User talk:Milar Kayne
Milar KayneThanks for your edits! We hope you'll keep on editing with us. This is a great time to have joined us, because now you can play the Game of Rassilon with us and win cool stuff! Well, okay, badges. That have no monetary value. And that largely only you can see. But still: they're cool!
We've got a couple of important quirks for a Wikia wiki, so let's get them out of the way first.
British English, please
We generally use British English round these parts, so if you're American, please be sure you set your spell checker to BrEng, and take a gander at our spelling cheat card.
Spoilers aren't cool
We have a strict definition of "spoiler" that you may find a bit unusual. Basically, a spoiler, to us, is anything that comes from a story which has not been released yet. So, even if you've got some info from a BBC press release or official trailer, it basically can't be referenced here. In other words, you gotta wait until the episode has finished its premiere broadcast to start editing about its contents. Please check the spoiler policy for more details.
Other useful stuff
Aside from those two things, we also have some pages that you should probably read when you get a chance, like:
- the listing of all our help, policy and guideline pages
- our Manual of Style
- our image use policy
- our user page policy
- a list of people whose job it is to help you
If you're brand new to wiki editing — and we all were, once! — you probably want to check out these tutorials at Wikipedia, the world's largest wiki:
Remember that you should always sign your comments on talk and vote pages using four tildes like this:Thanks for becoming a member of the TARDIS crew! If you have any questions, see the Help pages, add a question to one of the Forums or ask on my talk page. CzechOut ☎ 23:26, May 18, 2013 (UTC)
thanks
hi there
hi, i updated the howling theory about john hurt, can you understand it now? Just reply on my userpage like u did before, thanks. TheRealDoctor ☎ 20:47, May 24, 2013 (UTC)
Christmas cheer
As this fiftieth anniversary year comes to a close, we here at Tardis just want to thank you for being a part of our community — even if you haven't edited here in a while. If you have edited with us this year, then thanks for all your hard work.
This year has seen an impressive amount of growth. We've added about 11,000 pages this year, which is frankly incredible for a wiki this big. November was predictably one of the busiest months we've ever had: over 500 unique editors pitched in. It was the highest number of editors in wiki history for a year in which only one programme in the DWU was active. And our viewing stats have been through the roof. We've averaged well over 2 million page views each week for the last two months, with some weeks seeing over 4 million views!
We've received an unprecedented level of support from Wikia Staff, resulting in all sorts of new goodies and productive new relationships. And we've recently decided to lift almost every block we've ever made so as to allow most everyone a second chance to be part of our community.
2014 promises to build on this year's foundations, especially since we've got a full, unbroken series coming up — something that hasn't happened since 2011. We hope you'll stick with us — or return to the Tardis — so that you can be a part of the fun!
Re: your message on CzeckOut's page
Hi! Since you brought up my name in your post to CzechOut, and he is busy with wikia-wide things and doesn't visit this wiki as often as he used to, I thought I'd give you some input regarding your message (and he will probably get back to you at some point, but I don't know his schedule).
First, a disclaimer. I don't edit at or visit the Star Wars wiki, so anything I say about them is based on assumptions I've gotten from what I've heard.
Both the SW wiki and our wiki are huge wikis covering a ton of information. In order for the wikis to have any use, we need some guidelines. Lots of guidelines. To make matters difficult for multiple-wiki editors, different wikis have different rules. (And yes, I know that you are aware of what I'm saying, but I'm trying to make a point.) If we don't have policies, the wiki deteriorates into something not worth reading, much less working on. I don't know what SW is like, but here we tend to have a very busy time during the time DW airs. Therefore, we gets lots of new editors, most of whom break several policies in their enthusiasm to edit. It can get very frustrating to clean up so many edits in such a short time. When I message a user, I (and other admins) always try to be polite. However, when a user receives a message saying, in effect, your edit was wrong, I think some people take that personally and get offended. It's the nature of communicating this way. No one likes to be told they're wrong, and no one likes tons of rules thrown at them, but it's the only way to make sure users know the rules (especially if they choose not to read the policies that are posted on their user pages when they first contribute).
Rufus is a separate matter. I tried to be polite to him, but he came across as rude, insisting that our policies are wrong, and acting as though he didn't have to follow them. He actually admitted that he understood the spoiler policy but violated it anyway. He argued against many of our policies, which, of course, anyone can do, but they still must be followed until/unless changed. He has come across as argumentative in all of his posts, showing he has little interest in following our policies. In addition, he's had conflicts at other wikis. I don't think his case is a good example to use to prove your point.
In your message, you stated that you have read talk pages of users and admins. Just how many of my posts on other users' pages have you read? Because I post to other users quite a bit, and while I can sometimes get frustrated when I have to constantly remind the same user over and over again, in the main I try to be as polite as an impersonal medium allows. I don't know if you are aware of this, but admins don't get paid for this. It's volunteer work. And if you think the admins are rude here, you don't know how much worse the rudeness against the admins is. I'll admit I can try to be more patient with inexperienced users if you'll admit that it can be frustrating to have to clean up the same edits by the same users over and over. Deal? Shambala108 ☎ 14:58, October 12, 2014 (UTC)
New users
Thanks for your feedback. You're quite wrong to assume that I wouldn't care about your comments, or that I had certain pre-fabricated answers at the ready. Reaching and retaining new users is of paramount interest to us here, and your comments don't fall on deaf ears.
We don't want to alienate new users.
The tension between keeping order and offering a helping hand is one of the central issues in wiki management — not just here, but on any wiki, offered by any wiki hosting service. All admin can do is explain things when we do them, and/or make sure that it's obvious what we expect of our editors.
I know that there are times where we've just said the same thing six times to six different users, and when we get to the seventh user, we're not quite as hospitable as we were the other six times. That's bad — but we're human. I think it's also important to point out that the new user has a responsibility to read the rules, and to take criticism well. We don't take the time to write out a response to someone because we want to be jerks. We're spending that time because we want the new user to become a better user. At least some of the responsibility for good communication must rest with the new user being able to take constructive criticism.
You say you read our user talk pages, but I wonder how closely you looked. At around the same time as the conversation with Rufus was another conversation, also about our image policy. That user took the same advice quite differently. Instead of railing against the policies, she took the criticisms onboard and revised her editing practices. And that's just one example. I can point to several instances where people respond differently to the same advice.
One particular area of concern is the edit summary, which is often used to explain why a new user's edit got reverted. It's sometimes hard to be fully sociable in the context of an edit summary, since it has a limited number of characters. We find it's best to try to link to a specific rule or policy, and let that do the talking for us. While this can, admittedly, come across as abrupt, it is at least thorough. Which is one hell of a lot more than you get at most wikis. Indeed, on the scale of the wikis here at Wikia, Tardis generally gives a great deal of instruction to its new users. Again, how newer users receive that instruction is, in a sense, beyond our control.
We also listen quite a bit to our community when it comes to the creation and maintenance of our ruleset. Few wikis have the huge archive of discussions on policy creation that we do. But because we're an older wiki, new users have to accept that they aren't necessarily the first person to have thought about a certain policy. Obviously, we don't want to end up having the same discussions each year as new users join us. We allow for users to open up discussions on existing policy, obviously, but only if they have something new to offer. If we didn't have that approach, we'd spend a lot of our time re-litigating the same policies, rather than adding pages to our actual content.
And because our policies have largely gone through community discussion, we can't just allow people to disregard them. That would be disrespectful to the work of people who have come before. That's something new users frequently forget. They think we're just being stupid and inventing rules that make no sense. But actually quite a bit of work has gone into the creation of these rules.
And some of the rules are the way they are because of technical requirements. Sometimes these technical requirements are not well understood by other wikias. Thus when people, like Rufus, come here and question the rules in the light of what's happening at other wikias, we're not really able to accommodate him. For instance, we will delete images that are 3MB without discussion because they're indefensible from a technical point of view.
In closing, I'd challenge you to think of this wiki the way that most of the admin staff do. We consider this a publication, and ourselves as the chief editors. Now, if you were working at a newspaper, wouldn't you think it reasonable that a set of rules, a manual of style even, existed, so that Sally the sports reporter and Linda the lifestyles editor created their articles along similar lines? If they didn't, those two sections of the paper might not look like they belonged to the same publication.
And that's all we're trying to do. Not squash your creativity and fun. Merely to channel it in directions that make Tardis as consistent and appealing as possible. Of course, that does sometimes mean we have to say no, or mark a big red X over certain columns of text. But we try, really hard, to make sure that we always explain things when we have to do that.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 19:47: Sun 12 Oct 2014
