Board Thread:News and Announcements/@comment-5645428-20160302094836

Hey guys. It's been a while since we've brought you a report on the latest action happening around the wiki. We've had many brilliant editors get some great work done including IceKane with updated images, Loochi with new icons, Awesoman300 with fresh videos and KevinaThrashera with fine article improvements, among many others who have helped the wikito look stunning as ever! Also thank our moderators who continue to keep your social spaces free from silly people and ripe with excitement!

What else is up? As you know, we try to keep our article count low so that what articles we do have we can invest more time and effort into. Good ol' quality over quantity! Saying that, I'll jot down those which were deleted, some from a quite while back, just in case they slipped past without you knowing.
 * Everyplay (retired)
 * Composers (links to their respective Newgrounds profiles can now be found in infoboxes and on the main Geometry Dash article)
 * Forms (merged with the Portals article)
 * Geometry Dash Wiki:Userboxes (moved to Category:Userboxes)
 * Geometry Dash Wiki:Leaderboard (retired, a good run indeed, but the feature has been superseded by the in-game friends leaderboard)
 * Geometry Dash Wiki:Level Showcasing (retired, didn't receive the attention we had expected)

Top 10 Lists are a feature we've had around for almost as long as I can remember and are nice to have a quick play with. It's been brought up that perhaps they're not really doing enough to warrant keeping them. We'd like to hear what you think. Respond to the poll if you like, but giving a written opinion would be even better!

Should Top 10 Lists remain an active feature? Yes No

Next, a small note about both the stats and custom level userboxes. They were recently updated so that their image field no longer processes file links automatically. This will leave those who did use images with some text left over. This change was made so to allow any image to be used using Template:Image and not just the local files, which in most cases probably wouldn't have achieved what most people would've liked since we don't permit unrelated uploads. Local files can still be used, however, just treat the image as regular file. Remember to set them all to a maximum of 270px.

The truth is, there's not too much else to report. This is because quite frankly, the wiki's development stages are well and truly passed. We have successfully uploaded and organised every last image, categories and all. Around this time last year, we were only really getting started. Now, we're just having images updated with higher quality versions here and there. The assortment of templates are efficient, functional and well documented. Categories are sorted as they have been for ages now, and now we have turned to the endgame objective of completing our articles. At this point, the way we are article editing has changed. This point is likely very rarely reached by other wikis because they have so many articles and keeping a tab on all of them is simply impractical. But this is no ordinary wiki. We have gotten stuff done! Our progress has been beyond substantial, and it has certainly taken commitment from many to achieve the result we witness today.

Contributing to the wiki now is a more qualified task, meaning that edits should be more finely evaluated by their authors, or will be anyway by staff. Consequent reversions should be expected in the case of edits that are made 'for the sake of it'. An example is adding trivia, which normally is regarded as positive in any instance. Now, trivia should be decisively interesting and closely relevant for it to be a notable contribution and retained on articles. It's this level of assessment that ensures articles can reach that noticeably high level of quality which other wikis can't quite manage since their articles aren't monitored and are edited by so many editors who phrase things differently. What we are approaching is truly completing our articles. They will no longer require editing afterwards; written to the paper, edited, published and sold to the public. Concluding editing can seem like a foreign concept for a wiki, but again, we aren't like other wikis, we are nearing the objective of overall completion that almost always remains a mere idea everywhere else. Not for all articles, of course, but until there's an update, the game isn't changing and neither will core information which should be detailed appropriately. In order to regulate this, level articles will progressively be locked, being primary edit destinations which often don't amount into anything substantial - the core information is already there. Other articles will remain open for editing but will be actively monitored, requiring edits to be those notable contribitions.

With this in mind, it became evident that unregistered editors may no longer be contributing enough in line with the refined perspective of editing explained above that it has now become mandatory to create an account before being able to edit.

For the rest of you, we hope you continue to enjoy the social aspects of the wiki and remain a part of the GD 'fandom' as Wikia likes to call it. You're the ones who keep the wiki fun as well as informative and it's great to have you with us!

If you got through all of this, then congratulations! The next time I'm on the chat you can ask for free cookies and a walrus ride! ;) Indeed, although we have gotten this far with the wiki, I guarantee there's still plenty to come that I haven't anticipated. Stay tuned! 