User:Montagg/Master Plan

This page is a master plan for WoWWiki to make it a site worthy of community-wide usage. It contains a checklist of things that, in my opinion, will help our site reach that goal. Some of these items can be checked off already. Ultimately, the goals are to give the site a more professional appearance, more comprehensive information, and make it more useful to server, guild, and player communities.

Right now, our strongest articles are our lore articles. Everything else, however, has fallen behind. If we're going to be a resource to the World of Warcraft community, we have to improve the structure of our content, the presentation of our content, and the content itself.

Improve help pages
Goal: Someone should be able to read the help pages for an hour or two and come away with:
 * 1) a basic knowledge of wiki editing
 * 2) a basic knowledge of our policies
 * 3) knowledge of where to find more help
 * 4) a desire to add to articles
 * Article formatting needs polish
 * Cleaner look
 * More uniformity
 * Unobtrusive formatting
 * Article content needs to be much more concise and accurate
 * Articles should link to Metawiki for more comprehensive information on the topic

Improve categories
Goal: Categories should be intuitive, easy to understand, and easy to navigate through.
 * Intuitive category names; avoid colons; should be attractive to click on
 * Appropriate category structure for content
 * Easily navigable
 * Easy to understand
 * Categories should facilitate research of related content

Improve item articles
Goal: Someone should come to WoWWiki, look for an item, and find out all the information they could possibly want to know about it, plus a little more.
 * All items should at least have a stub with basic information.
 * Uniformity among item articles; conformity to the boilerplate
 * Boilerplate needs to be polished
 * Cleaner look
 * Unobtrusive formatting
 * Information on how to get the item
 * Drop list and drop percentages
 * What quest to do, and where to start
 * Pictures of the item.
 * A category structure that invites people to look through the list for items they're interested in
 * Simpler names (NOT Category:Armor:Head, Category:Head Armor OR Category:Cloth Head Armor)
 * Descriptiveness (Category:Armor that drops in Karazhan, Category:Armor World Drops 50-60, Category:Armor obtained from a quest)

Improve boss articles
Goal: Someone should come to the boss article and leave being able to explain every facet of the boss fight, the dropped items, and the quests involved to their party members.
 * Uniformity among boss articles
 * Guides on how to defeat the boss
 * Strategies need to be well written
 * Multiple strategies.
 * Polished graphs (not just MSPaint) on raid setup, if appropriate
 * List of rewards and drop rates (preferably with stats available on the article itself)
 * List of quests associated with the boss.

Improve quest articles
Goal: Someone should read the article and have no doubts about the ins and outs of completing the quest.

First off, our quest articles need to look like they know what they're talking about, which requires strict uniformity to a sharp-looking quest boilerplate. Someone looking for quests to do in Stranglethorn should be able to find all the right quests in a category, such as. They should know how many quests they'll have to go through until they're finished a given quest line and should be able to navigate to those quests quickly. The quest rewards should also be visible and easily understood (tooltips are a plus here) so the our readers know what they're getting into.


 * Uniformity among quest articles
 * Improve category structure
 * By faction; instead of,   and   respectively.
 * By level
 * "Quests that start in Location" instead of just Quest:Location
 * "Quests that end in Location"
 * "Quests that are advanced in Location"
 * Quest line listed and linked within each quest article
 * Transcluded from a subpage of the root quest, ex:
 * Progress page also contains totals for quest
 * Total XP
 * Total gold
 * All quest rewards
 * Well-written guide on how to complete the quest
 * Maps with important locations marked for the quest (if possible, incorporation with MapWoW.com)
 * List of quest rewards, preferably with stats right in the article.

Improve location articles
Goal: Someone should read the article and know everything to expect from a location, including how to quest there, how to grind there, where PvP is most likely to occur, etc.

Our location articles should help out two groups of people: new players fresh from the install screen and old players who haven't leveled characters in a while. Luckily, both have similar needs. I find myself asking what order to do the quests in a particular zone that might be most efficient. Or, I wonder what quests I should get before going to the zone so I can maximize efficiency. Our location articles should contain short or long form guides with these details as well as a totality of information about the zone. Location articles should almost be like project portals -- central articles intended to help navigate a collection of related pages.


 * Uniformity among location articles
 * Well written location history and notable NPCs that lived in or currently reside in the area.
 * Complete list of all quests that can be started, advanced, or completed in the zone.
 * Well written guides on how to quest in the zone for both Alliance and Horde
 * Warnings on how to avoid ganking
 * List of good grinding areas (perhaps with class as a factor)

Improve server articles
Goal: Server articles should be a cornerstone of the server's community.

Our server articles are different from any other page we have on WoWWiki, and I'm quite proud of them. We're essentially giving servers an alternative bulletin board to their forums. While some servers actively use it as such, others do not. We should work to make servers aware of what we have to offer so that they can use their server page as a resource for the server. Increasing the usability of our server articles will also increase editorship.


 * Uniformity should be promoted but not set in stone
 * A well-written guide on how to write a good server article
 * Examples of good server articles
 * A boilerplate, or at least a good starting point, for new server articles
 * Guild progression guide
 * Crafters list guide
 * Ninja looter warning guide
 * Arena team list
 * Comprehensive and easy to understand guidelines for server articles
 * Get rid of ninja looter lists without corresponding screenshots
 * Incorporation of the World of Warcraft Armory for servers and arena matches

Improve guild articles
Goal: Guild articles should be easy to add (correctly) and easy to maintain.
 * A link on the main page to a guild article guide that lays out the rules and sets up an easy way for an editor to start a guild article
 * Uniformity should be promoted but not set in stone
 * Comprehensive and easy to understand guidelines for guild articles
 * Solid guild naming conventions that require minimal editing of other pages to create a guild page
 * Incorporation of the World of Warcraft Armory for guilds
 * Self-updating guild statistics
 * Automatically shows whether or not the guild still exists
 * Guild categories for each server, all sub-categories of Category:Guilds

Improve fan-fiction, RP, and PC articles
Goal: WoWWiki should be a center for fanfiction and player expression.

Improving the fan-fiction sections of our site will help improve our community as a whole. I think WoWWiki should be an attractive place for people to publish their work. To do that, you need to give people 1) a place to publish (user pages, a separate namespace, or other organizational structure), 2) a place to talk about their work (talk pages, or a village pump for fanfiction), and 3) rewards for good work (contests, graphics, being featured on the main page). This will promote creativity, but it will also draw in more editors with good writing skills.


 * 1) Authors should be excited to write and promote fanfiction on WoWWiki
 * 2) Players should be eager to develop character articles
 * 3) RPers should be excited to write about and develop their RP sessions on WoWWiki
 * Comprehensive and easy to understand guidelines for fanfic articles
 * Examples of well-written fanfics
 * Examples of well-written PC articles
 * A boilerplate, or at least a good starting point, for new PC articles
 * Uniformity should be promoted for PC articles but not set in stone
 * A place to list and promote fanfics
 * List of fanfic authors
 * List of new fanfics
 * Rewards for well-written fiction
 * A place to comment on or discuss ideas for fanfics
 * Incorperation of the World of Warcraft Armory for players.

Revitilize API articles
Goal: API articles should be a comprehensive resource for people coding addons.
 * Articles must be up to date
 * Articles must be useful to programmers
 * Similar articles should be uniform

Improve news section
Goal: WoWWiki's news section should be as good (if not better) than the WorldOfWarcraft.com news updates.
 * List of official Blizzard updates.
 * Links to press releases (or copies of those releases, if licenses permit) regarding WoW or notable Blizzard news.
 * Links to and summaries of interviews regarding WoW.
 * Consistently kept up to date.
 * Professional looking formatting for news article(s).
 * Featured on the main page or easily linked from the main page.

Implementation
Most of these suggestions deal with articles that have boilerplates. In those cases, the boilerplates should be the first victims of change. Once everyone is satisfied, then work should begin changing already existing articles to conform to the new boilerplate. Work should be focused; the easiest way to get a lot of work done is to split up one big job into many smaller ones. For instance, we could have a month devoted to quests that start with A through E. Once that's complete, we do F through J, and so on. A list of progress should be kept to let people know where we are and to give editors some way of measuring our overall progress on a particular project -- and also to let us know when to go out and get drunk in celebration when a project is finished.

Divide and conquer
Some of these propositions are complex. If we intend to go through with any of them (or for any future large-scale proposals), dividing the issues into projects and appointing active editors to coordinate it will help us immensely. We currently have teams to monitor the day-to-day activity of the wiki. These would be temporary versions of those teams to meet one specific goal. Separating work into projects will keep work from becoming unmanageable and having a designated coordinator will give the work being done a central influence to keep it all together.

Featured Projects
For any large project (not just the ones listed above), we can create a Featured Project portal article listing the goals, who's in charge of coordinating it, and any other important information. People who provide substantially to the project can get rewards that they display on their user pages. The rewards and requirements for those rewards related to any particular Featured Project should be listed on the project's portal article.