Board Thread:Captain's Council/@comment-2089817-20160507033741/@comment-18812574-20160507202704

Alright well... I had a reply and then the word file became corrupted and I had to delete it and I can't reply to forum threads, message walls, or blog posts (anything with a "submit" button) since wiki did their last java update or something, so I had to find another computer to post this, and this computer is way too damn slow, and so yeah anyway I am not in a good mood.

I'm not going to sugar-coat things. I have never been a fan of the RPCQE. I am tired of being on chat and trying to convince new users that "no it's not as bad as it seems" and then walking them through every single step just so they can try and pass and join the wiki. First of all, if we just had stricter enforcement of the Manual of Style (say actually deleting tagged articles if they're not revised in a week like the MoS Violation tag actually says to do) then I think you'd eliminate the problems of spammers and Aizen clones on the activity thread, at least the low-quality MoS violating crap. Second of all, it seems to go against the grain of what wikis in general are all about, "a wiki of fan invention that ANYone can edit," when what you're actually saying is "a wiki of fan invention that only certain accepted members of our elitist society can edit." Whatever is decided the fact of the matter is that BFF is already seen as inaccessible. Eliminating the RPCQE isn't probably going to change that perception at this rate: because other wikis see us as a group of snobs. I know most of you are unconcerned about that: but the fact is this, the userbase here on BFF is aging. People have jobs, families, etc., so looking at this for the long-term (if there is a long-term, considering the way the manga has been headed that is), we need to take it upon ourselves to start mentoring the newcomers, not forcing them to take an arbitrary exam and/or turning them away from the wiki entirely. Everyone is a noob once, after all. "Weeding out" undesirable members in the form of an exam is.... very discriminatory first of all, and in my opinion unjust. How the hell are they gonna get better if they have no motivation to write? No offense, but a 4th seat Hanatarou isn't exactly an exciting idea, and 70k is very, very hard to reach. New members are faced with a daunting situation, placed between a rock and a hard place, and many of them don't even pass on the first try and are discouraged. Sure maybe considering the feelings of others isn't our priority here, but this is FANON not Stanford. It's not like you can put "acclaimed wiki fanfiction RP writer" on a resume or anything, I mean you could but... anyway.

I'll side with N for now since the majority is for keeping the exam. Merging the AA and the regular into one thing, and maybe shoot for the middle on bytes. 35k maybe or something, I don't know. Less complexity = good in the end, imo.

And yeah, as you said Sei the review system is a mess. I don't know if moving it to the forums would help though, since forums tend to get pretty messy. Another problem is that some of the people who are on the committee now should not be on the committee, imo. Not sure how members are decided (I wanted to keep my fingers out of it because aristocracy and what-not but at this rate all the admins might have to pitch in, not sure) but maybe it should be a merit-based system or something. Because no offense, but a one-line "Good job, you pass" after someone has put in a ton of effort to meet standards is both demeaning and hypocritical.

And here's the thing about the featured articles: the system we were using was actually working. I don't know if you noticed but that last forum thread I posted for nominations had a lot of... well, nominations. The problem was that, in order to update the featured article part on the main page you have to edit three other pages. So in the end the one who dropped the ball was me. Here's the thing though: formerly it was Prod who was managing the main-page update, I'm supposed to be head of the welcome committee, just like Z is in charge of the RPCQE. Once Prod left though, for some reason the main page stuff also got sandwiched with the welcome committee stuff. If we had one admin who's main "duty" was to keep the main page updated, I don't think that would be too much to handle. We don't even need a vote: just have the admin pick from the list of user nominations based on what a quality article is. If the admin isn't nominating, and if the nominators aren't the ones updating the main page (which only and admin can do anyway) then I think that will balance things out a bit and keep bias to a minimum. We could do it every three months, as we had talked about before. Because like you said Sei: this wiki is small, so I don't see the point of once a month featured articles anyway. We simply don't get that amount of traffic. Also one more thing to consider is the box I added for active RPs: that should be kept up to date as well probably, heh.