Okay guys. Here's the thing. We love Bulbapedia, don't we? We love the level of detail it gives, without being overly dependent on one person for updates. With the amount of diversity in the games now, there's no possible way that someone can keep up a totally informative website on the franchise all on their own. We've got anime, main series, Ranger, MD, battle arenas... it can go on. If as the administration we were working alone on this, it would be impossible to have as awesome a site as we do.
Now, here's the issue. Everyone's always excited about the next thing coming out, whether it be next week's anime episode in Japan or the US, an upcoming game or three, or even the greatest jump, the next generation. I get it. Woo hoo. But here's the issue. As the administration, our biggest and most tedious job is quality control. We're like the people who inspect your underwear, to make sure it has three holes, only we make sure the wiki is logical, well-written, and of course looks nice. Relatively easy most of the time, but when we've got a time when such exciting things are occurring such as the onset of Ranger 3, the revelation of the name of one of the two players in HGSS, and Generation V being possibly announced in the next two or three weeks... we need the utmost cooperation, which we've not really been getting.
The greatest perk of having administratorship on a wiki is the ability to protect pages. Stop edit wars instantly, keep yourself from being edit conflicted because you're reworking an article heavily... yeah, it's awesome. But we've also used it lately to prevent the creation of new pages and moving of established pages to as-yet-unconfirmed English names. Now, this isn't to deter users from making good pages; in fact, we'd love if you did so in the userspace, so we could get a look at them first. Keep the edits to a minimum, but if it's a page to be mainspaced, we do give a hell of a lot more leeway on the userspace rule (don't go crazy and save every other keystroke, but yeah).
Now to my main point. We've put the protection up on pages. We wanna make sure stuff is confirmed before we add or edit it. It's why Kotone's not going anywhere: the episode doesn't air until this weekend. Yeah, the source is Pokémon.com, but not only have they been wrong before, moving pages and deleting double redirects is a pain in the ass. For that reason, game Kotone's not moving until March 15 (or until a you-know-what gets leaked and one of us plays it firsthand). Anyway, you'll notice that I protected Lyra (Anime) as well as the would-be title Lyra (anime). Now why did I do this? Because in October of 2008, in anticipation of Barry's anime debut, I protected Jun (anime), as well as several other names, to prevent someone from making a crappy page about a character that hadn't appeared yet and who we knew next to nothing about. Hey look, someone decided to make the page at Barry (Anime). And amazingly, just as I imagined, it was absolute crap that didn't even use link templates for his Pokémon, let alone use wikilinks properly.
BALEETED.
Now, hey, this was October of 2008, right? Things are better now, right?
Wrongoli. Just yesterday, there was a major issue on Oblivia. We'd had the article protected from creation since the announcement of the name, because we really had no information on the place. Someone wanted to create the page, though, and was told to do it in the userspace. Thumbs up to that. Great job. Then another user comes by and, rather than asking about the protection, decides instead to create the page at "Region of oblivia" and slap a terrible notice on it about it being an incomplete page. That I don't have to screenshot for you; it's in the revision history still.
Now, the page was moved to Oblivia, possibly against better judgment. As the article stood, I would've flat-out deleted it, or at the very least told the user to premake it in the userspace, rather than plopping us with a crappy article. Plenty of other articles just like that first revision have been deleted in the past because they suck. Now, okay, I'll admit, I created the Jun (anime) page almost immediately afterward, to prevent future transgressions, and made it up to be as good as it could be at that time. But honestly, is it really that hard to not blatantly ignore the protection, guys?
Because of this issue, I'm thinking of instituting a mandatory three-month wait period for all new users, wherein they cannot create pages in the mainspace, the template space, and so on, because we get a lot who have no f'ing clue what they're doing and make stupid stuff like Bawile. Now, sure, they'd be allowed talk page benefits, and would be able to edit their userspace (maybe imposing a limit on those, of course, considering that it's the newest users who jump on their userpages first).
So, tl;dr, stop gun-jumping, stop jumping our gun-jumping protections, and please learn about our style by looking at similar articles' coding before creating your crappy pages. All these opinions are also my own, so if you post your opinion, don't include another's within it.
Now, here's the issue. Everyone's always excited about the next thing coming out, whether it be next week's anime episode in Japan or the US, an upcoming game or three, or even the greatest jump, the next generation. I get it. Woo hoo. But here's the issue. As the administration, our biggest and most tedious job is quality control. We're like the people who inspect your underwear, to make sure it has three holes, only we make sure the wiki is logical, well-written, and of course looks nice. Relatively easy most of the time, but when we've got a time when such exciting things are occurring such as the onset of Ranger 3, the revelation of the name of one of the two players in HGSS, and Generation V being possibly announced in the next two or three weeks... we need the utmost cooperation, which we've not really been getting.
The greatest perk of having administratorship on a wiki is the ability to protect pages. Stop edit wars instantly, keep yourself from being edit conflicted because you're reworking an article heavily... yeah, it's awesome. But we've also used it lately to prevent the creation of new pages and moving of established pages to as-yet-unconfirmed English names. Now, this isn't to deter users from making good pages; in fact, we'd love if you did so in the userspace, so we could get a look at them first. Keep the edits to a minimum, but if it's a page to be mainspaced, we do give a hell of a lot more leeway on the userspace rule (don't go crazy and save every other keystroke, but yeah).
Now to my main point. We've put the protection up on pages. We wanna make sure stuff is confirmed before we add or edit it. It's why Kotone's not going anywhere: the episode doesn't air until this weekend. Yeah, the source is Pokémon.com, but not only have they been wrong before, moving pages and deleting double redirects is a pain in the ass. For that reason, game Kotone's not moving until March 15 (or until a you-know-what gets leaked and one of us plays it firsthand). Anyway, you'll notice that I protected Lyra (Anime) as well as the would-be title Lyra (anime). Now why did I do this? Because in October of 2008, in anticipation of Barry's anime debut, I protected Jun (anime), as well as several other names, to prevent someone from making a crappy page about a character that hadn't appeared yet and who we knew next to nothing about. Hey look, someone decided to make the page at Barry (Anime). And amazingly, just as I imagined, it was absolute crap that didn't even use link templates for his Pokémon, let alone use wikilinks properly.
Now, hey, this was October of 2008, right? Things are better now, right?
Wrongoli. Just yesterday, there was a major issue on Oblivia. We'd had the article protected from creation since the announcement of the name, because we really had no information on the place. Someone wanted to create the page, though, and was told to do it in the userspace. Thumbs up to that. Great job. Then another user comes by and, rather than asking about the protection, decides instead to create the page at "Region of oblivia" and slap a terrible notice on it about it being an incomplete page. That I don't have to screenshot for you; it's in the revision history still.
Now, the page was moved to Oblivia, possibly against better judgment. As the article stood, I would've flat-out deleted it, or at the very least told the user to premake it in the userspace, rather than plopping us with a crappy article. Plenty of other articles just like that first revision have been deleted in the past because they suck. Now, okay, I'll admit, I created the Jun (anime) page almost immediately afterward, to prevent future transgressions, and made it up to be as good as it could be at that time. But honestly, is it really that hard to not blatantly ignore the protection, guys?
Because of this issue, I'm thinking of instituting a mandatory three-month wait period for all new users, wherein they cannot create pages in the mainspace, the template space, and so on, because we get a lot who have no f'ing clue what they're doing and make stupid stuff like Bawile. Now, sure, they'd be allowed talk page benefits, and would be able to edit their userspace (maybe imposing a limit on those, of course, considering that it's the newest users who jump on their userpages first).
So, tl;dr, stop gun-jumping, stop jumping our gun-jumping protections, and please learn about our style by looking at similar articles' coding before creating your crappy pages. All these opinions are also my own, so if you post your opinion, don't include another's within it.
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