We're nearing Wiki Award season. As you may have noticed, the Wiki's been a bit slower in the last few months. As such, the admin team is considering paring down the number of awards this year. The categories have fluctuated in the past, from colossal lists in the early years to the Ninth Wiki Awards, when there were only three categories (Character, Miscellaneous, and Fan Fiction). You can see them all here.
The question for the community is: which categories should be discarded, which should be consolidated, and which should be retained as-is?
It's not fair to expect Sebolto and ITCO to mine the Wiki to fill in categories in which no one else is nominating, so if your knee-jerk response is "keep them all!", make sure you—yes, you individually—have articles in mind to nominate for at least half the categories (remember, they don't necessarily have to be your own work). I'd rather not have a situation where we close nominations with, e.g., only 1-2 entries in each of the Character categories and only then have to consolidate.
I would like you all to know I am venturing into the author field and I am writing a sequel to Star Wars the Last Jedi called Star Wars the War Begins, or Star Wars The Rebellion is Reborn!
It's a very big nuisance when I try to edit my Mandalorian character and other individuals keep reverting back to old versions. This is not an open edit. Naastau, Faithful Iron, and any other related material are mine and I will change the information as drastically as I please. Stop.
Hello everyone! Just minutes ago I published the page for this year's annual Wiki Awards, and I thought it would be a good idea to make a Discussions post to clarify a few things. If you refer to the page for the awards, you will notice the introduction of a slightly different system involving a new award; this is the main purpose of this post, to clarify what this is and how it will work.
I thought it would be a fun idea to introduce a different voting system this year, as something of an experiment. 2018's Wiki Awards will introduce the Best Overall Article Award, which will be presented to the winner of a second voting stage, and will be voted for from the roster of winners in the other categories.
In the hopes of clarifying myself further, I will break down how this will work:
- The nomination period (April 16 - May 7) will operate the same as in past years. Users on the wiki will nominate whatever article they want, so long as they follow the rules, in the time period that the nominations will take place.
- After the nominations, the first stage of voting (May 8 - May 22) will also operate the same as in previous years. To make things easier to understand, consider stage one of voting the same as the voting in any other Wiki Awards.
- After the presentation of the awards in Stage One, the winners of each category will not only be awarded normally, but will also move on to Stage Two. The winners of Stage One will become candidates to receive the Best Overall Article Award, which will be voted for in the same way as in Stage One: by the community. Stage Two will be much shorter than Stage One, spanning a total of 5 days.
Once the Wiki Awards are fully completed, every winner from the first stage will be properly awarded. Winning the Awards is no easy feat, after all! The winner of the second stage will receive its normal award for winning stage one, as well as the Best Overall Article Award.
If you have any other questions, please feel free to ask me, and I'll be sure to get back to you as soon as possible. Thank you, and good luck!
Hi everyone. This post is to gauge people's interest levels in having a 13th Wiki Awards. You can read up on the Wiki Awards here (swfanon.wikia.com/wiki/Star_Wars_Fanon:The_Wiki_Awards ), but the idea is that the community comes together in a once-a-year push to read each other's works and vote on them. I'd highly encourage people who haven't participated before to read through the pages of a few old Wiki Awards to get a feel for it.
The thing is, though, it requires real participation to be a success. That doesn't mean it's hard, per se, but the best Wiki Awards see lots of users coming out at all levels—a host or co-hosts organizing, users nominating both their own and others' works, and everyone voting. It can be a great opportunity to read stuff you wouldn't have otherwise seen and a great way to show your appreciation for works that you've really enjoyed.
If this sounds like something you're interested in, let us know.
This has been written elsewhere, but just in case: because there is no text editor yet for discussions, please don't edit migrated posts with rich formatted content, because the formatting will be lost.
Come gather around people, wherever you roam. As some of you may know, the Wiki Awards have been a long tradition on Star Wars Fanon. That said, over time, they've decreased in popularity. After last year's low turnout rates (you can read a little more about that here), I didn't think there would be desire for a 12th Wiki Awards. That's the thing about time though; it's always a-changing. Over past few months (mostly into 2017), I've seen a lot of new(ish) users starting to collaborate on projects, talk with each other, and even hang out in the chat room. With that in mind, I've decided to ask if there is, in fact, interest in holding another Wiki Awards. What do y'all think? Is that something people want? Is it something you would be interested in nominating articles and voting for? Or is it not?
I have no strong feelings either way. If people want it to happen, I'm more than willing to give it another shot, but if there just isn't interest, then I'm not going to force something hollow. Come senators, congressmen, please heed the call Please share your thoughts. Cheers!
Last year we created a new feature called Flags, which has been live on your community for a while. As I'm sure some of you have noticed, we've been quiet about development on this front for a while. It's time for an update.
A visit to Shady Pines retirement home
The brief summary is: we're planning to retire Flags in the near future. While the feature had some aspects we really liked, it simply hasn't been as beneficial as we hoped, especially now that Template Types has been launched sitewide.
After careful consideration over whether it makes sense to spend time to build out the feature further or to simplify article editing by removing it, we feel the latter makes the most sense.
However, we do not think this was wasted time - we learned a lot while creating this feature, and it's quite possible we'll use some of the code in other features in the future.
How we'll retire it
In essence, we will run a bot that will switch Flags back into being a normal part of your article wikitext. We want to make this process as smooth as possible - ideally, viewers should see little difference, and editors will go back to editing notices just as they did in the past.
We will provide an update when we have more specific timing for this switchover, and feel free to continue using flags in the meantime.
I want to thank you all for helping try out this feature - we really appreciated all the feedback, suggestions and bug reports we received while it was available. If you have more thoughts and feedback about the feature, we'd still love to hear it - for example, was there some aspect that you really appreciated? Just let us know either below or via Special:Contact/feedback!
Hello everyone! With February upon us, it's time to think about this year's Wiki Awards. In case you aren't aware, the Wiki Awards is an annual event on Star Wars Fanon commemorating the best articles, stories, and ideas of the wiki.
So, I've started this thread to gauge interest. Feel free to look over previous Wiki Awards for ideas, and here you can post thoughts on categories (how many? which ones?), dates/deadlines (mid-February to end of March? March to April?), etc. Additionally, while I'm more than happy to host the WA again, there's always the option for new people. In the past, there have been volunteers and even votes for the host. Depending on how many people are interested in hosting, we can pick however we want. Typically, one or two people host, but IMHO there could be as many as three official hosts.
Feel free to discuss! Everyone's opinion is valid and useful! Anyone who's interested in the WA in any capacity can contribute.
I was just casually floating around the Wikia universe when I passed by this wiki to write an article about it at a wiki about wikis. Upon checking the founding date of this wiki, I noticed that today is the 10th Anniversary since its foundation.
So just posting this thread to congratulate all the wiki and all its editors here, also making this my first edit ^- ^ yay. Happy 10th Anniversary, may the force be with you for at least 10 years more!
As part of our ongoing work to help ensure articles display well across many kinds of devices, we've been hard at work on a new article feature to update the way 'content notices' behave, which we are calling Flags.
What we're talking about are the kinds of notice templates you see at the top of articles with information like 'major updates are incoming...' or 'this page should be divided...'. Essentially, they are metadata for an article - communicating the status of that article, rather than being article content itself.
A Flags access point
A sample flags dialog
What does it do?
With Flags, the notice templates are separated from the article content and given their own management tool. They still use the exact same templates as before (and you can continue to create new ones and update existing templates, just as you do today) - but now users can browse, add and remove them without resorting to fairly specific knowledge of how the templates work.
By adding a quick layer of data to these templates, communities will have more control over which notices appear to which people (e.g. a 'Major' notice would be relevant to all readers, but a 'Divide' notice may only be relevant to logged-in contributors.) The layer of data would also allow for custom reports via Insights (e.g. an Insight list of all pages that have a certain flag.) The content of these templates will no longer clutter Google and on-Wikia search results, and we'll be able to display abbreviated versions of the notices on mobile phones.
Other potential ideas include mobile users easily being able to mark pages that need work (e.g. you notice a page is full of typos, and flag it for yourself or others to improve later), or even modifying how the page behaves based on the flags (e.g. hiding spoiler article text from on-Wikia search results). If you have more ideas around this, we’d love to hear them.
How can you help?
We have been working on a simple version of the Flags tool, which is already live on several communities, such as WARFRAME Wiki, The Maze Runner Wiki, 007 Wiki and Red Dead Wiki. We're really interested to see how it works on active, smart communities like yours, to help us understand how it works in real-world environments.
We're looking to globally enable this feature in the future, and we think SWFanon would be an excellent place to gather early feedback. Any and all feedback on how it works will be invaluable, and will likely strongly influence future development in this and other areas.
What would enabling it mean for your community?
When Flags is enabled, we'd automatically convert usages of notice templates to the new type of code. (If it needs to be reversed, this is possible.) Afterwards, you'd use a new option on the 'Edit' button dropdown to choose which flags should appear on an article.
You can view the current, draft flags setup for your community on Special:Flags., which TK-999 helped set up (thanks!). This can't be directly edited yet (we're working on that functionality), but we're able to easily update it to cover any other 'notice' templates you may have (or correct any errors).
You can read lots more detail about how exactly the tool works on Help:Flags. The tool is under heavy development right now, and more abilities and options will be added as and when they are completed.
So - we'd love to hear all your thoughts and feedback about this feature. We'll keep an eye on this thread for any ideas or questions you may have - assuming there are no major concerns, we'd love to get it enabled here within the next few days.
In the CT discussion, the community has approved the migration of existing infobox templates to Wikia's new format. This thread shall serve as a venue for discussion pertaining to this process—please post any bug reports and the like here!
Customization
You can customize the appearance of the new infoboxes for yourself by going to Special:MyPage/common.css and defining stylesheet rules for them. Here are some to get started:
Infoboxes that have been converted to the new format now accept new parameters that allow you to customize their appearance. This way, if you don't like the default color scheme, you don't have to create your own template—all that's needed is specifying a few extra params:
|bg1= specifies a new background color for the infobox title,
|bg2= specifies a new background color for the infobox subheadings,
|c1= specifies a new text color for the infobox title,
and |c2= specifies a new text color for the infobox subheadings.
All these parameters take hexadecimal color codes as input, without the leading #. Example: |bg1=C2B119
Additionally, you can now use the |type= parameter of the {{Character infobox}} to generate any of the other prebuilt infobox themes, so there's no need to use templates like {{Jedi character infobox}}. See the docs for more info.
Hello everyone. I am happy to announce that Star Wars Fanon is now utilizing a feature known as Message Wall, which has replaced user talk pages here (user talk pages still exist as archives, which you can find on your Wall). The feature was developed several years ago by Wikia, but, at the time, many users here were opposed to the replacement of talk pages.
Now, in order to create an easier and more intuitive environment for user-to-user communication, I have gone ahead and enabled Message Wall. You can find your Message Wall by hovering over your avatar in the global navigation bar, and you will see a Message Wall link that you can click.
Posting on Message Walls is very straightforward. Walls are broken up into threads. If it is your Message Wall, you will receive a notification on the top-right of any page whenever there is a new message on your Wall, as well as a reply to an existing thread on your Wall. You will also receive notifications for any threads you have posted in on any other Wall, as well as any other Wall threads you choose to follow. Additionally, all Wall messages are auto-signed, so you don't have to type a manual signature.
You also no longer have to wonder if you should reply on your own talk page, or on the other person's. Because Message Walls work as threads, you keep everything in the same discussion. All participants in the discussion will be notified whenever there's a new reply.
If you have any questions, feel free to ask here or consult the Message Wall help page. Thanks!
Hi everyone. I am happy to announce that an exciting new feature has been enabled on Star Wars Fanon: Wikia Maps!
This feature will allow you to create maps about the Star Wars universe, but with a twist: you can use the maps to tell yourStar Wars stories. That's right, you can map adventures that your characters have been on, map the sites of battles you've written, map the galactic governments you've created, and more. Use it in a way that compliments your fanon and fan fiction writing.
So far, I have not created any policies for this except to say that maps you create must be relevant to Star Wars Fanon, and that you should use common sense. If you abuse the maps feature, your maps may be deleted and you may be blocked from Star Wars Fanon. But beyond that, I don’t want to create any other policies just yet. This is a brand new feature for Star Wars Fanon, and I don’t want to restrict its potential by imposing arbitrary policies.
You can learn more about Wikia Maps and see examples, including a Millennium Falcon map, here. You can read the instructions here.
Goodwood and I have opted to turn on the Wikia Forum feature, which can be found here at Special:Forum. This forum offers a new and intuitive forum layout (relative to the old wiki-style forums). It has simpler posting that doesn't require you to edit a page, doesn't require you to manually type signatures, and is just all-around easier and quicker to use. Administrators can also highlight important discussions so it appears as a message alert in the upper-right hand corner (in your message drop-down menu).
All of the boards are the same as the old ones, with the exception of a new one: Your Fanon and Fan Fiction. People can use this board to talk about their fanon creations and fan fiction work.
We think that this new forum layout will be a major benefit to Star Wars Fanon, particularly now that most of the old-school users are gone and there are now newer users joining Star Wars Fanon. We want to do what we can to harness the activity of those users to re-build something resembling a community here.
Take a look around the new forums to get a feel for what they're like. If you have any questions about them, check out this help page.
Thanks!
(Edited by Brandon Rhea)
Welcome to the community!
The Star Wars Fanon Wiki is a fan invention wiki. Star Wars fans can create their own stories about the franchise. Fanfiction can be in-universe or out-of-universe and short stories or novels. Users are free to create, edit, and maintain their works as they please, and they can even help other users through suggestions, comments, and good faith edits. Check out other users' stories on the wiki and feel free to try writing one yourself!
