User blog:Mdouglas3/My Hope For This Wiki

Tekkit is amazing and complex. In order to understand it fully I have come to rely on this wiki. I've joked with players that this is the only game where you absolutely must have a web browser open while you're playing. And players thinking they're asking a simple question, such as "how do you make an HV Solar Array?" find the answer is always "check the wiki!" And after checking they realize their question was not simple at all. Then they, too, come to rely on this wiki.

When you rely on something, you come to appreciate it. When you appreciate something, you feel obliged to help. So I've tried to pitch in here for this reason. When you put time and effort into something, you want it to succeed. And I want this wiki to succeed. I certainly hope it will succeed, but more than my hope, and certainly more than my time and effort, are needed for it to do so. In my opinion this wiki needs the following:

Strong Leadership. Administrators who set and enforce standards of language and style, who enforce and follow the rules, who actively expand and improve the wiki. From what I've seen, we have the dedicated staff who can do and want to do this. The area most lacking is standards, which can be built up. Hopefully they can do so without constant baseless accusations and distractions.

Standards. The diversity in language style, poor grammar, and formatting from page to page is at best distracting and at worst counterproductive. Some pages are copied and pasted from other wikis, some are written from the player's perspective, some change tense part way through, some sound like a car salesman wrote them, some have different section headers. We need an agreed upon format and language style that is easy to find and well publicized.

Civility. This is so important, it is one of Wikipedia's "Five Pillars". I've seen so much disrespect thrown around in the short two or three weeks I've been here that it causes me the most worry for the eventual success of this wiki. Whether its a blog post or comment, we should be showing respect and civility to everyone. Otherwise we will alienate the user base needed for us to succeed. No matter how "stupid" or "dumb" we think a question or comment is, no matter how much someone trolls, we should always reply with a comment that raises the level of respect, not reduces it. I've seen both staff and users comment in such harsh tones that it makes one question the viability of a wiki.

Lastly, I've seen the word "power" thrown around quite a bit recently when it comes to administrators. I see this on MineCraft servers, too - the idea that Moderators have "power". Being able to use various rights to maintain something, whether a wiki or a server, is a "responsibility"' not a power. only if someone wishes to lord over others will they want "power", and those are precisely the type of people you don't want having administrative rights.

Thanks for reading. More on these topics later. ..

Please remember to contribute to the wiki! :)

Mdouglas3 (talk) 00:13, September 16, 2012 (UTC)