Forum:CSS edits from inexperianced editors

I am the only active administrator of Zombiepedia and I have been seeing an increasing number of edits done with some sort of template or WYSIWYG CSS editor. Almost without exception, these edits are done either on contributions of entirely poor quality, or simply to "spice up" existing pages with unnecessary/hideous color, fonts, tables, or margins that quite simply do not meet Zombiepedia standards. I would like to make it policy that all usage of CSS will be immediately reverted unless the editor has sent me evidence of (1) His/her understanding of the proper format of the wiki and (2) an example of his/her skill using CSS. But to be honest, I don't even know how to convey this policy to my user base, which, as you can imagine, is mostly quite young. In fact, I don't even know what they are using to make these poor edits, so I don't know what to tell them not to do - I've asked, and no one has told me why their edits are different.

Do any other admins have this issue? Any informed guess as to what the bad editors are using, because I couldn't recreate any of it in Visual mode, and we don't have those kind of templates.

On a seperate note, I was contacted twice in as many as two years about the possibility of having Wikia overhaul my wiki's design. I've always offered my thoughts and cooperation, and was promptly left hanging. As my wiki is primarily about the book World War Z (which generated a film due out in 2013 starring Brad Pitt - trailers are widely available), I figure it would be wise to take advantage of the expected traffic spike, and get Zombiepedia looking as great as so many other wikis. Any advice would be helpful. Thanks

— &lt;&lt;— Philodox —&gt;&gt;  talk 18:56, November 30, 2012 (UTC)


 * Inline CSS problems: You could put a notice in MediaWiki:Communitymessages-notice-msg and MediaWiki:Community-corner asking users to tell you where they are getting their CSS ideas from...
 * Design help: See Community Central:Community Development Team/Requests. -- Fandyllic (talk &middot; contr) 30 Nov 2012 1:27 PM Pacific


 * I am kind of in the same boat as you in that I'm the only admin for the wiki but I didn't really do too much fiddling around with CSS in terms of the look-- I just did more coding with templates since that was easier for my skill level. From my experience though, a lot of the stuff I did was cobbled together from ideas from Help Wikia, Dev Wikia, and looking at the assorted templates and coding that other big wikis did to see if there was anything that I could cobble together for the wiki's use. What kind of edits are the anon users making though and do you use any custom templates?
 * Also, it sounds like maybe the weird stuff the newbie editors might be doing could have to do with the default templates wikia supplies us with...
 * One other thing to think about. If you have the visual editor/rich text editor/RTE enabled on your site — and you probably do — the "inline CSS" you're seeing might be due to occasional faults in that editor.  It does occasionally "dump code" onto pages, so your user base might not be entirely at fault.


 * As for your larger issues, the only way to really stop people using CSS is to "out use them". That is, if you present them with templates that look good, and you make it clear that you are regularly attentive to the actual CSS files (MediaWiki:Wikia.css, for example), most inexperienced users will back off, while the experienced CSS users will know who to talk to. Basically, you've got to be the "design sheriff" on your wiki — or at least appoint such an admin — or people will continually kibbitz on your design with their own, often competing, design ideas.


 * That may sound dictatorial. But I don't mean it that way at all.  Have regular discussions about design.  Get people's creative juices flowing in the forums.  Solicit advice in a public and transparent way.  Create a process where community input is present. But at the end of the day you, or your admin staff, need to be the ones who implement the basic design framework.  There are simply too many tiny details to work out with page design.  You can't practically have a discussion about the precise line-height you're going to use on the fifth section of your character infobox. You can't really have a discussion about whether you should use 20px of box-shadow or 5px.  But you can ask your community to generally approve infobox design. You can occasionally ask them what they think of the body font you're using. You can have a local "competition" for a front page redesign.


 * At the end of the day, though, the admin staff must remain in control of design implementation.  Otherwise, your wiki will have some templates that look one way and some that look another. Design is a much more singular occupation on a wiki than writing the actual page content.  Frankly, there just aren't that many people on any given wiki about line-heights and box-shadows and margin-tops to make super-detailed discussions work.  20:41: Thu 06 Dec 2012