Greetings everyone, as some of you already know, what's been on my mind for the past couple of months is setting an agenda detailing our current outstanding projects. There have been some very critical objectives we need to complete that we've delayed perpetually, and a lot of this is my own fault. These past two months I have mostly been translating Assassin's Creed: Dynasty promotional material for our social media, but beyond that I have not been as active as I used to be, and I wish to change that. An additional problem I've constantly encountered is that so often even while reviewing just articles, I become side-tracked revising and perfecting just one page, which frequently takes as many as two hours. While I feel a sense of duty to do as much as I can for this wiki, it is also unpaid volunteer work at the end of the day, and so I try to limit myself to only working on it for two hours a day—something that has not proven to be realistic.
I hope that by setting regular agendas, perhaps every season, we might be able to improve the efficiency of our wiki work.
A while ago, I asked some of you to provide me with a list of important matters you guys wish to solve or accomplish, and for this thread, I wish to present the completed list along with additions from my myself. I don't mean to discuss every item on this thread itself, but merely to provide a place where the agenda can be referred to conveniently. If there are some tasks on this list that you guys think would be simple and easy to discuss here, you guys are welcome to do so. Otherwise, for more complicated tasks, I do intend for us to open up other threads devoted solely to them.
Without further ado, here's the list of outstanding tasks.
My personal agenda
- Updating policy pages:
- The Manual of Style needs updating.
- We need to write-up a Layout Guide which provides all users a view of our standard structure for every type of page.
- We need a guide on neutral point-of-view.
- "Assassination target", per the talk page, needs to be rewritten as a page for assassination in general.
- Finish proofreading "Ezio Auditore da Firenze".
- Complete rewrite of "Soldier" in concert with Lacrosse's "Animus archetype" page.
- Revise philosophy-related sections of the "Assassins" and "the Creed": As some of you know, the Assassin philosophy was the ultimate element of the series which cemented my love for the series. I first became an editor due to a need to revise the article for its erroneous and simplistic characterization of Assassins as extreme anarchists years back, but my revision was hastily done, and it needs to be revisited.
- Correct Templar-related articles for POV issues: We have some serious original research issues on Templar-related articles.
- Country articles: We need to standardize what extent of real-world info we can borrow in order to truly bring our country and regime-related articles up to quality.
- Additional projects following chronology: Beyond these urgent tasks, I have always been meaning to revisit every article in chronological order of release and bring them all up to featured article quality. I have noticed while rewriting "Tamir" that there was an enormous amount of information in AC1 on the character that was missing from the subject's article and the same goes for all other characters. At the same time, many articles relating to the classic games had always been written in gameplay terms while most of our AC2 and Brotherhood landmark pages are plagiarized from the database entries. There is so much to work on on this wiki, with both old content and new, that if I were finished with immediate, outstanding projects, I would like to finally be able to work on the old since most of you guys are already invested in newer content like those from Odyssey and Valhalla.
- Create a blog post on multiplayer strategies
General wiki agenda
- Extent of real-world info: A persistent problem since the earliest days of our wiki, we need to decide how much real-world information we should allow ourselves to draw, given that it is sometimes necessary to fill in holes technically left by Assassin's Creed sources which assumes basic real-world knowledge of the subject. Giving vague guidelines has proven insufficient; we need an actual metric. This is also relevant to information provided in infoboxes.
- Narrative direction in Odyssey: We need to reach a decision via community consensus precisely how we are going to approach the plot in our Odyssey articles in regards to the narrative conflicts between the canonical yet awkwardly abridged novel and the more detailed game. In line with this, someone suggested that we to try requesting a decision tree from Ubisoft.
- How "deep" should we cite?: I do not remember if we have mostly resolved this question, but I remember this being brought up by either Vilka or Soranin. When should we use full citations? When not using full citations, to what level of a section of a work must be cite to?
- Geographical conflicts between games vs. real-world: certain locations are placed in different nomes or regions in the games than they are or were situated in the real-world. In general, we need to look at exactly what to do when geographical conflicts emerge.
- Standardization of Behind the Scenes subsections: This goes hand-in-hand with the need to create a layout guide. Also, should the date of each work be listed upon first mention?
- Codification of navigation box structures: We have had recent issues with too many locations nested under each other within navboxes. Users have disputed where to draw the line in terms of including specific locations. Post-Origins, we should also look at where to draw the line in terms of memories to be listed in navboxes.
- Finish weapon pages of Unity, Syndicate, etc.: We're still missing many pages on weapons from Unity after so many years. It doesn't feel so long ago to me, but the game was released 6 years ago. I am betting we are also missing pages on Syndicate weapons.
- Gear for Unity and Syndicate: We have had some questions regarding how pages on Unity armor should be organized. We also need pages on the gauntlets from Syndicate. Lacrosse suggested making a super-post on this topic.
- Organization of games vs. characters outfits: Lacrosse had major questions regarding this, though I have forgotten the exact issue. I am aware that our outfit pages need some clean-up though.
- Deleted content: how and where to cover them?
- Transcriptions of extraneous dialogue
- Lede information #1: should names introduced in the lede be glossed in their native languages? We've currently done this for new pages on Dynasty characters, but this practice was apparently deeply frowned upon by members of the old team, though I strongly disagree with their objections. By extension, should we gloss every Chinese and Japanese name on first mention? (I'm not sure gloss is the correct word to use here).
- Lede information #2: revisiting the question of using floruit
- Lore explanations on Rifts and Glyphs: suggested by Cris; I'm not sure to what extent are we still lacking on this.
- Articles detailing crossover events, i.e. with For Honor and Final Fantasy XV: I think we have proposed writing OOU articles on these.
- Revisit categorization of locations: when to categorize as a landmark? How to treat different poleis in terms of categorization?
- Appearance sections of media pages should be revisited
- Create pages on the most iconic soundtracks: We already have one for "'Ezio's Family'". I'm not sure which other tracks deserve an article.
- Create pages on ethnic groups: A precedent has been set for the pages on indigenous peoples like the Abenaki and Taíno. I know you guys have already given approval to taking this all the way.
- Flags: should flags taken from the real-world and which have never actually appeared in Assassin's Creed be allowed?
- Update "era" icons: we have some articles which don't fall under any of our so-called "eras". We need to expand our "era" icons.
- Re-establish a process for bestowing "featured article" and "good article" status on articles: we have lacked a procedure for this for many years, and as a result, our list of featured articles have not been updated for a long time, and even many featured articles are now outdated.
- Creating an "on this day" module: a suggestion originally put forth by our former head, Master Sima Yi, and already implemented somewhat by our social media manager, I think we can can consider maintaining calendar of the dates of Assassin's Creed events and have an "on this day" module on our front page, like the one on Wikipedia.
- Designing our official ACWiki logo: I've suggested using Thoth as a mascot while there were also some other suggestions.
- Canonize the Lychee of Eden: alternatively Dragon Eye of Eden? Sounds epic! :D But lychee sounds cuter.
As you guys can see, this is already a long list of outstanding matters for our wiki. Although the title of this post suggests that we fulfill all these tasks by the end of the year, I recognize that this is probably not realistic and too ambitious, and I don't want you guys to stress over that. I am also worried that I am missing some things. I probably am, but then, this list is long enough as it is.
If you guys have any questions or clarifications regarding these items, please feel free to comment below! For items that you recognize as your own suggestion, feel free to take the initiative to advance the next steps towards seeing to them through. Cheers everyone! :)