The Sims Wiki talk:Community Portal

Speculative Information in articles
So, in the process of wiki-browsing, I've noticed that many articles contain a lot of information that isn't exactly verifiable or even proven. The information is sometimes included with phrases like 'it is believed that,' or 'one theory is' or 'some players think', but a lot of these speculative phrases are more-or-less passed on as fact. Examples exist on many Sim pages, especially those with complex family webs, memories or other things. So, what I'm wondering is, since this is a wiki and wikis are meant to provide accurate information, what is the feeling about speculative statements? Do we want to include them with a disclaimer, or just not include them at all? --  LostInRiverview talk · blog 21:32, December 31, 2011 (UTC)
 * I'm not really sure of this, but in the case for some Sims, memories are what makes the speculations. Speculation of some Sims exists because the bios, memories, skills, relationships, etc. implicitly describe that specific Sim, which leads to theories. We can't really prove existing theories or speculations such as Bella's disappearance. As for some articles, that works different. It needs source unless it's already proven in-game.  Nikel  Talk  11:35, January 1, 2012 (UTC)
 * I agree with Nikel. In case of townies, where we have no evidence of anything really since they don't have any biographies, memories and family ties, speculation should be automatically removed. In the case of pre-made Sims, I would say putting some of the player's theories would be OK, but we can't push it too far. -- RoseGui [[File:Thanks rose.png]] ( talk here ) 13:27, January 1, 2012 (UTC)
 * The speculations will exist whether we mention them or not, and that they exist is itself information. Sometimes, speculation persists despite evidence to the contrary, and when it does, that should be pointed out. Sometimes, the information we're given about a Sim is incomplete or ambiguous, either intentionally or through oversight. That encourages speculation, which I see as a good thing. However, many players seem to assume that their speculations and beliefs are much more definite than they are. To say that, while many players believe "X", "X" is speculative is a useful thing, but it requires mentioning "X". Dharden (talk) 14:52, January 1, 2012 (UTC)
 * Maybe I can state something similar with speculations. The other speculation is, which is more nonsensical, about Sims who are assumed to be based on real world people. There's been many cases of this, but the 2 I still remember is Lil Bling who was said to be based on Justin Bieber and Tom Wordy who was said to be based on both 50 Cent and Usher (lolwut?). Is this supposed to remain on page or deleted?  Nikel  Talk  07:04, January 22, 2012 (UTC)

Newsletter logo
February marks the 1st edition of the Newsletter under new editors (me and MTDM couldn't make one this month because there have been a couple of issues and the content couldn't be transmitted to each other) and I think the newsletter should have a new face - which it will - but the logo is kind of a bummer.

So, I made this cute little logo for our newsletter (personally, I think the "The Sims Wiki" letters could be in a different colour, but that depends on the community's opinion) and I'd like to know what do you think of we switching the current logo to the one I made. 22:26, January 19, 2012 (UTC)


 * I think it looks cute, however, I agree that the lettering could be written in different color. Unfortunately, I don't know what color that would be. -- RoseGui [[File:Thanks rose.png]] ( talk here ) 22:19, January 20, 2012 (UTC)


 * I was thinking about something more like our current wiki wordmark, in blue and white. 22:47, January 20, 2012 (UTC)
 * Yeah, a blue/white color would look better, I think. --  LostInRiverview talk · blog 19:13, January 21, 2012 (UTC)
 * Okay, I have improved the logo (the new version is where the old one, since it's a new version of the file). I'd like to receive feedback from you, so that this subject reaches its conclusion before the next edition (1st week of February). 22:04, January 22, 2012 (UTC)
 * This proposed version is far better than the old one. Support. 1358  (Talk)  23:52, January 27, 2012 (UTC)
 * No offense DanPin, but I don't really like it all that much. It's too different from our current Wiki logo imo. —Random Ranaun (Talk to me! ) 00:11, January 28, 2012 (UTC)
 * That's awesome! I've often wondered why we don't just use the same type/font as the TS logo, so I think this looks pretty cool! --  LostInRiverview talk · blog 00:25, January 28, 2012 (UTC)
 * I like it. I think it could be improved even more if you maybe changed the font of newsletter to the same font as the wiki title, and maybe made it have a color scheme similar to the normal wordmar. Other than that, its obviously a huge improvement over the old one (as well as over the other one you made) :)
 * First of all - RR, I tried to have the same scheme as the old logo (the Wiki's name on the left, a Plumbbob in the middle and the word "Newsletter" on the right). Secondly, I chose this font for the newsletter because it is a kind of monthly publication, and several newspapers around the world, like the NY Times or the Portuguese Diário de Notícias have fonts like these. Also, making the word "Newsletter" in the Series' logo font is a little hard for me, because I basically copy-pasted the "The Sims" from the current logo and the "Wiki" from an old logo proposal back at the Monaco days. 10:52, January 28, 2012 (UTC)

Who made The Sims Wiki logo again? Can't we ask him/her to create another? I hope it wasn't Bob. Though the newsletter font is based on newspaper, I think it's a bit off from the design. It doesn't really match, IMO.  Nikel  Talk  15:18, January 28, 2012 (UTC)
 * It was Erry who created the wordmark, but I haven't seen that user here for a long time. Also, since it's almost the end of the month, I think we should start a vote. 19:45, January 28, 2012 (UTC)


 * I've asked Erry to create a Newsletter logo on the IRC Channel (he's active on there, actually. :P). I like it better since it fits our current logo's style a bit more. What do you guys think? —Random Ranaun (Talk to me! ) 07:10, January 31, 2012 (UTC)

Consensus
We are now seeking consensus on approving the new logo for The Sims Wiki's Newsletter. Please indicate your support or opposition, with reasoning, below. This consensus period will be timed for 7 days - Remaining: 


 * Please respond below to the following question - Do you consent to using the new logo designed by DanPin for the Newsletter?

Support - Since it was my idea, it's implied I support it. :P 20:08, January 28, 2012 (UTC)

Support - While I think that it should have a closer resemblance to the TSW logo, the proposed logo is still heads and shoulders better than the current logo and thus is still a remarkable change. 20:31, January 28, 2012 (UTC)

Support - I like the current logo, and I also agree with Georgie. -- RoseGui ( talk here ) 20:45, January 28, 2012 (UTC)

Support -

Support - Looks good for the newsletter. :)

 ThomasWikia Main 10:52, January 29, 2012 (UTC)

'''Support - Looks nice. '''Alex9400 | TALK with me. I ♥ ♦³ :-) 14:02, January 29, 2012 (UTC)

Neutral - Seeing that there's no other choice, I suppose I have support this as well... It's all or nothing.  Nikel  Talk  14:27, January 29, 2012 (UTC)


 * Support - The new logo is fabulous and it matches our wiki! :D  Nikel  Talk  09:01, January 31, 2012 (UTC)

Weak Support - I don't have anything cute to say. It's an amazing logo, though. ~ M TDM  20:09, January 29, 2012 (UTC)

Support - It's a good logo :) --  LostInRiverview talk · blog 03:23, January 31, 2012 (UTC)

New Consensus
Seeing as RandomRanaun has submitted a logo as well, we should re-start this, if for no other reason than to avoid confusion regarding which logo is being supported.




 * Please indicate your support for one of the following options:
 * Option A - The logo on the left, created by Erry
 * Option B - The logo on the right, created by DanPin
 * Option C - Other/none of the above (please state in your response what you would prefer)

I will re-start the countdown at seven days to allow sufficient response. Time remaining is

''Please place your responses, along with reasoning, below.

The Sims Medieval Wiki
Alright, I think it's about time we re-open this can of worms. We've held multiple discussions on this in the past, and each one has for one reason or another fizzled out, either because of doubt that the TSMW community would support a merge, or that the quality of TSMW articles is on par with our own. I say, enough of that! Let's simply look at the facts.

1 - The Sims Medieval Wiki is dead. No one edits there anymore - Well, almost nobody, to the tune of 6 edits within the past 7 days (at the time of this writing). The last edit to that wiki by a registered contributor was by Woganhemlock on January 4, resigning as an administrator. No one edits on that wiki, and very very little new information is being added. Quantcast puts this in another perspective; montly pageviews on thesimsmedievalwiki.wikia.com are ~16,100, whereas monthly pageviews on sims.wikia.com are ~476,300, or about 30 times more. The Sims Wiki, on average receives about as many page views in a single day as The Sims Medieval Wiki gets in an entire month!

2. There is no community on that wiki. There is no one there to say either way that the wiki should or should not merge.

3. That wiki has a large knowledge base on The Sims Medieval that this wiki does not have.

4. No new expansions for TSM are presently announced to be in production. This is important to this discussion, because if a new expansion were publicly-known, more people might visit that wiki, complicating any efforts we might choose to make to merge.

Now, here is opinion. I think it was stupid to create a separate wiki for The Sims Medieval, and I think we should make an effort to bring the information from that wiki into TSW. Why? Because we should be a central source of information for The Sims series of games, including spin-off titles like TSM. We should be looking out for anyone who is looking for information on Sims titles, including TSM.

So, we as a community should reach a consensus on what we will do. I suggest that, after we decide, we contact Wikia to ask them if there is any special procedure with absorbing another wiki. Wikia is extremely reluctant to eliminate wikis that have existing communities, so we'll have to prove beyond doubt that their wiki is dead and that the information there is better suited on this wiki. Perhaps Wikia has a tool that would allow movement of multiple pages at a time, and would be able to work with us to take in and categorize those pages properly.

So, how do you all feel about finally putting this issue to bed? --  LostInRiverview talk · blog 20:37, January 21, 2012 (UTC)
 * I feel the exposal of these facts proves that the The Sims Medieval Wiki needs help, and its information would be suitable on this wiki since we are a database for The Sims which includes The Sims Medieval. Therefore, I agree on the merge, but we need to know how we are going to do it. -- RoseGui [[File:Thanks rose.png]] ( talk here ) 20:45, January 21, 2012 (UTC)
 * Additional information on their administrative staff. TSMW currently has two users with sysop flags and three with bureaucrat flags (not including the bot that has both sysop and bureaucrat flags for some bizarre reason, or the misspelling of DarthCookie that was given bureaucrat flags). Of those users, the last one to edit the wiki (aside from Woganhemlock, as before mentioned) was DarthCookie (the real one) on November 23, 2011. The only administrators/bureaucrats on that wiki that are or were not also admins on this wiki are Life_Matters and God of the sims. God of the Sims is the wiki's founder, but has the fewest edits of any human bureaucrat or sysop on that wiki, and hasn't edited since November 10th.
 * As for the process of merging, it really doesn't seem all that complicated, at least according to this page. If it's agreed that there is not much of a community at TSMW to support or oppose anything, then the next step would be to contact the admins, bureaucrats and founder regarding this idea, and see where they stand. In the previous discussion, Life_Matters came forward with the idea to merge on both TSMW and TSW, so it's clear that he already supports the idea (though he hasn't edited in two months, so he might not be around anymore). If we decide this is something we want to look into, I can try and contact these admins/bureaucrats with the idea. In any case, we should hold off on contacting Wikia until we get our ducks in a row. --  LostInRiverview talk · blog 00:25, January 22, 2012 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure how merging will work. Doesn't that mean the information and content of TSMW will all be provided in this wiki? Or is everything just more complicated?  Nikel  Talk  09:03, January 22, 2012 (UTC)
 * I believe we should get what we can from TSMW, but write the articles on our own. Let's be serious; the quality of the articles there is horrid. As for TSMW community consensus, most of the editors there are actually editors here as well. 21:02, January 22, 2012 (UTC)
 * Merging, according to this page, involves talking with the TSMW community (or admins, if no community exists), transferring all the (wanted) information over. Then we contact Wikia (preferrably alongside admins from TSMW, just so it's clear this is a joint decision) and explain that TSMW is inactive and that our wiki can easily assume the roles of that wiki. We then request that TSMW be deleted and that its url automatically re-direct to our url, meaning that anyone that goes to TSMW's web address will end up at The Sims Wiki. As for Andronikos' point, realistically speaking, it would be easier to just transfer over the pages, regardless of quality then improve them to our standards, rather than moving the 'quality' information over piecemeal. Any poorly-written articles can be improved through editing on this wiki. I think the best approach would be to copy over every page on TSMW, with these exceptions 1) Those pages which already exist on TSW, in which case a determination can be made on which information should be kept or carried over 2) Pages that are marked for deletion on TSWM, in which case a determination should be made whether the content should transfer over or just be deleted along with TSMW.
 * But I feel we're straying from the point a bit - the merge is actually possible, logistically, but this conversation shouldn't be about that (yet). Before any of these questions become issues, we have to decide if we want to go down this road. And if we decide we want to pursue it, we need to convince the admins at TSMW that it's a good idea as well. So, really what I'm asking isn't how we think the merge should be conducted, but if we should even attempt to conduct one at all. --  LostInRiverview talk · blog 02:50, January 23, 2012 (UTC)
 * Well, I for one really want this whole thing of merging/not merging to end, and as I've said before we should just build the content ourselves. Let's be honest, they have no real Manual of style, and as such, the pages are disorganised. No one edits there, so the info is out of date and incomplete, and would just make our wiki look bad. I've looked through the files on the wiki, and nearly all the images aren't licensed/categorised, which would make a ton more work. As well as that, it is very hard to get wikia to merge wikis.
 * So, here's my solution. We look through the wiki for pages of acceptable quality (if any) which do not exist on our wiki. This automatically means we don't import things like the trait pages. I think that the rest should just be canned and rewritten and remade from scratch on this wiki, as imo it would work more efficiently than cleaning up lots of poor quality pages.

I personally agree with Wogan. However, this kind of solution means we don't help TSMW at all, and instead we'll get several advantages from improving TSM articles with TSMW as the source. Though this may be not much as the lack of article management and improvement there. Short, it will advantage us more than we help TSMW.  Nikel  Talk  15:31, January 28, 2012 (UTC)
 * I'm with WH on this one. 20:11, January 28, 2012 (UTC)
 * I disagree. I don't think its a good idea to leave that wiki out to dry, since some people (admittedly, IPs) do still go there to look up stuff and edit. It would be better if that traffic was simply redirected here, which would mean that at some point we'd have to get Wikia to support it. And it's a lot easier to import a poorly-written page with the information already on it, then to delete the page and try to re-find the information and include it again. The job of hunting for this information has already been done for us - why would we want to delete it, only to re-write it again just because the page was poorly organized? It makes no sense to me. --  LostInRiverview talk · blog 20:16, January 28, 2012 (UTC)
 * This topic was basically made under the assumption that TSMW is dead. And actually, it is not an assumption, it's real. After we finish we the merge, TSMW will basically have no reason to exist. It's sole purpose now is for use to use whatever info we can from the articles. There was no reason TSMW was made in the first place, as well as there was no reason we didn't start writing articles about TSM as well. Also, only God of the Sims and Life_Matters are basically users that are there and not here, so we do not kill TSM, but rather move it's contents in a place they will be seen.
 * I googled "The Sims Medieval wiki" and The Sims Wiki was result #3, while TSMW result number #4. The way I see it, we do more good rather than evil by moving TSMW in TSW, or at least getting whatever sort of information we can use from there and write the articles ourselves. I'm supporting WH here. It's better to write the articles ourselves, rather than just copying and then doing all the work required to improve them. Andronikos sig.png 20:21, January 28, 2012 (UTC)

Wiki projects
I was digging through some of the pages in the Project namespace today, and noticed that we have over 50 project pages. The reason I bring this up is that, many of these projects have few or no members, and none of them are active. In fact, I can't remember these being horribly active, at least since Duskey was around. So, I'd like to know what we plan on doing with these pages. I see a couple possible solutions.

1) Since we want to promote regular user involvement in the wiki, we can keep these projects open and promote them more than we do currently.

2) We can perhaps eliminate redundant projects, narrowing the number down to a more manageable few projects, which can be opened to volunteers.

3) We transfer the duties of those projects to the Administrative projects that we have in place.

I know personally which of these options I would prefer, but I'm interested in what others have to say. If anyone else has a suggestion I haven't mentioned, feel free to add it as well. --  LostInRiverview talk · blog 03:33, January 31, 2012 (UTC)
 * IMO, the "Project" project is kind of obsolete, but abandoning them and not taking a note on this will make it more obsolete. I suppose this kind of projects needs more involvement to the community instead of administrators. Therefore, I don't suppose the projects should be administrators responsibility. I also agree with the point 2). However, the projects lack of update and advertisement, which will make people abandon it once more in a matter of months (or until another bureaucrat cycle).  Nikel  Talk  09:11, January 31, 2012 (UTC)
 * I remember attempting to "resurrect" the Featured Contests project a little while back via a blog post but it didn't receive much enthusiasm despite the revamp. I'm not saying it'll be the case for everything (seeing as Featured Content is a separate thing for starters) but it would be a shame if we went to a lot of trouble and it turned out to be a waste of time and effort. I'm not sure how it would work out with point 3 seeing as most of the administrators who were about when the projects were active didn't seem to carry them on. I guess I'm going to go with point 2. 20:40, January 31, 2012 (UTC)