Let's Co-opt the Player Guides at the Wiki. Good idea?

[BlackSpectre]

There are many player guides at the wiki, nearly all of them are left-overs from the Paragon Wiki days. The players who wrote them are no longer updating or maintaining them. Most contain obsolete information and no longer completely apply to Homecoming. Players are reading them and noticing that there is a lot of incorrect information in them.  So... what do we do with them?

 

When I see this notice, it means "hands off" to me. I am not permitted to edit it. It's not mine. It's not even the wiki's.

 

It seems to me we have 3 options:

 

1) leave it as is and ignore them. Let other players read it and conclude that there is a lot of incorrect information at the wiki, and therefore the wiki itself is not very useful.

 

2) Delete the player guides. This eliminates the issue altogether in one foul swoop.

 

3) co-opt the player guides. Bring them into the wiki and within the purview of wiki editors. Make them OURS. Take responsibility for them. Fix them and maintain them.

 

You know my opinion. Ignoring the various player guides is bad mojo for the wiki. It's an easy way for others to unfairly criticize our work here at the wiki. Deleting the player guides will end up erasing a lot of very important information that is only available in these guides. Just look at the Demo Editing guide, or the Chat Bubble guide. The information in these guides is pretty much essential. So deleting them would hurt both us and players who come to the wiki looking for answers. That leaves co-opting the guides as really the only option in my view.  

 

What do you think? 

 

 

https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Category:Player_Guides

 

 

 

 

Edited Thursday at 09:54 PM by BlackSpectre

[Doc_Scorpion]

You missed option 4 - writing new guides, using the old guides as a reference where appropriate.  Once that is done, remove all references to the old guide/point them at the new guide.  A link on the new guide's page should be the only way to reach the old page.

[BlackSpectre]

Can the Search box even be limited so as to not show the old guides?  

 

Honestly, your suggestion is a lot more work. By co-opting the guides we merely have to update them. Takes a lot more to write one up from scratch. 

 

However, what you suggest could be done in 2 steps, even without limiting the search engine:

1) write a new guide/article

2) delete the old one. 
 

That would essentially do the same thing. And there’s no reason to create a link to the old guide. Remember, that same old guide is accessible right now at ParagonWiki.com. Nothing would be lost if we deleted it and replaced the old guide with a new one.  The old guide wouldn’t even need to be credited unless the author of the new guide took wording directly from it. 
 

Practically speaking, I doubt we could contact the original authors of the guides and ask permission to co-opt and rewrite them. So many players from 20 years ago are just not around anymore. Their email addresses and other contact info we might have could have easily changed in 20 years. we probably don’t have their real names. We could try, but what if there’s no way to contact them? 
 

If you want to talk about ownership and copyrights… the original authors gave permission for ParagonWiki to publish their work, not our Homecoming wiki. So we shouldn’t even have the guides, legally… especially since they were not really part of ParagonWiki, and were disavowed by the wiki. I don’t mean to be alarmist, because practically speaking these old guides are abandoned. And even if the authors are still around, I’d bet they wouldn’t have any problems with us co-opting the guides. If, in the event they discover their guide has been co-opted, and are not honored by the reverence we’ve given them, then we could simply remove it and write a new one… but what are the chances of that happening?
 

All this said, @Doc_Scorpion, I’m glad you at least see a need to do something about the guides. 

 

In order for me to start doing something, I need our wiki admins to weigh in on the issue. @Michiyo? 

Do we co-opt the guides and update them (my preference), or do we write new guides and replace them? If the latter, then please delete all of the player guides right away, and change the policy of this wiki to reject player guides in the future (which I think should be done anyway). 
 

Official wiki policy:  https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Homecoming_Wiki:Article_Guidelines

 

 

P.S. Looking over the player guides category I see “player guides” in there that aren’t player guides. Meaning, they’re wiki articles. For example, all of the “Players Guide to the Cities” pages are wiki articles.  So we can’t just delete everything in the category. Sadly. We’d need to look each doc over. 

Edited 22 hours ago by BlackSpectre

[AboveTheChemist]

I'd vote for option 3, assuming I got a vote.