Interesting experience. We started a wiki for our open source project, the community hit the ground running with it. I couldn’t have built a better wiki myself. Players love contributing to the wiki every game update. It’s bizarre how polar opposite our experiences are.
Comment on A generational gap on Wikipedia - 91% of WP admins started editing before 2010
harmonea@kbin.social 10 months ago
Everyone's pointing out that this is specifically about admins (not editors) and the general difficulty of wikipedia editing specifically due to its rules and reversions, but I really feel compelled to offer a counterpoint: this applies to wiki editing in general.
I've been editing mediawiki-based game sites since the mid 2000s - before Wikia became Fandom, before it was evil, before it started gobbling up smaller wikis with tempting financial offers. I took a decade+ off and only recently found myself drawn back into the hobby in the last couple of years when I found a game I loved that had a burgeoning wiki that seemed to need help.
I was handed admin privileges within a month because an extension I wanted to use (ReplaceText) was locked behind admin. Two years later, I'm still there because I hold 85-90% of the edits on it. And I. Just. Can't. Get. Help. Not even from the site owner that handed me admin. I've gotten interest from I think seven whole people in all that time, and all but two dropped off within a week or two; the remaining two have a page or two they each maintain but leave the rest of the site to me. And this is a live service game, so it's a neverending stream of event pages and new content that I, and only I, keep going.
No one wants to learn how to edit wikis anymore. It doesn't have to do with the high position or the rules of a specific site. It's a dying hobby viewed as too hard for content consumers to wrap their heads around.
ryannathans@lemmy.world 10 months ago
harmonea@kbin.social 10 months ago
It's not that bizarre - a community that's coalescing around an open source project is sure to be a lot more inclined toward technical hobbies than the one that gathers around an otome game. I knew that from the start... but still, I was hoping for more like-minded fans than none. Back when I started editing on an MMORPG wiki, people were a lot more willing to pitch in, even if they weren't that confident.
Glad to hear your project is going well, at least.
SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world 10 months ago
The war against deadlinks is never ending
30mag@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Wikis attract rules lawyers and no one likes rules lawyers. People have better things to do with their time than writing a fucking dissertation to keep an edit correcting a typo from getting reverted.
ikidd@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Exactly my experience with Archwiki and Wikipedia. I’ve tried to contribute with minor edits and corrections; I get non-stop pushback on the most un-controversial edits of things like punctuation or adding cross-links. I just walked away after a few attempts to satisfy whomever reverts the edits. What’s the point of adding the stress of dealing with these people to one’s life when there is utterly no personal benefit?