This month was a bit quieter on the wiki front than the last two, with most of the changes and updates happening behind the scenes or at the code level.

Updates

The major updates to the wiki this last month all revolve around the various infobox templates found on many wiki pages. Ever since the wiki was hit with the James bat and formatted to match the main site, many of the infobox templates had become a bit disfigured. A small handful, most notably the character template, were updated with some new formatting code to ensure that they displayed right again and formatted their information correctly. Over the last month, the remaining infobox templates have also been updated to the new formatting standard. As part of this the formatting for all those infoboxes, such as color and the like, has also been moved out of the templates themselves and into the CSS of the wiki system to make future edits far easier. Lastly, the two ship templates (Template:Ship and Template:Ship_(individual)) have been combined into the same template that contains all the fields of both. These two were very similar with only a few differences, so it made sense to condense them. Special thanks to Solari and his bot-fu for updating all the affected articles to source the combined template.

WotM & Featured Article

Another month, another Wikipedian of the Month and Featured Article.

Much like last month, this month’s WotM is getting singled out more for what type of updates are being done than the volume. Bentre Stahoes has done a lot of the nitty gritty updates to several of Clan Naga Sadow’s pages. These include quality passes on NPC’s and updates to vessels and other Clan items to reflect their current status with the unit. To say exactly what I said last month (because it still applies, and apparently Bentre was listening last time so who knows who I’ll reach this time…): The wiki strives to be an up to date resource for members to be able to find information on the Brotherhood and making these kind of house keeping updates is crucial to that. Clan summits and the members of the wiki staff won’t always get to this things right away, so anyone that is willing to pick up a hammer and help out building the wiki is always welcome!

This month’s Featured Article is about highlighting how an article doesn’t have to be long (or Atty-like as we say round the DJB these days) to be featured. The Khyron-class Star Destroyer article is fairly short as FA’s go, but it containes all the information on the subject in question. It also has proper wiki formatting, but most importantly sufficient linking to other articles. The latter of those two is what often keeps FA candidates from making the last push to be featured. I know that with the long articles it can be especially daunting a task to link them, but without all those links the wiki just turns into a collection of dead end pages.

Wiki Policy Updates

The DJBWiki Manual of Style has been created and updated. This includes the sections on tense and naming policies that were outlined in last month’s report, along with a few other things. I want to highlight a new policy this time around, however, as it’s one that I think requires a shout out in general:

• Any article that includes content taken directly from Wikipedia or Wookieepedia must properly reflect the inclusion in keeping with the GNU Free Documentation License and Creative Commons license. As a result, these pages must include either Template:Wikipedia or Template:Wookieepedia on their article's talk pages.

In keeping with this new policy, Andrelious went through all of our specifications transclusion articles and added the appropriate templates. As to what this means for the general user, this applies to text taken directly from either outside source. Statistics in infoboxes (such as how many guns a ship has) do not rise to the level of needing to be sourced. Only text taken directly from articles needs to be sourced under this policy.

Projects

• Accessibility: Lead: V’yr. The first phase of this project which will consist of developing the magazine style table of contents system for our Clan category pages. Once a tentative plan is in place for a standardized system, we’ll be working with the Clans to make sure their specific concerns aren’t steamrolled by the march of progress. Work will also be proceeding on a redesign of the wiki’s front page to meet the same goals for the overall wiki itself. V’yr’s been a bit distracted from this given his new HRLD job and making the website look more awesome, so I think we can excuse him. A mockup of how the Clan page table of contents may be formatted can be seen here.
• Tutorial/Policy Organization: Lead: Andrelious. Right now our wiki has a lot of duplicated and, often times, contradictory data when it comes to policies for such things as character page creation. With the help of the staff, I will be looking towards taking the current information and condensing it into single articles, as well as placing all the disparate pages together into specific categories. Additionally, development of the Manual of Style document will be part of this project.
• Archivist: Back burner for now. I feel that making the wiki easier to learn, navigate, and use is a higher priority at the moment than recording event plots. That isn’t to say that clans and their members can’t take some of this project on for themselves, as that sort of work is often a really great option for Dark Jedi Knight promotion requirements. hint hint
  

Wiki Tip of the Month

This month’s wiki tip is about a template that is used on almost every character article: Template:Birthyear and Age. This templateis used in the birth field of character infoboxes to display your character’s current age. The wiki is set up to actually calculate the current fictional DJB year using the current date (Fun fact: between January 1st and April 12th the DJB year equals the current year minus 1977). With the current DJB year being known to the wiki, the template above can then calculate your character’s age if it knows what year your character was born. Characters that are born in years before the Battle of Yavin should specify BBY in the template while characters that are born after the Battle of Yavin should specify ABY in the template. Characters that were born the same year as the Battle of Yavin should use the year 0 as their birth year, and use BBY or ABY to denote if they were born before or after the Battle of Yavin in that year. This will then display your character’s year of birth followed by their age in parentheses. That age will then update in keeping with the DJB year from now until the wiki lights get turned off.

Update: As suggested by Terran Koul, this single template will now replace both Template:Birthyear and Age (BBY) and Template:Birthyear and Age (ABY).

Final Words

My first report that isn’t as humongous. As I said at the top, things got a bit slow on the wiki, with myself and much of the staff being distracted by some outside work. This next month should be getting back a bit more to business as usual. Also, as a special factoid for people that read this far, I understand that the same layout bat that hit the website this last week will be coming to a wiki near you very soon.