12-24-2022, 06:53 PM
There are Ghost Nations Among Us
There's been a trend as more people look to join the TRA roleplay, and not a good one. More RPers as of late seem to remain trapped in a purgatory where they haven't completed the necessary wiki to be added to the official map, and wind up quitting or going inactive instead. Since these are newcomers and may not be familiar with wiki conventions like page categorization, and often wind up departing, we wind up with "Ghost Nations".
Ghost nations are nations that do not appear on the map, have pages that are difficult to find, and are often abandoned/unmaintained.
To me, this poses a few problems, but the primary one is that it's time consuming to clean up when someone leaves: Recently there was an RPer who joined TRA and switched nations multiple times, they never cleaned up the pages that they had discarded in switching nations, and one of these nations was integrated into a bunch of the statistics pages and the 2022 Winter Olympics pages. All of these multination pages required manual edits to clean up. Some of that is inevitable, but one of the more time consuming aspects of cleaning up these nations is not knowing if the RPer is still in the process of joining the RP, or has given up on the nation.*
I also think that having uncategorized pages might contribute to the onboarding issue- An important part of our wiki is that, when we find grammar, spelling, and Manual Of Style (MOS) mistakes, we can either correct them (when doing so does not change the spirit/point of the article), or bring it up on Discord to help getting the pages to convey what the authors want to other RP members.
*On a more historical note, it can be incredibly difficult to clean up the aftermath of an RPer leaving. There are still numerous people who left the region almost two years ago who have RP content we have struggled to remove.
What's a Solution Here?
Maybe the pages of new RPers should have its own category for faster reference, as well as to keep everything more organized. This category would be for nations that have not been added yet to the TRA map, and would be subsequently be removed on the fufilling of the wiki requirements.
For the statistics pages, it would be nice if we could simply scrape that information off of nation pages to automate updates there, which could make pruning inactivity RPers easier. I already have something of a solution for that involving the MediaWiki web API, but it's very much a work in progress at the moment, and even when completed would not be able to handle doing map updates for those pages.
But those are just my rambly thoughts, do you all agree, disagree, have other solutions/ideas?
There's been a trend as more people look to join the TRA roleplay, and not a good one. More RPers as of late seem to remain trapped in a purgatory where they haven't completed the necessary wiki to be added to the official map, and wind up quitting or going inactive instead. Since these are newcomers and may not be familiar with wiki conventions like page categorization, and often wind up departing, we wind up with "Ghost Nations".
Ghost nations are nations that do not appear on the map, have pages that are difficult to find, and are often abandoned/unmaintained.
To me, this poses a few problems, but the primary one is that it's time consuming to clean up when someone leaves: Recently there was an RPer who joined TRA and switched nations multiple times, they never cleaned up the pages that they had discarded in switching nations, and one of these nations was integrated into a bunch of the statistics pages and the 2022 Winter Olympics pages. All of these multination pages required manual edits to clean up. Some of that is inevitable, but one of the more time consuming aspects of cleaning up these nations is not knowing if the RPer is still in the process of joining the RP, or has given up on the nation.*
I also think that having uncategorized pages might contribute to the onboarding issue- An important part of our wiki is that, when we find grammar, spelling, and Manual Of Style (MOS) mistakes, we can either correct them (when doing so does not change the spirit/point of the article), or bring it up on Discord to help getting the pages to convey what the authors want to other RP members.
*On a more historical note, it can be incredibly difficult to clean up the aftermath of an RPer leaving. There are still numerous people who left the region almost two years ago who have RP content we have struggled to remove.
What's a Solution Here?
Maybe the pages of new RPers should have its own category for faster reference, as well as to keep everything more organized. This category would be for nations that have not been added yet to the TRA map, and would be subsequently be removed on the fufilling of the wiki requirements.
For the statistics pages, it would be nice if we could simply scrape that information off of nation pages to automate updates there, which could make pruning inactivity RPers easier. I already have something of a solution for that involving the MediaWiki web API, but it's very much a work in progress at the moment, and even when completed would not be able to handle doing map updates for those pages.
But those are just my rambly thoughts, do you all agree, disagree, have other solutions/ideas?
