User blog:Xean/Featured Wikian: Godisme

Welcome to the next installment of our Featured Wikian blog series. Recently, we chatted with Godisme, who said he started out as a "troublemaker" on Wikia, but later became a trusted member of the Bleach Wiki community. He's so involved on the wiki that he writes a weekly blog post, which gets a ton of comments. Check out the interview below to learn more about Godisme's interests on Wikia.

Wikia: Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Godisme: Well, I am just your average 20-something with a passion for many things. I am a student earning a dual degree in Political Science and English Writing, and hope to one day write for a comedic political news source such as The Onion or The Daily Show. I am a huge Bleach fan, and much of my day revolves around checking things over on the Bleach Wiki. One of the things that most appeals to me about it is that the author, Tite Kubo, has a similar writing style to myself &mdash; very action oriented, and sometimes unfortunately a little low on extra details.

Wikia: How did you first discover Wikia?

Godisme: I actually remember the day I discovered Wikia. It was back when I first discovered Bleach. I went to Google to search for a place I could watch the next episode [of Bleach] because Adult Swim had seemed to stop airing the series. One of the first results was bleach.wikia.com, so I clicked on it. I had a look around the site and saw that Bleach was so much more than what I had known. I decided to make an account, and from there, I slowly became one of the top contributors to the site.

Wikia: Which wikis do you spend the most time on, and which is your main wiki?

Godisme: I am active on Bleach Wiki, Bleach Answers, and the Ninja Gaiden Wiki. I also spend some time on Community Central each day. Bleach Wiki is definitely my main wiki, and with everything I do around there, I find it hard to break off and do any significant work on other wikis. though I try. Bleach Answers kind of goes along with that. Yyp, the other administrator there, and I answer the majority of questions... and we get a lot of questions each day. Between that and my regular duties on Bleach Wiki, I have a lot to do each day.

Wikia: What do you think is great about Wikia?

Godisme: The greatest thing about Wikia is that [the site] really gives a sense of community. I have never met any of the people I talk to and work with on Wikia on a daily basis, and yet I feel like I know them. I have jokes with many and trust many of them to a great degree. Wikia also provides a great environment where everyone shares passion for the topic of the wiki. Where else could I have a debate with a person on whether or not Ichigo Kurosaki's latest abilities mark the return of his inner Hollow? That is what I love about Wikia.

Wikia: How has Wikia inspired you or supported your passion?

Godisme: Before I started using Wikia, I had a mild interest in Bleach and the other subjects of wikis I contribute to. Discovering Wikia fueled my passion for them. Wikia has provided a place for me to express that passion and use it in a creative and fun way. On Wikia, my knowledge of Bleach events and happenings means something and helps, whereas anywhere else it is just trivia. On Wikia, it is useful information for the growth of the Bleach Wiki.

Wikia: What would your top 5 tips for new folks on a wiki be?

Godisme: 1. First and foremost, learn wikicode. It is incredibly helpful and allows you to do so much more on Wikia other than add information to articles.

2. Get to know the community of the wiki. The best editors I have found are always the ones who take the time to get to know everyone. They are the ones that know how things work around the wiki and often make the fewest mistakes when doing anything.

3. Ask around for policies before diving in. Especially on Bleach Wiki; we have a lot of strict policies. People ask all the time why their edits were undone, and we point them to the policies that show what they did wrong. The first thing I do whenever I go to a new wiki is to look around for their policies and get a feel of how they do things.

4. Start small. You don't want to do a major page overhaul for your first edit. Wait until you get a good feel for that wiki before making giant edits.

5. Remember to have fun. Wiki contributing should be fun. If you aren't having fun with it, you are taking it too seriously.

Wikia: What would you like to see that isn't on Wikia already?

Godisme: A bot rental page would be nice. Somewhere users could go to ask for a bot to perform a task for them on a wiki. That would be much easier than tracking down someone you know has a pybot or making constant forums on community.

Wikia: You're part of a ton of different groups on the Bleach Wiki, like the Article Improvement Project. Can you tell us a little bit about what the purpose of the groups are, and why you've joined them?

Godisme: Yeah, we have a ton of different groups and projects around the site to try and get people interested in editing and organizing how things are done. I head both the Grammar Corner, where all other projects place their completed articles to be checked for grammatical errors before we say it is a completed article, and the Policy & Standards Committee, which is a group of nine users who have rollback rights and are basically the moderators of the site. We head the different projects and are also quality checking edits. The Article Improvement Project is for improving the quality of an article in one area or overall. I usually contribute the most here, referencing information or improving stubs. We have an Anime Summary Project to fill out the summaries on our anime episode pages and a Fight Summary Project to summarize the fights and events of Bleach; when it is all done, it will provide the entire story of Bleach from start to finish for both the manga and the anime timelines.

I initially joined to start doing things around the wiki. I started doing grammar checks on the pages, so the admins created the Grammar Corner so I could organize it better. The Article Improvement Project provided me with a way of re-familiarizing myself with some of the older parts of Bleach, while the Anime Summaries let me revisit the anime a bit, something I had started to lose interest in (compared to manga by the time I started contributing there). With the Fight Summaries... well, some of the fights in Bleach are just so amazing that I wanted to get involved. Initially I was hesitant to join that one, but when one of the main contributors the the project went MIA, one of the admins asked if I could pick up a bit for him. I stuck around since then.

Wikia: It looks like you write a blog post each week on Bleach. How do you decide what to write about, and do you ever run out of things to cover?

Godisme: I write a blog post each week about the latest chapter, which usually comes out on Wednesdays. I usually try to write about what happened in the chapter, what I liked about it, what I didn't, and touch a bit on where I think the plot is going. Sometimes though, I will just mix it up. We had a chapter a few weeks ago that focused heavily on one of the female characters that had typically been seen as very weak, and some fans of the series do not really like her. The chapter showed a big growth in her, so I spent the majority of my blog post discussing this growth and praising it. Its hard to run out of things to cover when each chapter usually contains so much. Some of my blog posts are short due to a chapter being a bit quick paced, but there is always enough to at least get something down. Many of the irregular uses love to comment on them and share their thoughts as well.

Thank you Godisme for taking the time to answer our questions!

If you or someone you know would make a great Featured Wikian, please let us know by leaving a comment here with their username and one sentence about why they should be featured. And, feel free to introduce yourselves by answering one of the questions from this interview in the comments below.