Forum:AR:Adoption request for Dragon Age Answers Wiki

Forums: Index &rarr; Adoption requests &rarr;

What is your username?

Land Raider

Please link to the wiki here:

Dragon Age Answers

How many edits have you made on that wiki?

8 (see Other Information below)

How many days/months have you been editing there?

2 days (see Other Information below)

On the Special Pages -> Special:ListUsers when was the last time an admin edited, and who was it?

There are currently two bureaucrats/admins listed on the Dragon Age Answers wiki. The first isn't active since since March 19th, the second isn't active since June 2nd and his last notable activity in maintaining the site was forbidding the users from using signatures when answering questions. I would request their privileges revoked, if that's fine.

Any other information:

I have been an active moderator of Mass Effect Answers wiki since August 5th 2011. I helped to transfrom the wiki from the state the Dragon Age Answers wikia is currently in - unintelligible questions, most of which can be answered by searching the main Dragon Age Wiki; trolling, irrelevant questions and users mistaking the "Ask" bar for a search field. In order to dramatically improve the site, I have a list of methods that proved to work very well on Mass Effect Answers Wiki:


 * customized greeting message that informs every new user about the site's guidelines


 * a welcoming banner on the main page that reminds the users about the site's guidelines and do's/do-not's


 * deletion of every question that is irrelevant to the topic of the answers wiki


 * strict guidelines on proper grammar, capitalization and punctuaction, which helps to share information more effectively


 * various technical tweaks - enabling the new Message Wall, custom JavaScript snippets from Developers Wiki, etc. - that make the interaction with the site easier and more enjoyable for the users. For example, a simple addition of a "Back to top of the page" button makes it much easier for the user to read through a long discussion and then come back to the top of the page in order to click the "Edit" button to add his/her reply. Such functionality is not present on DA Answers wiki, but I could implement it - as well as various other improvements.


 * a number of Mass Effect Answers wiki users who also happen to be Dragon Age fans and are ready to participate in the reconstruction of the DA Answers wiki as active contributors (the crucial element of any wiki is an active community of interested contributors, and luckily, we have that covered) - the side discussion about Dragon Age is what inspired this move on the first place


 * This method requires Wikia Staff approval: it has been successfully enabled on Mass Effect Answers by DaNASCAT and has been extremely helpful in keeping the site clean. The idea is to stop the anonymous users from asking new questions while still allowing them to edit the existing pages. This way, 95% of trolling/vandalism gets extinguished since most of the vandals are too lazy to register, while the productive participants of the wiki do not mind such a requirement; besides, registered users do not get famous Wikia caching problem where an already answered question is displayed as empty to an anonymous user and his/her answer gets prepended to the beginning of the first existing one. In short, ProtectSite is a godsend for answers wikias and helped us transform Mass Effect Answers into a productive answers wiki with many intelligent discussion about Mass Effect franchise.

Now, I know that I don't exactly meet the guidelines for adoption. I haven't been contributing for at least a week - I knew of DA Answers for a long time, but the abysmal state of the site stopped me from active participation. However, I realized that Mass Effect Answers have given me enough experience and ideas on quickly improving answers wikias and I'd like to take on this task as soon as possible.

Of course, I will continue contributing to DA Answers every day even without bureaucrat rights, but so far my contribution is limited to reminding lazy users that their question can be answered by reading the main DA Wiki, and pointing them to the right articles. That's not what answers wikias are for; they're for discussing the aspects of the topic that can't be answered by simply reading the main wiki on the subject. For example, a question about unique items in Dragon Age:Origins can be answered by simply reading the corresponding article on the DA Wiki, which I pointed the OP to in my answer. However, a question about the advantages of the said unique items for a given playstyle and class would produce a fruitful discussion with many contributions - that's the kind of content we aimed for at Mass Effect Answers and we have succeeded. Being a fan of Dragon Age series and knowing quite a few of its fans on ME Answers, I'd like to transform DA Answers to a place where such discussions can happen. All I need is bureaucrat rights :) If you have doubts about my reliability as a bureaucrat, you can always take a look at the work I've done at ME Answers - I'm not the bureacrat there, but I'm a moderator and I helped to implement some of the ideas mentioned above (of course, main credit still goes to Mitranim, should he ever read this thread :D) so I had enough experience with these tasks.

I'd also request the current DA Answers admins' privileges to be revoked because their work has either made no improvement on the wiki or has been counter-productive (such as forbidding users to sign their posts).

I understand if the Wikia Staff decides that I need more time/contributions on the DA Answers wiki, but I'm confident that an extra wait will not help me to improve the site as much as bureacrat rights would.

I'm also convinced that taking a second answers wiki will not harm my productivity on ME Answers, since we now have a total of four moderators and an active community that helps us to maintain the site. Of course, I also plan to recruit admins from those contributors that prove to be dedicated enough to the Dragon Age Answers cause in order to help me with site maintenance.

Thank you for your time,

Land Raider 07:49, June 20, 2012 (UTC)