Community Central:Community portal

Welcome Wikicitizens! Please use this Wikia community portal to ask for help, or to make cross-project announcements. Older discussion is in the archives (pages: 1, 2).

Logo
I think that every Wikia project has a logo. If you agree put it on my talk page. General Eisenhower 01:56, 30 March 2006 (UTC)


 * Hi, I'm not sure what you mean... a lot of Wikia have personalized logos, but many still use the default. I'd love to see more using something specific though, I think it makes a big difference to the look of the sites.  The logo that Nhprman has suggested on w:c:war:Talk:Main Page looks good -- sannse (talk) 12:00, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

Didn't realise we could change the logo. How is that done? Lifeartist 06:43, 7 April 2006 (UTC)


 * You just need to upload the image as wiki.png - the page is usually protected, so you will have to be a sysop on that Wikia to upload. The logo needs to be no more than 155 high by 135 pixels wide.  You can also upload a custom favicon, which is used in the address bar, bookmarks and in browser tabs.  That needs to be a 16x16 .ico file, and uploaded as favicon.ico -- sannse (talk) 07:55, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for that Sannse. Are you automatically a sysop if you are a founder?


 * Yes, the founder is always set to sysop and bureaucrat (able to make others sysop) -- sannse (talk) 07:26, 25 May 2006 (UTC)

How long does it take to request for a Wiki?
Hello! May I ask how long it usually takes for a request to be granted/denied? I requested 2 days ago and I still haven't heard from anyone. Am I being too excited?--Nino Gonzales 10:03, 6 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Not long, generally, but we're still trying to get everything settled after the upgrade to 1.6, so you might have to wait just a little longer than usual; sorry about that! Mindspillage (spill yours?) 14:43, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

I've got the same question as Nino; I've waited for a couple of weeks, and I'm getting just a little bit impatient. It's not that I can't wait, but an acknowledgdement that the request has been received would have been nice. I'm getting this feeling that something might have gone wrong so that the request didn't go trough... Cnyborg 17:56, 24 May 2006 (UTC)

Since April, I'm afraid the backlog has grown. Angela is currently away and with very limited access, and the changes to allow other staff to create wikis has been more difficult to create than expected - so she is still the only one who can process the requests. I'm really sorry for the delay, Jason is working on fixing the problems that are stopping more of us being able to work on the backlog. I you could tell me the name of the wiki you requested, I can check that it's on the list (I'm sure it will be, but can check to reassure you anyway). -- sannse (talk) 07:26, 25 May 2006 (UTC)


 * The name is Romanchurches, and the title Churches of Rome. Thanks for checking; don't worry about the delay. Cnyborg 15:24, 25 May 2006 (UTC)

Shopping Wiki needs you
Consumers need unbiased information to spend their money wisely. The Shopping Wiki aims to provide that information to everyone in the English-speaking world. Having undergone some infrastructure-building in recent months, it now has everything it needs to grow, prosper and provide that information... except YOU.

Yes, the Shopping Wiki is in need of contributors like you to write some of the thousands of articles it will eventually hold. We have top-level categories, starter help pages and starter articles, to guide and organize your writing. It may not be an official designation -- yet -- but let's make the Shopping Wiki our Collaboration of the Month! The most pressing tasks are listed in the ShoppingWiki:Project:Community Portal. Seahen 03:03, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

Collaboration of the Month?
I propose that we institute a "Collaboration of the Month" program, to highlight one undeveloped wiki on the Main Page each month for improvement and expansion. Since there are many potentially good, but near-inactive, wikis that we'll never hear of, it's in our interest. Since unvisited wikis take up server space without bringing in ad clicks, it's also in Wikia, Inc.'s interest. The ideal CotM, in my opinion, would meet four criteria:


 * Its Main Page should have a low Google PageRank. This means that it has no inbound links from important pages, won't appear high in Google results, and would not be likely to be seen if it didn't become CoTM.
 * It should have a large potential audience.
 * Its purpose should be clearly defined on the Main Page.
 * It should have a system in place for, or a capable editor committed to, organizing and wikifying content as it is added.

Seahen 22:29, 10 April 2006 (UTC)


 * I like this idea. It could easily run along side the Wikia of the month, and get a few more people into a quiet wiki.  -- sannse (talk) 14:13, 11 April 2006 (UTC)


 * Halló! I was experiencing great difficulties with my (broken) laptops in the past and visted the farm only sporadically. Dou you see any need / resistance to enable MediaWiki:Tog-enotifusertalkpages: "" here? Best regards Gangleri · T · meta: Th · T 13:53, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Uploading pdf files
Is there anyway that we can upload pdf files? We are building an academic psychology site and pdf  is now the standard file archiving format in academia. It would be particularly useful as it preserves the formating for charts, tables etc. which are difficult to recreate in the site. I know we could do external links, but as we all know these get broken so often. Lifeartist 11:52, 14 April 2006 (UTC)


 * pdf files are enabled, did you have a problem uploading one? If so, what was the size, it could be that it was above the limit for MediaWiki (I'm not sure what that's set at).  I tried uploading a random pdf on psychology and it was fine  but it was a small one -- sannse (talk) 19:12, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Some more information on the downtime
We had quite a long outage yesterday (as many of you will have noticed!). It seems this was caused by another power failure at the colo (the facility that houses our servers). They say that this was due to faulty equipment and that they are replacing this. Obviously we are not happy with this, and want to make sure it doesn't happen again. We were already looking into getting servers set up in a second facility, to give us a reserve site, and will now accelerate this. It's possible that we will make the new site the primary, and leave the old site as the backup. Many apologies for the downtime,! -- sannse (talk) 08:37, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

What's the rule on blogs?
What actually is the agreed rule about personal pages and blogs on Wikia? I want to have a blog (temporarily here) partly to let people know where I am, but also for commentary on political, educational, social, and cultural issues. I know that on Wikipedia this is discouraged (if more than a couple of pages) but it's I can't find what the policy is on Wikia. As Wikia is ad-supported & not necessarily NPOV, I hoped there might be less restrictions than Wikipedia.

I'd rather do it here than on a wikifarm because
 * it's easier to link to Wikia and Wikipedia pages; and
 * I don't have to go to another site, with another login - so it's easier to concentrate on Wikia and Wikipedia editing, with blogging & commentary on the side. (Also, I edit on public or friends' computers, so less logins makes it easier).

So... anyone know what the policy is? Thanks, Singkong2005 04:46, 26 April 2006 (UTC)


 * The policy depends on each individual Wikia. Something like the Dune Wikia is not going to want a blog on politics of course, but the Politics Wikia might.  There is certainly no overall rule against personal opinion or blog-style pages on Wikia.  Individual wikis may have their own policies on whether they accept this, and what areas of the wiki it is allowed in.  I think that personal opinion, reviews, and commentary is something that Wikia can do that will set us apart from Wikipedia.  It's an equally valid route to go down, as long as it's clear what you are getting!  The Blogging Wikia seems quiet at the moment, I wonder whether that could become a place for general blog-style user pages as well as for information about blogging? -- sannse (talk) 08:21, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

TeX problem
When I try math code on scratchpad it isn't often shown. Really it occurs always when expression is not simple. There is only a link "math" to png file. Can anybody help with it? The page with problem is. Nikiforov 19:14, 6 May 2006 (UTC)


 * Hi Nikiforov. There is nothing wrong with how you are doing this, it seems to be a problem with the set-up at Scratchpad. I've reported this to Jason, hopefully he will be able to see the problem. -- sannse (talk) 15:25, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

Wiki name change, howto?
I want to change the name of the wiki I moved here. I never really liked Hitchhiker's Guide to Hitchhiking that much. How can I make it change?

I'm trying to ask other contributors, but noone really responded. I think Hitchhiking Wiki would be a much better name and will attract more contributors. As soon as there will be considerable community activity the name can always be reconsidered.

Thanks, Guaka 23:21, 10 May 2006 (UTC)


 * Angela has done this -- sannse (talk) 15:39, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

Hikipedia disappears
Hikipedia was not hosted by Wikia and few days ago has disappears. URL is not responding. I don't know Finnish and cannot know about Hikipedias lot. Does anybody knows anything? Szoferka 13:12, 12 May 2006 (UTC)


 * I've been asking the same questions myself. There really seem to be big problems there.  I've been trying to get in touch with whoever runs the servers, but I can't find any contact information anywhere.  So if anyone has an email address or anything, please let me know.  If their servers are down for good, then we could easily give them a new home here. -- sannse (talk) 15:39, 12 May 2006 (UTC)


 * Not a whole lot to add on this that hasn't been raised in the en.uncyclopedia forum - zapto.org is one of those dynamic-DNS servers (so any subdomains on it could well be individual home PC's, dunno) and the wiki is is still down (some static content on the same server is still live, what little there is). It has been down for about a week. Worst-case, it would be possible to recover a portion of the data from search-engine cache and reconvert it to MediaWiki text, but these archive pages represent significantly less than half the text and none of the images. (I've been able to recover at least couple hundred pages so far.) If it doesn't come back up, as a last resort whatever data could be salvaged could be placed on another server and the (or equivalent templates on the other uncyclopedia projects) updated to point to the new server. A search for peelonet.zapto.org finds little content other than the Hikipedia wiki, a user page for one person and some game-related stuff. And no, if it doesn't have its own domain name, whois won't be of help. The Finnish (Suomi) language will also pose an obstacle as there is no Babelfish translation for it. --carlb 05:21, 14 May 2006 (UTC)


 * I've tried to contact the host, we'll have to see if any get through. If not, it will just have to be rebuilt I guess. -- sannse (talk) 10:09, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

Problem on the Pokemon wikia
At the moment, the owner is not currently active. However, a user who is impersonating the owner (by changing two l's to uppercase i's) is vandalising it. Is it possible for a member of wikia to block the user?--66.231.222.131 18:53, 17 May 2006 (UTC)
 * Yep, will go take a look. Mindspillage (spill yours?) 19:23, 17 May 2006 (UTC)
 * Thank goodness...--Ac1983fan 19:26, 17 May 2006 (UTC)
 * It's happening again... the person is impersonating you(Mindspillage, that is) this time...--Ac1983fan 18:56, 22 May 2006 (UTC)
 * I'm there -- sannse (talk) 22:13, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

Heading and tagline on "Engineering"
Pages in the Engineering wiki - eg http://engineering.wikia.com/wiki/Special:Specialpages - are currently headed "MEDIAWIKI" and have "From MediaWiki" below the page name.

If I were a sysop, the tagline would be fixed by now; but I don't know how to fix the page heading.

Robin Patterson 01:48, 19 May 2006 (UTC)

Same problem on the Shopping wiki. Robin Patterson 01:54, 19 May 2006 (UTC)


 * Tell the sysops there to check Special:Allmessages for the offending text? If there are none active, you can ask a wikia staff member. Splarka 02:58, 19 May 2006 (UTC)


 * Some configuration files for some wikis were accidentally destroyed today. Jason has regenerated new configs, but there are still a few problems. He has a list of which wikis are broken so is working on fixing those. It will temporarily affect the sitename and the project namespace for some wikis. Angela (talk) 08:36, 19 May 2006 (UTC)


 * http://www.desencyclopedie.com is one of the problem wikia; project should be language = fr: and project name = Désencyclopédie: but this seems to have been inadvertently changed to default the project to some other language (most likely en:). This means that [Category:whatever... works but [Catégorie:whatever... does not; end result is that the main page (with its big table of contents right up top) is a mess of redlinks pointing to each catégorie. Jason had already fixed this once, but it broke again. *sigh*
 * To make matters worse, users are seeing as a regular redlink and are clicking to create regular stubs there, so [catégorie:tout|Index] suddenly becomes "the index is the middle finger..." --carlb 17:01, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

Vandalism

 * I founded a new Wikia The Top10 three weeks ago. Today, "User:206.82.55.81" wiped out my  Main Page and another template.  I blocked that user with an expiry time of infinite.  I now require registered users must login before they are allowed to edit the  Main Page and the other affected template.  Does anyone else have this experience? Is there a better way to report vandalism on Wikia?  --Dreams2go, 20:11, 22 May 2006 (UTC)
 * Well, it seems like it would be common snese to simply protect you main page.--Ac1983fan 18:47, 23 May 2006 (UTC)
 * Actually, we really discourage protecting main pages unless there is really a problem&mdash;see Protection here. If you've been getting a lot of vandalism, protecting for registered users only for a while seems like a good compromise, but a lot of users will be turned off if they see a site that claims anyone can edit it and then find all these pages they can't edit. One good place to report vandalism is here, on the Community Portal. Another good place is in the #wikia IRC channel, on irc.freenode.net. If you don't have a regular IRC client, you can also get to it by clicking the "Live chat and support" link on the sidebar&mdash;there's almost always someone around who can help. Mindspillage (spill yours?) 20:27, 23 May 2006 (UTC)
 * I think it's also worth saying that there will always be some vandalism on wikis... until we can read the minds of people before they press the save button that is! But is is very easy to reverse, and there are strategies to minimise it.  If you are more likely to notice a new email than an edit, then you can put critical pages on your watchlist and enable email notification.  That helps to ensure a quick cleanup.  It's also a good idea to encourage your good users to view recent changes regularly.  The more eyes on the changes, the quicker any problem can be nipped in the bud.  Blocks and protections are useful, but as Mindspillage says they do have the downside of discouraging good users caught up in them.  In the case of the IP you blocked, it's really best to reduce the time - most IPs from big providers change regularly, so it will stop affecting the user you want to block, and might affect someone else. -- sannse (talk) 13:34, 24 May 2006 (UTC)

Forum
I've added a forum, which will eventually replace this page. I think the forum extension is great, it's really easy to use and a lot clearer than long, mixed pages like this one. Please give it a go, try out a few threads, and let me know if it works OK. -- sannse (talk) 11:47, 25 May 2006 (UTC)