Forum:Wiki activity

If someone could provide some hard data, it would be much appreciated, but as I'm sure most have realized, the wiki isn't nearly as active as it was before. I'm not proposing anything in this forum, I'd just like to know what some people think are the causes of this inactivity in general, and if there are any solutions.

In addition, if you happen to be online frequently between 00:00 and 14:00 UTC, please let us know, because as it stands that is our most inactive period, and on more than one occasion I've seen vandalism go unchecked during that period for a number of hours. Once my winter break starts (December 13th) I'll probably be more active during that time, as I imagine a lot of us will, but for the time being and time afterwards I think we should set up some sort of "night shift" (not proposing anything).

Thoughts? Joe Copp 04:29, December 6, 2013 (UTC)

Discussion
This is where time zones will start to come in handy. I know a lot of you guys on here are Brits, so you're 6 hours ahead of me. Joe, what zone would you happen to be in? 04:43, December 6, 2013 (UTC)
 * EST. 00:00 to 14:00 UTC is 8:00 PM to 10:00 AM here, which coincides with sleepytime for most editors/viewers. Joe Copp  04:46, December 6, 2013 (UTC)
 * I can see it being mostly nighttime for people living in North America and Europe (and it's 2:00 to 16:00 here which is the hardest time for me to be active if I have school) where we have virtually all our editors. The thing is we have never really had a good amount of editors in Asia/Australia where that timezone would be at a good time, there was that miracle man but he's been inactive since February. Also, I generally check the changes from the night when I have woke up (via this page) but I usually overlook small changes from IPs which may or may not be vandals. 10:44, December 6, 2013 (UTC)

Honestly that's hard to aggregate. I mean we have a few odd users going inactive and not enough new users replacing the old ones. I haven't seen many new users join the wiki in the past 6 months. I can't think of any clear way to change that except people being nicer to new comers. KλT 06:01, December 6, 2013 (UTC)
 * Thing is, you can super nice to someone, but it's still up to them if they want to continue editing concurrently. And if the drive isn't there, they'll bugger off. 07:05, December 6, 2013 (UTC)

I put the blame to two things. Firstly the series itself, frankly the CoD series may still be selling, but I don't think it's quite as amazing as it used to be, and as such that's going to have an effect on if people want to actually get involved in something related to Call of Duty. The other reason I think is YouTube. While I'm sure you know I like complaining about Activision and YouTubers, this observation is more factual. I think Call of Duty is at a point where it's more interesting to watch one of these users play multiplayer while talking about what they're doing as opposed to actually looking at the Wiki itself. While we have all the facts, campaign is often underlooked now, and Denkirson have a load of info from the files so of course YTers can get their info from there instead of here. And furthermore with their links with Activision they have access to information before us, and happily post it before we do, and due to our COD:LEAK policy, we end up behind. These are the main two reasons I can think of, mainly series degeneration and stronger competition. 07:03, December 6, 2013 (UTC)
 * Having said that, could you be suggesting that we should put more effort into our YT channel? Joe Copp  14:44, December 6, 2013 (UTC)
 * Joe, we currently have a thread open to any suggestions on how to expand effort into the YouTube channel. MLG is gonna finish up the BO2 campaign walkthroughs, I'm gonna start recording the Ghosts campaign tonight. 18:03, December 6, 2013 (UTC)
 * It would be irrelevant to do so. People use YouTube for the videos alone, so even if we started utilising the channel, it wouldn't help the wiki activity at all. And at this point there's far too much competition to actually produce any videos that would receive as many views, furthermore, to actually compete against them we'd need gameplay footage of people on high killstreaks and such. And I only know of 2-3 people with recording software, and I'm too mediocre at Ghosts for footage considered "exciting" and I don't know about the other users. 22:42, December 6, 2013 (UTC)
 * So is it even worth the effort, in your opinion? Joe Copp  05:07, December 7, 2013 (UTC)
 * Well, for the outcome you want, more wiki activity, no. Even if we could set up a decent YouTube channel, people would just be using that, the wiki would still have just as much activity. 07:43, December 7, 2013 (UTC)

I agree with Sam. There's usually little reason why people would check here over YouTube and Den/Symthic, apart from people who actually happen to prefer encyclopedias and info leaning towards facts rather than a famous person saying "This gun is beast" because they got a K.E.M. Strike with it. 10:44, December 6, 2013 (UTC)

Gotta agree with Sam here. Also, i am a little bit inactive compared to last month, due to school problems. And per Joe, we really should put more effort into our YT channel. 15:48, December 6, 2013 (UTC)

I absolutely agree with Sam. The lack of new users with commitment and the abundance of youtube COD players are the main reasons for the inactivity. Lack of cooperation from activision and time zones are also other factors. Unfortunately I don't know what to do about it. -- 19:50, December 6, 2013 (UTC)

I'll try and edit a lot more, I mean I don't play CoD any more but I'm sure I can look through articles and edit grammatical mistakes and that. I can try and help promote but the fact that so many Cod YouTubers are out there causes some major problems. Maybe we could work with one or two of them? Otherwise we just need to carry on as we are and hope a random influx of additional editors comes along. 17:56, December 7, 2013 (UTC)
 * I helped Drift0r once with something and that got us a small shout out. But as to if we could actually get a proper union with one of them is a bit unlikely, since there's not much we could offer them. They can just get stats from Denkirson, and they have Activision backing so they even know a lot of things before us. 07:03, December 8, 2013 (UTC)
 * Honestly out of all the "youtubers" drif0r would have to be the most laid back and professional of them all. I'd say we should shoot him an inquiry and ask him about it. KλT 08:11, December 8, 2013 (UTC)
 * He uses his Twitter account a good bit, perhaps we could contact him via our official Twitter account, or though a YouTube PM from our YT channel. Might look better if it comes from one of our Wiki named things instead of just a user. 10:40, December 8, 2013 (UTC)
 * He used to give us a credit when he posted his videos about Juggernaut health in MW3, if i remember correctly. 11:14, December 8, 2013 (UTC)
 * Wickedshrapnel credits us in a lot of his videos, like his "This Gun Fucking Sucks" series. Joe Copp  19:54, December 8, 2013 (UTC)

I have the statistics for total pageviews we've received by day going back to January 2012 anyone wants it. 07:12, December 8, 2013 (UTC)
 * Yes please <3 Joe Copp  19:57, December 8, 2013 (UTC)
 * The statistics are stored in about 500 separate emails so it will take a bit for me to provide. I'm free for a few days so it shouldn't be too long. 21:26, December 8, 2013 (UTC)

I feel it's just the way the times are changing. We were the group that was brought in by Cod4-BO Era, the golden era of CoD. So many of us joined at once, and now we're all starting to go our seperate ways. New users come, but they seem to rarely have much interest to stay. Part of it's probably because people aren't getting as invested in the series, part of it is the already active community is starting to move on from the wiki, and part of it could be unrelated to either of those two things. The point is, it just seems like the golden era of cod is over, and as we move on and go our seperate ways, there are less people left to fill in the gaps. 11:07, December 8, 2013 (UTC)

Perhaps one may argue that it is artificially extending the lifespan of the wiki's livelyhood, and perhaps that it may be in vein, but I think utilizing some basic community-building skills encompasses a large majority of imperative actions we need take in order to sustain activity here. Now, I'm not proposing anything, but things like Article Comments, Achievements, and a greater emphasis on welcoming and guiding new users through the editing process may prove beneficial in supplementing the number of users that stay and edit.

I can personally vouch for Article Comments and Achievements, having used them for quite a while now on Crysis Wiki, a wiki that has suffered the same problem for years as this one is just starting to: Limited interest in the subject matter. As soon as I was able, I enabled Achievements, and the abundance of low-level, "you made an edit!!" type achievements--at least seemingly--made it more interesting for new users to make edits (the reason we abandoned this system here was because it was deemed unnecessary in light of the massive interest in CoD at the time, and because of a minute amount of "edit whoring").

Achievement's effects are somewhat more objective, and I may be able to find some study on them at a later time, but on the more subjective side are Article Comments, which at their very core serve only to promote more basic activity and community involvement for anons/new users--even if this means sacrificing the current purpose of talk pages and settling for somewhat unrelated blog-style comments. I know there is valid reasoning against the Message Wall style cascading comment system, which is exactly what these comments would be, but at their core they can serve the same purpose as talk pages (to discuss changes to page content) and simultaneously foster more interaction between new users and article content (even if that ends up being opinions and irrelevant quips). Immediately after activating this feature on Crysis Wiki, I witnessed a vast difference in daily activity; while we had been steadily attracting some five thousand page views a day, we'd be hard pressed to conjure 10 edits a week, not including mine. You might witness by going there yourself that anons and new users apperantly enjoy adding their thoughts/opinions to articles as they would blogs, and if that would be any motivation or invitation to that user to stay or continue to edit, then the activation of the feature would be considered successful.

Lastly--and if I were to place whole-hearted support in favor of only one of these possible solutions, I would do so here--I believe we should be continually efforting to make transitioning into knowledge of editing and participating in the community on the whole easier. When I joined the wiki, I must say I was rather befuddled at the natural order of things on-wiki, and if not for my intense thirst for the CoD series as a whole, I might not have stayed on the wiki as long as I have. Since I can't say whether the new user experience has improved (since I haven't been a new user in four years), I will estimate that it has not, or has only marginally; thus, what we're found pressured to do most is to improve the new user experience. This may entail making more user friendly--or even interactive--welcome/editing templates; providing better Call of Duty Wiki pages to describe how to go about editing without having to resort to the cold, lifeless, intimidating, and impersonal page that is Help:Editing; or even going so far as to create several multimedia projects, such as introduction videos or "noob" chat sessions (where we invite new users specifically to come chat with a few experienced ones, whereupon they can ask questions or express concerns; this would also serve as a great mode to guage the user experience if we were to ask them to rate it) which might arguably fit Darwin's theme of simplification.

I may be wrong, but I feel that we're either on top of or rather close to a turning point in the life of the wiki, a crux at which we need to realize how to improve the wiki by its most basic mode, the editors; and if what we've realised in this forum is true--that we are losing user interest to YouTube channels--we must accordingly collaborate in order to slightly shift the direction of the wiki towards a more inticive experience whilst still retaining the core of encyclopedic origin. Joe Copp 13:17, December 9, 2013 (UTC)
 * When i first got here, i got scared by a lots of things. I think that things haven't changed to better. But enabling article comments... well... that would be a good idea for anons that want to ask something related to the page, but it would be a hell to have a maintenance about it. While on the other side, Achievements sound good. 13:28, December 9, 2013 (UTC)
 * While the immediate sound of turning on achievements and article comments makes me cringe, thinking about it, it could make things better. The achievements sure would give much more people the incentive to contribute, which is good even were it for purely gaining the achievements. There has been trouble with achievement whoring in the past, true, but with currently more active administration it can be relatively easily noticed if someone is just doing edit massing with little to no changes and give them a proper warning in case of alleged achievement whoring and I consider the possibility of increased activity outweighs the potential risks. I'm not so positive about article comments however, I'm very against the Message Wall style because it can't be maintained and flexed so easily as regular talk pages, although I can see how it could make for tidier discussions about the article, and most importantly it's easier to find and use for a new user. And it sounds good to change the welcome templates and the corresponding stuff punched into a new user's face (metaphorically) to a more open way, maybe give a better and a bit more realistic approach on the most used community links and how to contribute, and obviously delete the Help:Editing link, that page seems pretty outdated and something I would not find much use of as a padawan. So, for now I support the idea of making these changes. 13:49, December 9, 2013 (UTC)
 * Achievements might cause some more activity, but I don't like the idea of Article Comments at all. We already have the issue of people using the talk pages as forums, having article comments will just make them treat them like blogs, posting their opinion on whatever is on the page, but not actually about the page, for example claiming a weapon is shit because it has low damage or something. It wouldn't really help us, and would be more a nightmare to keep on top of. I know we've tried achievements before and they weren't that popular, and I don't think they'd really work too well on a large established wiki, they seem to be more for promoting smaller wikis that are growing in terms of community and size. 17:53, December 9, 2013 (UTC)
 * Also, these are more incentives to stay. And for "Achievements" we have UOTM (which as I recall everyone wanted to stay the same as it's only intent was to act as new user incentive). But right now our primary issue isn't incentive to stay, it's incentive to join. So we would need a completly different approach, and to be honest, before writing this comment, I just played 1 game of Ghosts and got so bored, so convincing people to join a Call of Duty wiki is harder than one would think. 20:51, December 9, 2013 (UTC)
 * Hmmm, I do feel like article comments could possibly bring some life to the activeness of users. I do generally see more people adding comments to blogs than actual mainspace editing, so I think this could help out. If it is possible, have both a talk page for the mainspace page (for the usual improvements of the article), and then have a separate blog area for discussing the content of the page in general. The only downside I can think of is opinions from this area leaking onto mainspace, but that can't be that big of an issue. 02:10, December 11, 2013 (UTC)
 * You can't have talk pages and message walls on at the same time. And if we did have message walls and allowed our pages to be used like blogs we may en up looking a bit like the MLP wiki's pages, and to get what I mean here is a link to W:C:MLP:Pinkie Pie's page, and you can see how long the page is due to the comments section. Overall, the message wall would be more a hindrance than a help. 06:30, December 11, 2013 (UTC)
 * I think the page length argument is irrelevant since comments are located at the bottom of the page and don't even load until you scroll all the way down. That said, is there something inherently wrong with having a more opinionated talk section? Like I said before, you can still have the discussions about the page that need to get done, all while fostering greater community involvement. In fact, talk page discussions about mainspace articles aren't even that common. Joe Copp  08:25, December 11, 2013 (UTC)
 * Yes, but it's currently set up that the talk sections shouldn't be used as a forum. And with weapon pages all we'll get is a torrent of "this weapon is shit" or "this weapon is OP nerf it" or any other such comments. It'll just make the pages look very unprofessional and overall quite disgusting to look at. Furthermore, if we switch now we will lose all our talk page history, which since this wiki is so old is a lot, and given COD:LEAK's origin is found on a talk page, we couldn't afford to lose that. I'm not sure what you expect out of allowing blog style comments on articles, but given the community we cater for, they're hardly going to be civil discussions like this. 08:44, December 11, 2013 (UTC)
 * In fact, if it didn't remove talk pages, I'd just recommend we trial it, but since it will destroy all our current pages, I don't want to risk that. 08:46, December 11, 2013 (UTC)