Board Thread:Support Requests - Designing Your Wikia/@comment-15636815-20151104205648

I am an admin on TrainStation Wiki, an encyclopedia for a Facebook game. When the wiki started, the game was new, and there was a fairly small amount of content. Some people designed the wiki and its structure around what the game was then, and things worked well enough.

But the times, they are a-changin'. The game just celebrated its fifth anniversary last month. The developers introduce new content into the game three days every week, and temporarily offer old content on two other days. We have almost 8,000 pages now, and almost 9,000 files uploaded, and neither the design nor structure of the site have changed in any significant way since the founder and original batch of editors left. That was two or three years ago. Both the game and the site have severely outgrown the wiki's original design.

Therefore, we need to redesign essentially everything. The entire site. All of it. We know this. We're gathering ideas and information, and we've started to work on it. We have a few major hurdles, though. We currently have six infobox templates to control the display of these pages (locomotive, wagon, train set, building/decoration, flag, theme). Every one of these highly complex templates must be redesigned to accommodate information they don't display because the developers introduced those elements after the infobox designers left, and to update various things that were in the original designs but have changed. Alternately, we could scrap these infoboxes altogether in favour of a completely different page design, but we haven't the first clue as to what that design would, or even could, look like.
 * It's really overwhelming. We're not completely sure where to start.
 * We have many pages on which the primary or only content is one (or several) long tables. Wikia advises against this, but we're not sure how else to catalog some of the information.
 * Each item in the game (locomotive, wagon, building, decoration, etc.) has its own article page. Each of these pages contains a template call to create an infobox. The vast majority of those pages contain only the infobox--nothing more.
 * We have no published guidelines, policies, or MOS. I'm working on a Style Guide, but it's excruciatingly slow because of having to keep up with a constant flow of new content and new editors, who enter the new content incorrectly because there's no MOS, so then I have to take time to train them by hand since I can't just point them to a page, and then they want to discuss new ideas for changing things, even though we want to change everything, and--well, I think you get the idea there. (Whew!)
 * Our category 'structure'--if you want to dare to call it that--is a complete waste. Everything of a certain type is lumped together in one category. In addition, items tend to be categorized within both a subcategory and its parent. For example, as of 20:00 UTC on 04 Nov 2015:
 * Category:Buildings contains 1,017 pages.
 * Category:Award Buildings contains 311 pages, most or all of which also are in Category:Buildings.
 * Category:Contracts contains 77 pages. Of those, about one-third are things that users (especially mobile users) would like to find quickly, but can't because of the clutter.
 * Category:Images contains 13 images. If you're keeping track, that's 0.00146% of our images, and there are no subcategories.
 * My favourite is Category:Special Offer. This model of efficiency contains 3,108 pages, representing all the stuff the developers have released on short-term availability, twice per week, for five years (or at least most of it). Oh yeah, and one file.
 * We're going international! We currently have two non-English versions of our site connected for interlanguage links and shared images. Both sites have very little content. We'd like to help by exporting our content and assisting with import. We also have users wanting to start two more non-English sites, although they haven't created their wikias yet. All four sites are waiting until we can complete some of the biggest and most important changes, just to avoid redoing stuff.

All of that is only the tip of the iceberg.

I sort of thought it might be nice to get some help from Staff, since they're the real experts. I found Community Development Team/Requests, where I was heartbroken to find these two requirements, among others: To get help from them, we must create and implement a clear category structure and finish our overhaul. Until we do, our community is in the middle of major upheaval. Put another way, the only to get Staff to assist us with redesigning our entire site from top to bottom is first to redesign our entire site from top to bottom. Catch 22, anyone? Ferdamsure I ain't gonna do this twice.
 * The community should have a clear category structure to help readers navigate the site. Every content page should be in a category. (Special:UncategorizedPages should be empty.)
 * The community should not be in the middle of choosing new admins or any other upheavals. It should be a stable, friendly place.

To be clear, we're not looking for people to do this for us. We made this mess, and we'll clean it up. What we need is some good advice on what to do and how to do it. We're so deeply entrenched in the muck and accustomed to seeing the site look a certain way that it's become all but impossible to see our way out. I've looked around at other sites for ideas, but I just haven't seen anything that looks like it could work for us.

I've been working diligently on this site for more than two years. I initially visited the wiki for one reason: to look up which buildings were the most practical to buy for my station. I found this information lacking, so I started editing the site to add it, and things went from there. Five weeks ago, my hard work and loyalty were 'rewarded' by granting me admin rights. I'm tired. Really, I'm exhausted, and I just don't know what to do anymore. The place is a mess, and if we don't do something soon, I may not be able to deal with the stress much longer. Please help. Someone. Anyone.

(And the site still doesn't have a way for me to find the building information I want.) 