User talk:Emily Diehl/Guild Wars 2 Wiki discussion archive

Guild Wars 2 Wiki questions

Is there currently any way to use standard wiki links between here and the Guild Wars 2 Wiki? What about redirects? -- Gordon Ecker 04:01, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

There's a topic on that at her talk page over there [1]. IT intervention is required to set it up. --Valshia 04:09, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

Emily, thanks for the heads up about the new wiki. One note -- it currently doesn't have a favicon (the little icon that appears next to it in your web browser's address bar / favorites list). —Tanaric 05:01, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

Hi guys...I've actually put out the request for the FavIcon and have that ready for IT to put up, and I'll be requesting the interwiki links first thing tomorrow morning (based on the data you guys have over there...so make sure that discussion is fleshed out by then :)) We should have them soon after those requests are pushed through. If there is anything else you guys see that we need, please let me know so I can pass them along. -- Emily Diehl (talk) 05:04, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

Try going to Eloc Jcg's userpage on that wiki and clicking on his images. Notice that the upper-right menu that usually says your username is replaced with Eloc Jcg's username and talk links. I imagine it's an issue with whatever cache you're using, but it might be a MediaWiki bug. —Tanaric 06:52, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

What do you mean? — ク Eloc 貢 07:15, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

Eloc, you're Eloc, so you can't see it there. Try going to Defiant Element's page and clicking on his image links. Check your upper-right menu and you'll have his name up there instead of yours. —Tanaric 07:17, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

"Eloc, you're Eloc" lol, made me laugh. Anyways, I went to DE's page and nothing weird happened when I clicked on the images. — ク Eloc 貢 07:24, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

I went to D.E.'s page, clicked on an image, and it said I was Eloc. --Valshia 07:55, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

Sweet! I am a bug now! — ク Eloc 貢 07:56, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

Definitely seems to be a cache issue, since Eloc's images are resulting in a menubar that says I'm Raptors. o.0 (Aiiane - talk - contribs) 15:31, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

LOL, I knew that elog was gaile and dirigible, but this one is new ;-) --Xeeron 20:39, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

Oh, that's odd! I'll pass that along to IT as well. It's possible that they may not be able to figure that one out until the New Year, but I'll see what they say :) -- Emily Diehl (talk) 21:07, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

Aww, I like being a bug. You should just leave it :P — ク Eloc 貢 22:14, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

Can I be Eloc too? ^^ Biscuits 01:01, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

i want someone to be me :( - Y0_ich_halt 16:16, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

But I'm you, am I not? ;) --84-175 (talk) 10:57, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

lol XD - Y0_ich_halt 16:27, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

(resetting indent) Hiya guys! I received an email from IT this morning that told me that all caching issues should be resolved. If anyone has any other problems pertaining to caching, please report them to me on the reporting wiki bugs page. Thanks so much for your patience with this weirdness ;) -- Emily Diehl (talk) 20:56, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

GW2 & Wikipedia

Hello Emily, I wanted to point out to you that at the moment the link to the official Guild Wars 2 wiki has been added to Wikipedia. Since you mention on this page that you want to have to wiki keep a low profile, I thought I'd mention this to you. --  (CoRrRan / talk) 23:59, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

And this message is keeping it in low profile. :P Lord Belar 18:48, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

:-) Emily can real quickly remove this discussion to her archive, once she has seen it. --  (CoRrRan / talk) 19:05, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

I don't see anything there about actively keeping it a low profile, simply that ArenaNet doesn't want to officially make a big deal about it until there's more content to work with et cetera. I don't think there's any reason to censor links on wikipedia pages or the like - if they didn't want it to be known to the public at all they wouldn't have made it publicly available. (Aiiane - talk - contribs) 19:19, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

I don't think you could censor wikipedia on this one if you tried to be honest. --Lemming 19:48, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

Well, it's not there now. Don't know who removed it, but it's gone. :) Lord Belar 20:22, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

Gordon changed the existing link to gw2w, Cor (I think) removed it, then Cor was reverted and someone changed the link back to this wiki.. So it's fine atm :P poke | talk 20:35, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

Hiya guys! Right now we're walking that odd line I was talking about on my GW2W talk page. I'll try to explain my thoughts a bit more so you can all see where I'm coming from on this topic.

We don't want to hide the new wiki, since it needs attention and input to develop into a site that we can announce and we realize that it's very important to let everyone have a say in the development of new policies that will shape the development of the site. On the other hand, we're also wondering if it may not be in the best interest of the community as a whole to publicly announce a wiki that's little more than a shell right now. Wikis are odd little Web 2.0 creatures that mandate a very different way of thinking, and by nature they often defy what people view a website to be. Unlike a standard site, they start with no content, and through the hard work and constant contributions of the community, they grow into intricate and extensive sources of information.

When most folks view a website, they expect to find information and content, and to many, the idea of a website governed by underlying, user-created policy that essentially has no content until it's put there by a member of the gaming community is very confusing and potentially frustrating. If we were to officially announce the new wiki immediately after it's opening, we'd have thousands upon thousands of readers visiting a blank, policy-less site. Out of these readers, there is bound to be many that don't understand the philosophy of the wiki and therefore get confused/frustrated by the blank site. They may not visit the site again, and we'd then lose a potential wiki community member. We'd have frustrated sysops and bureaus, since they'd be plunged into firefighting possible vandalism with no prior warning from us. If we chose not to grandfather anyone in, and let the site start from scratch, we'd have to step into wiki moderation ourselves, and you guys all know our stance on that. We want this site to be community-run with as little political involvement from us as possible. That's why you will never see an ArenaNet contributor banning or blocking any other user, regardless of the situation. We follow the rules in the same fashion as anyone else, and we don't want to make any hasty moves that would jeopardize this balance of respect.

It seemed to us, after extensive discussion internally, that the best way to proceed would be to pursue a gradual announcement of the site. We'd open the wiki up to all of the sysops and bureaus, and I'd post a greeting in a spot where people who were active on this wiki would be bound to find it. From there, we'd monitor the site, let you guys take it and run with it, and figure out when the best time to announce the wiki would be. This would allow folks that are intimately familiar with wikis to work together, pull together functional policies, and get things to a stable point that would keep the wiki from falling into chaos when new and potentially inexperienced users are introduced to the site. After working on wikis personally for many years, I fully understand how challenging it can be to create policies that will actually work for these sites, and that it's essential for policy-makers to be familiar with the way wikis work before they can advocate for or against a course of action.

I'm getting into one of my famously wordy speeches here, so I'll wrap it up :)

I personally don't have any issues with the Wikipedia announcement. The last thing we want to do is to make the GW2W an exclusive club, accessible only to a select few. We want this site to develop into the ultimate resource for GW2 information, and we have some really cool things planned to make this happen. In order to build a solid site that's adopted by folks across all communities, we'll want to work together. Wiki folks (whether from GWW, GuildWiki, Wikipedia, or any other wiki background) all have valuable insight and experiences, gleaned from their passionate goals to provide ultimate, free repositories of information for anyone to benefit from. That's what made me completely fall in love with the philosophy behind the Wikipedia project years ago. I love the energy of a healthy wiki, and I love to see people interact on the site. It's really cool to see experienced folks building the groundwork of a site, and then seeing new users appreciate this hard work and turn into wiki lovers themselves, eventually growing to mentor others in the same fashion.

Anyways, don't worry about attempting to police for word about the GW2W getting out. We really don't want to hide the site from those who may be really interested in helping out, and we definitely do plan to announce the site at some point. If folks who are interested in wikis want to share the site's existence with other folks who may want to help build the community, we have no problem with that at all, and actually do encourage it. We'll just hold our own official announcement until a later date. When we do announce the site, though, it will get all the fanfare we can give it :)

I hope this clears up a bit more for you guys. As always, please let me know if you have any other questions or thoughts. I'll be busy with post-holiday things here in the studio today, but I'll keep an eye on both wikis and respond to things as soon as I can :) -- Emily Diehl (talk) 20:47, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

The only problem is, we're already being bombarded by GW1 info and meaningless stubs from well-meaning contributors, without a dedicated team of admins to delete them. We have to rely on people who are primarily committed to GWW to delete for now. I think it would be best if we tried to keep it "hidden" until we have a chance to write and approve an admin policy and select active admins. Lord Belar 20:58, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

Not new members are the problem but the endless discussions about policies imo ;) But thanks Emily for that nice wall of text :) poke | talk 21:00, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

and there is a reason, policies on a wiki is not an easy topic. There is a lot of complain of policies in all wikis, specially this one. There is a need to properly discuss the policies and in my opinion many people that should be discussing it are not. But this is not the place to discuss that. Coran Ironclaw 21:05, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

Haha :) Yeah, I'm famous for writing huge, eye-scrambling text walls :p I think you guys can appreciate the point in general, though, on why we aren't announcing the wiki to the general public just yet. Could you imagine thousands of people all trying to contribute to the site now? Being a huge Frank Miller fan, I'd use a 300 quote here (*cough* something pertaining to madness *cough*), but I won't. As far as the policy discussions go, I can sympathize. It's incredibly hard to get a large base of people to agree on things and push them through channels to become official. I have faith that you'll all come to conclusions sooner or later, though :) -- Emily Diehl (talk) 21:06, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

so... should we let the link stay or tell them to remove it? i think most people seeing it will want information about gw2, not a blank wiki, so in my opinion removing it would be the right thing for now. - Y0_ich_halt 21:08, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

And I support 100% the way you are announcing the site =) -- Coran Ironclaw 21:09, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

(Reset indent) Thanks for your (although a bit lengthy) explanation Emily! I had NO intention to get you to censor Wikipedia, as some people think I wanted, I just wanted to get you up and running on this entry on Wikipedia. And apparently I also gave you a good place to make A.Net's intentions more clear to the rest of us. :-)

I do hope that somehow more people with knowledge on writing decent policies will find their way to the new wiki, as in my opinion, the GW2W:ADMIN is going to be one tough nut to crack. Personally, I am not one of the people who is capable (or even interested) in writing tedious things like policies, I'd much rather just do my thing working on the background of the wiki.

I would like to know whether A.Net employees will also get themselves involved into the discussions on policies AS REGULAR USERS. After all, I assume you will also make an active appearance on the GW2 wiki? (And together with you people like Linsey, Andrew, Izzy, Gaile?) I know there is a thin line between your presence on this wiki as a regular user and you representing A.Net in a certain fashion, but personally I would welcome your input. --  (CoRrRan / talk) 21:32, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

Well, to answer Y0 (and your original question), I think that it's best to leave the Wikipedia topic to your (well, the community as a whole) hands. As far as I'm concerned, you guys know our stance on things and why we believe the way we do. As long as we're all on the same page and understand that we don't want to make the wiki into a private site (which I know you guys don't think), I don't think we need to officially step in to the topic. I'd definitely caution you guys to not start a censoring war with Wikipedia or any other site, though. If someone wants to post a link on another wiki, we don't have an issue with that and I'd hate to deter folks from Wikipedia from coming over because of squabbling in the page's history. I'd also be really conscientious about how things are worded when folks post reasons for removing or changing links to the wiki. For example, someone posting on an anonymous IP and saying that "we don't want the site announced" in the change logs can easily be misconstrued as an official ArenaNet member saying that, and we really don't want to have that assumption drawn :)

To answer you, Cor (I'll shorten it to that since I always miss an R in there somewhere), I'm SURE that ArenaNet folks will post on the GW2 wiki just as much or more than they do now. I don't think you'll see a flurry of activity until GW2 is released (just because folks are super busy working on the game, and because we won't really be able to say much before we ship), but I am sure that this will pick up significantly afterwards. If not, I'll personally use my jedi mind tricks on as many people as I can to make them at least set up a user page to say hi :) And I don't blame you on the policy thoughts. While I love contributing to wikis, I always dread having to participate in political things like setting up policies and elections. I'd much rather be sociable and work on the fun stuff like content. I've got to say that I really respect people that have the perseverance to see policy debates to the end. -- Emily Diehl (talk) 22:24, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

i guess i'll stay outta this link thing then ^^ - Y0_ich_halt 22:38, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

Can we also use our magic jedi tricks on A.Net people to spill the beans early? ;-) And don't worry about using the shortened version of my name: I've got it highlighted and every time someone types it, I get a ping from my PC. (Or was that on IRC...) --  (CoRrRan / talk) 22:41, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

Not sure if I should keep filling Emily's page like this but I think I remember Gaile saying some of the campaign 4 plans were scrapped and some were used for GW2. GW:EN was almost completely new - this is why we went almost 12 months without a new game, because they didn't redevelop campaign 4 into GW:EN, they created GW:EN from scratch, maybe using some of the old work for the Tarnished Coast - you can see the Iguana in some of the concept art for for Campaign 4. Had they just redeveloped campaign 4 into GW:EN I would imagine it would have taken A LOT less time that it did to complete, considering it's smaller than other campaigns. Dancing Gnome 03:16, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

It'd be nice to have some confirmation on this, toon then... I'd have thought Utopia would be adapted into GW:EN - GW2 will use a totally different engine for everything bar graphics, I'd have thought... and even then, the graphics engine would have significant improvements from GW1. --Santax (talk · contribs) 12:30, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

I have a very strong feeling that Utopia was partially trashed, and partially adapted to GW:EN - we may see some of what we were told was concept art for Utopia in the Asuran lands, for example, and in one of the trivia comments above, it was mentioned how one of the props we see in one of the dungeons (the blue face statue) was actually meant for Utopia, but was then used for GW:EN. Erasculio 12:38, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

I'm not really sure how much of this I can comment on, but I really want to get back to you guys about this. I'll bring up the topic again and see what I can find out :) -- Emily Diehl (talk) 00:22, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

Woo, thanks Emily :D --Santax (talk · contribs) 21:52, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

dance trivia

the male assassin dance resembles popping. with the divine aura shuriken, it appears as if the assassin is dancing with photon leds. is this intentional? example vid of photons: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyTh7woeeNY --VVong|BA 20:23, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Hi Wongba! That sounds likely, but I'll have to check with the artists in the morning to be sure. -- Emily Diehl (talk) 03:33, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

Admin names

May I have your vote and/or opinion regarding the Admin names (on a three level draft) discussion here? Coran Ironclaw 22:43, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

Sure, I'll take a look at it tonight to see if I have any personal thoughts (anything I'd say for something like that would not represent ArenaNet, of course) :) -- Emily Diehl (talk) 22:28, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

Interwiki links

Hi Emily, we just noticed that interwiki links to/from gw2w were implemented. There is just a problem: GWW now has "gww" interwiki links but not "gw2w" links - and GW2W has "gw2w" interwiki links but not "gww" links. So it's swapped which causes shortcut links such as GWW:SIGN to not work. Could you please let the IT fix that soon? Thanks :) poke | talk 16:33, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

See my sandbox on this wiki User:Brains12/Sandbox. And on GW2W http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/User:Brains12/Sandbox for a few examples. -- Brains12 • Talk • 16:34, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

Haha! Oh no! I'll reply to the email I got with these details. Thanks for pointing this out, guys :) I'll have them put gww on the GW2W and gw2w on the GWW. -- Emily Diehl (talk) 19:04, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

Ok it seems that the gw2w links were just activated but the gww interwiki links still need to be disabled here to get the policy shortcuts (like GWW:SIGN) working again. Same on gw2w. But thanks so far :D poke | talk 19:46, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

Hiya guys! I think this should be working now...can you double check to make sure I'm not crazy? -- Emily Diehl (talk) 19:59, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

Using the sandboxes brains constructed it looks like they are working to me. one more test for luck though --Lemming 20:02, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

As I said, interwiki links to gw2w work now, but the gww interwiki links (here) have to be disabled to fix the issue with our policy shortcuts. And as far as I see, gw2w still does not have gww interwiki links (and the gw2w links need to be disabled there as well). poke | talk 20:03, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

Hi again guys! I just had a conversation about this with our IT folks, and some questions came up about the interwiki links. These things are confusing...hehe. Here's a recap of what we talked about:

• There's a bit of a concern about maintaining two separate interwiki link tables between the wikis, since the more information that varies from wiki to wiki, the more confusing it will inevitably get if we decide to add more wikis to the family at a later time. From a maintenance standpoint, the team would prefer to keep everything the same if possible.
• It was mentioned that the confusion being caused by us having an interwiki link that is the same as the standard prefix used for shortcuts may prevent us from having two identical interwiki link databases, since we'd be unable to use gww on the GWW and gw2w on the GW2W.
• The team suggested that it may be better to pick interwiki links that are not the same as links used for internal shortcuts. They mentioned that perhaps using "gwwiki" and "gw2wiki" or something similar to that may work better in the overall long run. This is actually something that was brought up and debated on the conversation on my GW2W talk page. I think it may be valuable to consider this again to make sure things are the easiest they can be for later maintenance and such.

I hope I managed to explain this clearly enough! I can see the points on both sides of the request, so I want to find a solution that works for everyone :) If you guys can discuss this and let me know whether using a different variation of the interwiki prefix would work for everyone, that would be great. Until then, I believe that IT is planning on removing the mapping(s?) until a decision is made. If you guys have any thoughts you'd like me to pass onto them, please feel free to share them!

Sorry for the confusion about all of this :) -- Emily Diehl (talk) 21:16, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the response, Emily :). The interwiki links have been stopped now, and the policy redirects are back up again.

Seeing as gww and gw2w don't seem to work, I would agree on the suggestions of gwwiki and gw2wiki gw1 and gw2 for the interwiki links. -- Brains12 • Talk • 21:34, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

Thank you Emily. I would prefer gw1/gw2 then. poke | talk 21:23, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

As I suggested on the other page, I support the gw1/gw2 links. Coran Ironclaw 01:58, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

To toss in extra support, gw1 and gw2 seem like the best alternatives. Short, easily understood, and infinitely expandable. - Tanetris 02:08, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

gw624 ? :D poke | talk 02:09, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

Thanks guys! It seems like this is a pretty clear consensus. I'll talk to IT in the morning about getting the links up as soon as possible! Until then, continue to give any other thoughts you may have :) -- Emily Diehl (talk) 02:25, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

Since I see no more comments about this, I'll pass the request along to IT to use gw1 and gw2 as the interwiki links! I'll let you guys know what I hear back. -- Emily Diehl (talk) 19:30, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

They are implemented just fine now. The ironical part is they are implemented the same way we first requested; not identical on both wikis ("gw2" only works here, and vice versa). I guess the statement still holds, can be hard to keep track of, but it still looks funny ^^ - anja 15:59, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

Finally, not that I currently work on the GW2 wiki but it's good to see them at last :) --Kakarot 16:23, 8 January 2008 (UTC)