason to change that as otherwise it may appear confusing (especially when the description refers to how something appeared earlier, yet the page lists that info later).
Please, do not continue changing the order of paragraphs from the chronological one! Sadly for the time you spend on your contribution, I will soon start to revert the paragraph order back to how it was and should be. For the future, please do not make such contribution at-mass without any sort of consultation with the other contributors. With that in mind and to improve communication with you I would like you to join our wikia's discord where we are able to more freely discuss stuff regarding EBF Wiki. The easiest way to join would be pinging user "Omega Sentinel" on the Epic Battle Fantasy official discord channel (if you aren't on that one, public invitation is found in KupoGames blog).
Wait! Didn't you wonder, why did I change them? But first of all, why are you writing the wiki? For yourself? Or for the others? Because if you write the wiki for yourself, then a wiki is the wrong tool, a wiki is a collaborative tool for knowledge sharing. Now, if you are agree with me about the definition of the wiki, then you want the other users, who are looking for information, to find them in a easy and fast way. Do you know what the other users are looking for? If not, just take a look at the popular pages and it won't be a surprise that the most visited pages are about EBF5. But this is absolutely obvious, people are looking for recent information and not for information that is ten or more years old. Now that you know what they're looking for, where would you put this information? At the bottom of the pages and force them to scroll always through the old content? Or at the top of the pages, where can they find them easier and faster?
It isn't that I thought that the "reverse chronological" order is better, I put what the people look for on the top of the pages so that the wiki is more user friendly. Furthermore, the "chronological order" makes no sense, because these pages contain information on three or more different games, which are completely uncorrelated. You could divide the information into three different pages and they would still be complete, they would not lack any information. Therefore the order of the information on the pages doens't matter.
Now, what do you think? That the chronological order is still better, only because it is the order of the games and nothing else. Or do you think that a wiki must be a user friendly instrument made for the other users to find what they look for in a easy and fast way?
And if don't know it now, just make a test, wait a month and look if there are more people visit the wiki.
That was kind of a rude assumption. I get your principle, that is exactly why pages about things appearing in multiple games tend to be renamed to their most recent (thus relevant) name, and the first picture on the page is the most recent one, so it is more convenient to find them. However, that doesn't need to, and shouldn't, extend to the paragraph order. Any page of a thing featured in multiple games will usually end up having enough paragraphs to have a table of content anyway, so it doesn't actually require that much scrolling. And as I already said, the universal practice on nearly any Wikia and similar projects is to order paragraphs chronologically. So it wouldn't actually be that intuitive and user-friendly, since it goes completely opposite of what everyone is used to. And while some game-specific info is not really correlated with the previous game, sometimes it is more than less and like I wrote earlier, it would be confusing when later game's section says anything that relates to the previous appearance, yet the previous appearance is only listed afterwards. It destroys any coherent narrative.
As for dividing information into separate pages. On this wikia, since individual game information tends to be limited (for equipment, skills, and items especially) and aren't usually much more than a single template, we went with compressing the same object throughout the games to a single page if able. As there would be just a lot of redundant repetition since both pages would contain nearly the same description and trivia. Which is also a common practice on numerous Wikis.
Please, contact us on Discord or say what is your nickname there so I may contact you myself.
Sorry, I didn't mean to be rude, but let me ask you one last question: Also if the majority of the users find more useful to have the newest content / information on top of the pages, you would ignore it and would use a chronological order?
Could you please answer me about Discord, or at least say why you don't want to use it if that is the case? Sorry for repeating it so much, but I would really wish to improve the communication between editors and that is currently a convenient method.
Yes, I am ignoring that aspect, because at the same time there is another aspect - that the majority finds it intuitive and clear if things are ordered chronologically, as that is how it is done nearly everywhere, and ToC circumvents the scrolling problem anyway.
I don't like to register everywhere, so if I don't need, I don't do it. Anyway, I don't see why, you have already taken a decision, so there is nothing to discuss.
Hello there. Many thanks for your countless contributions since EBF5's release; however, while I know wikia achievements are really tempting, please try not to resort to also making trashy edits (or comments in that case) with the sole purpose of farming the achievements. That is still considered a spam and is not advisable by the wikia code of conduct.
Thanks for your understanding. Sorry for criminally underusing blog posts thus making that achievement line kinda hard to get.