Aloha, and welcome back! It would be an understatement to say that lots of things have changed ever since our last update on the Wiki. The world is going through a pandemic, and on top of that, we are facing a political and financial crisis. It’s not looking great for this year so far, so first and foremost, we hope that you’re all safe and well!
On the bright side, summer is finally upon us! This is the time to take a break, enjoy the weather and go back to normal, even if it is just for a moment (mind you, social distancing is still in place, of course!). If you’ve had the chance to check out Mineplex recently, you might have noticed that as a minigame server, it has been a big winner of the coronavirus outbreak, with their player count more than doubling!
Keeping that in mind, we obviously want to keep the Wiki tidy and clean for the increased amounts of visitors. There have been plenty of cool changes we want to share with you today, plus there’s so many more to come later this year. So why not grab yourself a nice drink, a comfy spot and dive right in, hm?
Remarkable contributions
Over the past few months, many dedicated editors of the wiki have spent lots of time ensuring that the wiki stays a reputable source of knowledge for the server. In this section of the newsletter, we would like to focus on some of the users that have made a tremendous impact on both the reputability and overall appearance of the wiki.
Our first spotlight this time is on Sncwie. With 30 edits since joining the wiki in March 2020, Sncwie is very dedicated to keeping the wiki a valid source of knowledge for all and puts a lot of time and effort into editing different articles, whether it be ranks, games, or even more!
Next, we’d also like to thank BlueandGreen! He is an ex-wiki staff member who has put a tremendous amount of effort into the wiki in all aspects. More recently, he’s made somewhat of a return and now spends lots of time ensuring that the wiki is up to date, clean, and reputable.
One final shoutout goes to someone who has been working very hard over the past few months to keep the Wiki updated and accurate: TheBlueComet481! A current builder for the Mineplex network, he is constantly editing many different articles whether about the build team or just Mineplex in general. Showing his interest in- and outside of the Wiki, he is definitely deserving of the Featured User award. Congrats!
Discussion, feedback and internal changes
Feedback from polls
In the last newsletter, we asked a few different questions about various topics and aspects of the wiki to see how we could improve them. We are going to have a look through each one of them and the feedback it received here!
Mobile Readability
Judging from the poll results, it appears that most of you do not often use your mobile to browse through the wiki. 75% of you said that mobile readability could be worth a fix in some articles around the place, but it shouldn’t be a major concern. This is also backed up by the wiki statistics administrators have access to, which suggest that about ⅔ of our user base uses a desktop. Thus, while we are definitely going to take it into account while creating new articles in the future, it is very unlikely that we are going to go through all the older articles to improve them for mobile users, unless they are extremely messy.
Newsletters
Overall, 2 people would be happy to see the newsletters carry on, 5 think that the time spent on them could be spent on something more useful and announcements for major changes would be enough, and 1 person does not read them or care about them. From our perspective, except for polls, newsletters don’t get that much engagement. They are also quite a bit of a challenge for us to release in time or release at all as we are all rather busy, and do not have that much time to dedicate anymore. Hence, while we are not quite sure what is gonna happen to them yet, this might be the last one for a while since we are considering to put newsletters on hold temporarily. However, we expect things to change around the wiki in the future and its relation with the server, which signifies that there is a possibility they will return if there is a demand and more people around!
Rules
This one is straightforward. 100% of the votes said that the current community policy and rules were fine. Unless something major is brought up, we will most likely not change or add any rules in the near future.
Bedrock Content
2 people were focusing more on Bedrock articles, whereas 5 did not think it should be our main focus at the moment. Currently, we do have some articles about Bedrock games and features, but the issue is that most of the active editors actively play Java. Thus, we cannot really document stuff we are not entirely familiar with. In the future, if we get the Mineplex community to engage more with our platform then perhaps we could encourage more Bedrock articles to be written, but it is not our biggest priority as it currently stands. We have yet to finish all the server subteams and Java Nano Games pages, which we think is more important before starting a wider expansion.
Visualizations
This was about the layout of the pages and whether they had too much images / we should focus more on text. While this did not get a lot of votes, it appears that most people do not care or think it is currently fine as it is. Therefore, in the future we will most likely keep on writing articles the same way as we do nowadays, but we will keep in mind that too much images can cause loading issues, especially on low-end devices.
Usage of the wiki
We were quite surprised to see that most of you use the wiki to look up information about older, or previous games, features and updates! The content which is the most interesting to you guys is both general information on broader topics (hackers, GWEN, reports) and factual information, statistics and analytics (kit stats and game balance). We will thus try to make sure that the relevant articles are always up to date and available.
Design Choices
For the theme, 1 reader wants light, 2 readers want dark and 1 reader does not mind. We did experiment with a black theme in the past during seasonal events (Halloween), and people seemed to have enjoyed it. While it is not a priority at the moment, we will consider reintroducing a black theme for a longer period of time to see whether it is an improvement or not.
As for the general article layout and design, everyone voted for having professional-looking, Wikipedia-like articles without flashy colours or fancy fonts. This is great news as we believe this is already the case for most of our articles at the moment, so not too much change is required. However we invite you to debate on any change you think would be necessary in the #wiki-discussion channel of our discord.
Thank you very much for giving your input and feedback, this is really helpful in order to stay on the right track and focus on stuff which actually matters to the wiki users and reflects what they want!
New staff member !
Even though we had SophOG resign from her administrator position at the beginning of the year, we are delighted to announce that Saltyfishhy will be joining the wiki staff team as a content moderator! Here is a few words from him:
Heyo! I’m Saltyfishhy, and I’ve been a member of the Mineplex community for about 6 years now. I’ve always been interested in contributing to the community and the network itself, and more recently I’ve discovered the Mineplex Wiki! As a little bit about myself, my favorite game on Mineplex is probably Speed Builders, and as a close second I’d have to say Super Smash Mobs. These days you’ll likely see me chilling in lobby one, however.
This is great news for us as we are always willing to see the wiki team and active users grow, as not only does it positively impact the quality of the content available, but it also allows us to realise more of our plans and projects for 2020! Speaking of...
Going Forward
Aside from several internal updates and additions, there haven’t been many content updates visible to regular readers. This is about to change though: Our schedule for 2020 is packed with exciting projects! Today, we’ll just name some of them which will be our main focus during the next months.
The mysterious CoM project?
If you’ve taken a look at our public project overview before, you might have noticed that one card has remained untouched for over a year now. But has it really? Today I’m happy to confirm that what might be our biggest collaboration to date is still in the making, and we’re now working on it at full steam. We will keep you updated on its progress over the course of the next few months. Stay tuned!
Discord server overhaul
Our Wiki Discord server is far from optimized, and we heavily rely on the use of third-party bots to make features like the Wiki integration and moderation possible. Even though it will only be a side project, we are planning to develop and implement our own bot to make more features possible, which also comes with an improved experience for all of our server members. We are considering to add features like:
- Wiki ↔ Discord account linking
- An upgraded report system for Vandalism/malicious edits on the Wiki
- An enhanced verification system for Mineplex Staff & GI members
We’re still in the planning phases, so if you have any other suggestions, let us know!
Unified Community Platform
The UCP is a major upcoming change, affecting all FANDOM & Gamepedia Wikis in the near future. It will come with a massively updated editor, improved mobile device support, and much more! To prepare for this, we will be undergoing some changes sooner or later. We’re not quite ready for the move towards the new platform just yet, simply because some features (like the forums this newsletter is being posted in) are not fully functional on the new platform, but we will make way for it soon. Read more about it here!
Upcoming content
Welp, that’s a lot to look forward to! If you want to give feedback on our current projects, feel free to check out our public trello board.
Content-wise, we wanted to do something special based on the poll results this time. Seeing that you guys are primarily interested in removed games, and UHC has been frequently requested to make a return in the Mineplex community, we decided to focus on our Ultra Hardcore page throughout the next weeks! UHC has actually been a featured article before, but we felt that it could still use some improvement in terms of content and layout. Be sure to help out and start editing the page if you have anything to share about UHC, be it factual information, screenshots, clips or anything of the like.
If you have any other suggestions for the newsletters or you want to share other thoughts, make sure to leave a reply.
Thanks, and stay safe!
| Newsletters | |
|---|---|
| 2020 | Newsletter 20 • Newsletter 21 |
| 2019 | Newsletter 11 • Newsletter 12 • Newsletter 13 • Newsletter 14 • Newsletter 15 • Newsletter 16 • Newsletter 17 • Newsletter 18 • Newsletter 19 |
| 2018 | Newsletter 1 • Newsletter 2 • Newsletter 3 • Newsletter 4 • Newsletter 5 • Newsletter 6 • Newsletter 7 • Newsletter 8 • Newsletter 9 • Newsletter 10 |
| 2016 | Week 1 • Week 2 |
