Hello there 2020! It might be with a delay, but we still wanted to wish you a happy new year. We hope you all had a great start into the new decade!

As for the Wiki, we’ve tried our best to get this newsletter out as soon as possible. It’s slowly becoming a tradition for us to gather community feedback at the beginning of each year, since it’s very important to us what you guys think. Of course, this is not the only topic which awaits you in this issue. There’s a lot in store for you today, so why don’t we dive right in?!

Remarkable contributions

Thanks to MachoPiggies for making countless edits as well as creating some new pages in November!

Welcome back Prism55Writes! It’s been some time since he was last active, but he’s made some smaller changes recently.

Vanessa1375 deserves a big shoutout for keeping many subteam pages up to date, as well as her valued contributions throughout the last year! Thank you :)

Saltyfishhy only recently joined us, but he contributed to a number of articles already. Sounds like we’ve found our Featured Contributor for the Winter season, congrats!

Once again, thanks to all of you for your work here! We really appreciate it.

Discussion, feedback and internal changes

Okay, let’s talk about polls first. Last year we’ve had a batch of questions for you to answer already, and by bringing some of them up again, we’d like to see if your opinion changed. Next to that, there’s a lot of new questions on recent topics too, so be sure to answer them to the best of your ability! Of course, feedback is always appreciated outside of polls too, so if you have any other thoughts to share, let us know in the comments.

Mobile readability

This is one of the questions we already asked you last year. We’ve done some small improvements here and there to clean up and improve the experience for our mobile readers (smartphones, tablets etc.). Unfortunately, FANDOM doesn’t provide many useful tools to allow for design changes, and it is difficult to get around their restrictions. Still, we’d like to see if you feel strongly about improving the current situation.

Newsletters

As you can see, we’ve had lots of trouble releasing these newsletters every month. We’ve now switched to a quartely release schedule, which means we’re aiming for one new issue every 3 months. Last year, you’ve clearly shown how much you’d like to see our newsletters continue, but with each new release, we question if you actually enjoy them, since they require a lot of preparation each time. So, here’s the poll:

Rules

Aside from a fancy redesign by BlueandGreen, our community policy hasn’t undergone many changes last year. Being a topic which affects all of us more or less, we’d still like to see your opinion on it though.

Bedrock content

Despite seeing a lot of Bedrock player contributions on our page, it’s undeniable our main focus is still on the Java edition. How important is Bedrock as a platform to you?

Visualizations

With the main focus of our Wiki being on a Minecraft server, it’s no surprise that our readers prefer short, concise articles over walls of text. Images and videos can help in breaking up long paragraphs. What do you think about them?

Usage of the Wiki

The Wiki offers a wide range of content, and our readers’ interests aren’t always clear to us. To find out what areas we should prioritize, here’s two questions for you!

Design choices

Unlike in previous years, we’ve been experimental with our layout and tried many new designs, such as a dark mode (with white text), new backgrounds and more. Let us know more about your reader experience below.

Those are all the polls we have for you today. Thanks a lot for answering them! We’ll evaluate your responses internally and announce the results later. Now for the interesting part: our 2019 Year review!

Year Review

The beginning of each year marks an exciting event for all of us: in January, the Wiki celebrates its anniversary following its creation in 2013. If you haven’t seen my blog post on it yet, check it out here! Since the 5th anniversary was a large milestone for all of us who’ve worked on the Wiki over the years, we’ve released a temporary design to celebrate it. It’s hard to believe that we’ve already passed our 6th anniversary this year, but we’re still going strong!

Only a few weeks later, we launched our Wiki Discord server. This was something I had been considering for a while, but I definitely didn’t expect the massive turnout! Thanks to over 100 of you for joining us. And – in case you’re not a member yet – don’t fret! We’re always open for newbies, so come join us now :)

In March, BaconAnEggs surprised all of us with the sudden creation of dozens of pages and over 800 edits in only one week. He started working on an article for each staff member, which would unfortunately later prove to be too inconvenient to handle. Regardless, we still appreciate your hard work, which started and led what was probably the most passionate project for our Wiki in 2019!

Following the staff pages creation, we began working on another one of our plans during Summer: the Translations project. Although it hasn’t been completed yet due to inconsistencies of the official rules document and conflicts with the workload of the Translations Team, we’re hoping to fully launch the project soon.

Aside from that, the Wiki has seen many overhauls to basic functionality in the last year. We’ve revamped the staff application system, the punishment system, the rules and policies, the History pages, the verification system, but most importantly, the project management structure. With the release of our public Trello board, we created an easy way to offer an overview of our current plans for the Wiki. Not only that, everyone (yes, you too!) is able to comment on them at any time. Feel free to check out the board from time to time here!

In terms of new staff members, last year has surely been a surprise too! With Nicodami stepping up to become a Bureaucrat and SophOG as our newest Administrator in July, we’ve seen two very experienced Mineplex community members join the Wiki staff team. Their help with various projects is definitely appreciated. As always, we’re looking for new staff members, so be sure to check out the application hub. We would be excited to read your application if you’re interested!

Back in November, we finally completed the staff page archival. All that remains are Admin+ pages, as they do not require as many updates, and are of higher interest to our readers than volunteer staff pages. If you want to take a quick look at the 200+ archived pages, check out the Wiki archive here.

As for December, we’ve decided once again to introduce a new layout and background for the holiday season. This was our second attempt at introducing a dark theme, which was unfortunately removed shortly afterwards after noticing some conflicts with older article designs. Still, we’ve kept this freezing cold blue color palette until today. By the way, we’ve also enabled an animated background with snowflakes. If you’re interested in enabling it, continue reading below!

var className = "CustomSnowElement";
var flakeWidth = 32;
var flakeHeight = 32;
 
importArticles({
    type: 'script',
    articles: [
        'u:dev:MediaWiki:SnowStorm.js',
    ]
});

The final major change for 2019 were the updated Minigame infoboxes. This might not sound like much, but it enables us to do so much more with the Wiki design. The template is also more customizable than before. We haven’t noticed any issues with it yet, but if you do happen to come across some glitches, please let us know \o/

And here we are, back in the present! We hope you liked our short recap of last year’s events. Since we’re already some weeks into 2020, we’ve got some changes to document from this year too.

First of all, we replaced the news panel on the homepage with a dynamic rss feed. What does that mean? Well, it will update automatically without requiring manual edits now. Every time an announcement on Mineplex is made, it’ll show up in the small box on the right side of the homepage now.

This is more of a small change, but if you play Mineplex on the Java edition of Minecraft, you might’ve heard of Communities already. Well, there’s one for the Wiki now! Come join us by typing /com join MineplexWiki in-game! ^-^

And we have one last, rather unfortunate announcement. SophOG has decided to step down from her position as administrator for personal reasons. Still, her work won’t be forgotten. Thanks for all you’ve done on the team :)

Upcoming content

What’s next for us? Well, we’ll aim to focus on the Translations project for now. The concept is good to go, so we should be able to get started soon(TM). The CoM talks also haven’t been forgotten, but due to a lack of time on our ends, we haven’t been able to make any progress lately. The winter design will disappear soon, so enjoy it while you can! We will return to the classic look after February. Finally, Rose Rush will be our next featured game. It was re-introduced on Java only today, so our readers will surely be interested in a well-crafted article. That’s why we need you to get it up to date again. Feel free to help out wherever you can, be it with additional tips or even videos.

If you have any other suggestions for the newsletters or you want to share other thoughts, make sure to leave a reply. Thanks for sticking with us, and here’s to a great 2020!