User talk:Inpursuit
InpursuitThanks 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. Shambala108 ☎ 04:44, July 24, 2013 (UTC)
Disabling visual editor
Petitions to disable the visual editor are often refused. However, they are not impossible. In our case, it came about because of extraordinary democratic action. We first tried, for at least a year, to work with the visual editor. Our administrative staff initially resisted calls to get rid of it, instead allowing Wikia a reasonable period to work out the bugs. Although we noted significant progress, the fact that it could randomly — and seemingly without explanation by Wikia — dump raw HTML onto pages, we determined that the grace period was over. The visual editor had come into conflict with a local rule, T:NO HTML, which meant that we had to either rewrite local policy or declare the RTE in violation of local policy.
Our administrative staff chose the latter.
We then chose the most democratic, inclusive way possible to make a community decision. Through the use of a bot, we contacted every editor, registered or otherwise, which existed at the time, and gave them an opportunity to participate in the conversation. We also held the vote around the time of the Christmas episode of Doctor Who — a time where we have a demonstrable spike in editors. We wanted to make sure that we weren't passing the rule "in the dark of night", but rather at a time when a lot of editors tend to be on the wiki.
We then left the conversation open for more than a month, as I recall, and the results were overwhelmingly in favour of disabling.
When we presented the results to Wikia, they granted the request.
Now, I don't know why the request hasn't been granted in your case. Maybe they've stopped allowing RTE opt-outs, full stop. Or maybe they put up more of a barrier to start with. I mean, I could see that if yours was a relatively new wiki that they might not allow an opt-out. I would tend to think that you need to have a relatively large and active user base in order to even convene a reasonable discussion about it.
But I do think that, here, the key was patience. We didn't have a knee-jerk reaction against it. We really tried to work with the RTE, but were able to demonstrate that the RTE was against local will, local maintenance practices, and local policy. We also showed we were interested in giving our users local guidance on how to use what Wikia calls "source mode", as at T:MARK and elsewhere. Another thing in favour of our case may have been that, really, our coding is relatively complex around here. Our most-edited pages generally defaulted to source mode, anyway — because of the presence of SMW and nested templates. None of our thousands of our pages about dates, for instance, would work in the RTE, nor would any of our pages about television stories.
At the end of the day, it was pretty easy to demonstrate that the RTE was a net negative for this community. That may not be the case at your wiki. I would think that you have to be able to prove with specificity that it's a net negative for your community as a whole — not just something that you and a couple of other editors don't like.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 14:22: Wed 24 Jul 2013
