User talk:Sarah Manley

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Welcome
Hello, I am a community Manager here at Wikia. Please add new messages to the bottom, thanks :)

If you're looking for help, you can leave a message for me here or visit our help page.

If you have an idea for a new wiki, please create one! Check out our list of new wikis and see if any of them interest you. A directory of existing wikis is also available.

Familypedia / "Genealogy"
Our community has been fairly small since its inception in 2006, but that may change. It's a popular market segment, as evidenced by competitor sites like ancestry.com that charge $24/month and advertise on Discovery and History channels. As far as I am concerned, their days are as numbered as those of Encyclopedia Britannica when Wikipedia began. Our recent efforts since last spring have been to make it easier for novices to enter family histories. Once that work is complete, I shall be importing large amounts of information from Wikipedia biographies via "pywikipedia" bots. We may get a good spike in activity after that is complete, but otoh it may flop entirely. Who knows- at least something will be learned about how not to apply Semantic wiki concepts on Wikipedia, commons and other wikis. I'm a retired software jock, kind of slogging through the technical stuff while raising my own family (we have 4 kids and are adopting 2 more from Africa). I personally am much less interested in the genealogy side of who begat whom, and more in getting contributors to recover stories about their ancestors. It gives more credit in history to individuals who made it, deconstructing the popular fantasy that history is about the dead white guys who through their singular genius caused everything to happen the way it did. It follows along the line that Zinn started in the 1980s with his series of books that began with "A People's History of the United States". Such fine grained history is material that does not meet Wikipedia's notability requirements, but each story is extremely notable for the micro audience of their descendants. Were it not for each of these forgotten ancestors, we would have not been born. Anyway, in a few months when everything is in place you may like to take a look at it.

I hope you enjoy your new position. Regards, 19:13, October 19, 2009 (UTC)

Administrator rights
Hi, I'm looking for a way to get administrator rights for the Shield wiki but couldn't find a specific page that explained how to do it. I've been contributing to that wiki for a couple of months now and, even though only one other editor has stepped in, I'd like to keep on working on it and perhaps elevate it to the status of other more complete, more visited wikis. Let me know what's the process I should follow. Thanks. Thief12 16:43, October 21, 2009 (UTC)

Just felt like adding that I'm a frequent contributor on the 24 Wiki as well, just in case you want to check my trajectory or something like that :-D Thief12 16:45, October 21, 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the message Thief12, I have responded to your similar inquiry to community@wikia, so you should have a message about this. Thanks for all your great edits! Cheers Sarah (talk 20:26, October 21, 2009 (UTC)

Avatar Wiki
Hi, I had 2 questions... first if you could erase http://jamescameronsavatar.wikia.com to pass the information to this new wiki http://avtr.wikia.com. And then I want to make a navbox but with a [hide] button. Could you help me? Thanks! --Matias arana 10 03:04, October 24, 2009 (UTC)


 * For the second part of that, you're thinking of collapsible tables, which require a few things. First, you need to add  to your MediaWiki:Common.js, then make a navbox (or use a pre-existing one) and give it a collapsible class ("toccolours collapsible collapsed" or "darktable collapsible collapsed" usually do the trick for me,) and make sure it defines a header (what is there when it's collapsed.) An example of all of this can be found at Avatar Wiki.  ~Joey~  ” ^Talk^ ” 03:15, October 24, 2009 (UTC)


 * Thank you! Very fast answer :) --Matias arana 10 03:22, October 24, 2009 (UTC)
 * Matias arana 10: Were you requesting a name change from http://jamescameronsavatar.wikia.com to http://avtr.wikia.com? From what I have seen the James Cameron Avatar appears a lot more active than the Avtr wiki. Are you in touch with the other Admin at JamesCameronAvatar? Thanks! Sarah (talk 16:20, October 27, 2009 (UTC)


 * Yes, but Catherine already deleted jamescameronsavatar and sent the info to avtr. By the way I'm the creator of both and I didn't edited avtr, so jamescameronsavatar will be deleted. Thanks anyway :) Matias arana 10 12:12, October 29, 2009 (UTC)

Good job!
Wow! You guys did a great job setting up wikis! Looks great! 23:26, October 27, 2009 (UTC)

RfA
As the most recent Staff editor of Central, could you please give Geek Admin rights, after his successful RfA? Cheers. :) --Thomas Rattim (talk) So much support, and a considerable edge of supports over opposes, is generally assumed to be consensus... The implication was, however, for my message to inform Wikia staff of the RfA's completion and to make a decision over whether they feel this to be consensus or not. --Thomas Rattim (talk)
 * It's not for you to decide whether it was successful. RFAs are decided by consensus, not plurality. -- Darth Culator  (Talk) 20:10, October 29, 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your messages and letting me know about the RfA. The vote seems rather close, and not a general consensus, so we will not be granting Admin rights on central at this time. Sarah (talk 22:28, October 29, 2009 (UTC)


 * To my knowledge, there have been much closer elections in the past.  How is this not consensus?  I know of one election that had only six votes!  This election had 59 votes, 34 for, a nine point lead.  I ask again, how is this not consensus?  The Almighty Ninja Talk 22:56, October 29, 2009 (UTC)
 * Out of curiosity, was my vote back in '07 close too? After all, "only" 6 users supported me, while 34 users supported Supergeeky1. It saddens me that Wikia lets people who abuse their user rights not only keep their rights and continue abusing them, but also tell Wikia staff what you can/cannot/should/shouldn't do! That's quite something, I must say. --Jack Phoenix (Contact) 23:00, October 29, 2009 (UTC)
 * Hi Sarah. I appreciate your opinion on this, and the vote is indeed fairly close (although a nine point lead is, in my opinion, a stretch).  However the consensus is still indeed in my favor.  Quite honestly, I've never seen as many people in support of a user on Wikia, and I believe that says all that needs to be said about this.  The opposition, while great in amount, did not provide any back-up to their claims involving me and for the most part, it's seemingly out of spite.  I've had an extraordinarily limited amount of contact with many of the users claiming I've made a series of wrongdoings, and even one opposing based solely on the fact that I "prank call people" and offend her religion.  That aside, as StarNinja99 and Jack pointed out, many users with only six or seven people supporting have been given sysop rights.  If that's a general consensus and 34 votes are not, then I don't know what is.  Additionally, I see absolutely nothing on the RfA page or otherwise stating it must be a general consensus.  Just a consensus.  Thank you for taking the time to read this and I look forward to hearing from you in the future.  Cheers! &mdash;  supergeeky1   \  m  /  (  Talk to the Geek  ) 23:04, October 29, 2009 (UTC)

I'd also like to just add on, in regards to the support having nine more votes than the oppose, that percentage wise the support is 14% greater than the oppose. When you do the math, it's 57.6% to 42.4%. Considering there are no established guidelines that say you need to have 60% of the vote or 2/3 of the vote, that's a rather overwhelming number. - Brandon Rhea (talk) 23:12, October 29, 2009 (UTC)

The point is really moot when you consider that the candidate doesn't actually want the job for any productive purpose, by his own admission. -- Darth Culator  (Talk) 00:06, October 30, 2009 (UTC)


 * The fact that Geeky himself said that to a joke, and I'm doubting if the quote is even legitimate, makes that rather interesting an accusation. Additionally, if you find it to be insulting for us to quote your users, I'd appreciate it if you didn't quote ours. Thank you. --Thomas Rattim (talk)


 * Thanks for the comments. As I stated prior, it does not appear that a consensus has been reached here, and I think many of your posts reaffirm that. A majority does not equal a consensus, especially one that is won by 14%. I understand that in many other cases there were only 6 votes more, but when this is 6 positive, to 0 or 1 negative, that is a much higher percentage of approval than we have here. I will be maintaining the decision that I posted early, which is to not grant further admin rights to supergeeky1 at this time. --Sarah (talk 16:20, October 30, 2009 (UTC)

That's obviously your perogative, but I would very strongly suggest that the Community Team come up with actual guidelines for future requests for adminship. It's not fair to users who are nominated for adminship to reach a very clear majority of nearly 58% only to have the Community Team tell them that a consensus hasn't been reached, despite the fact that there are no RfA guidelines. This is especially important considering how Wikia values the community, its decisions, and its opinions. Just a friendly suggestion. =) (I also just want to add that, in regards to the quote from Culator, it is in fact a legitimate quote, but when it was said in the channel I didn't take it as anything more than being a humorous comment.) - Brandon Rhea (talk) 17:59, October 30, 2009 (UTC)
 * Calm down mate, just because he failed, once he takes aboard the things from the Oppose comments, tell him to try again later... That block log that they showed doesnt look too good either. If it was me, I would say the same as Sarah... It was a very active and close vote.. -- 18:54, October 30, 2009 (UTC)

I would've thought an appropriately placed =) would've told you that I'm nothing but calm. I'm just giving a tip for the future, which will be important if there's ever a close election like this again. =) Besides, I'm not beholden to any side of this feud between a select group of Darthipedians and Wookieepedians. I don't really know anything about it, nor do I care to know it. I'm just saying that in the interest of fairness for future RfAs, RfA guidelines really need to be established. - Brandon Rhea (talk) 19:52, October 30, 2009 (UTC)

Sarah test wiki
What on earth is w:c:sarahtestwiki supposed to be?-- 21:01, November 6, 2009 (UTC)


 * A test wiki. -- 21:01, November 6, 2009 (UTC)
 * Yeah, but why was my page erected without warning?-- 21:21, November 6, 2009 (UTC)
 * A simple oversight. It would have been a better idea to omit the user talk namespace in the import. -- 21:23, November 6, 2009 (UTC)
 * How did you import everything from one Wiki from another? That erects double histories!-- 21:30, November 6, 2009 (UTC)
 * According to sannse, it was done with a script server-side. I wouldn't worry too much about a test wiki, though. -- 21:31, November 6, 2009 (UTC)
 * I won't worry.-- 21:32, November 6, 2009 (UTC)
 * Sorry for the confusion. It is just a test wiki I created so I can work on some of the help pages. Sarah (talk 21:42, November 6, 2009 (UTC)
 * Just erect a hell of a userspace. By the way, pardon my rage and language earlier.-- 21:50, November 6, 2009 (UTC)


 * So every single person who ever posted on the main Wikia.com has gotten a message that they have new messages here, even though they don't? A bit odd.  Anyway, would it possible to create a wikia and duplicate everything, history and all, from the official Wikipedia?  Call it "Inclusionist version" where no articles are allowed to be deleted unless it is a hoax, spam, jibberish, or an attack page.  Or could you make a script that copies over everything ever deleted?  Have an administrator at Wikipedia use it to userfy every single deleted article there is, over here some place, and then people can go through and determine how much should've been saved(which is probably most of it).  As it is now you have gangs of evil deletionist thugs deleting best selling novels that don't get reviews, about 90% of every manga article there is since such things don't get reviews(some argue to delete things even if they know it has three volumes that sold over a hundred thousand copies each, since sales figures don't indicate notability according to their idiotic guidelines), and many other things that should not have been destroyed.  Or perhaps userfy it by category, letting people work from there.  Would that be possible?   D r e a m Focus  11:31, November 7, 2009 (UTC)
 * I doubt it. It would cause attribution to go to bogus accounts. What would happen then?-- 11:39, November 7, 2009 (UTC)
 * What happens now? Articles from the Wikipedia are copied over to many Wikis here already.  And you'd copy just the articles, not the user pages.  Wikipedia isn't done for the credit.   D r e a m Focus  11:43, November 7, 2009 (UTC)
 * No, you appear to have misunderstood me. If a user had an account there, but not here, then it would look like a non-existant user had edited the page according to article histories. That is pure misrepresentation.-- 11:50, November 7, 2009 (UTC)
 * FYI, all wikia.com wikis have a shared user database. So the article histories at the test wikis are all valid accounts. It is not misrepresentation at all. -- 18:43, November 7, 2009 (UTC)
 * An administrator over at the Wikipedia commented recently that legally if you copy something from the Wikipedia, you are suppose to copy the history as well, to credit who did what, most people not realizing that, and it not enforced. And I don't believe anyone is misrepresented at all.  Just have a note on each one, a phantom edit marker perhaps, saying "all edits before this point were done at the official Wikipedia, before article was copied over."   D r e a m Focus  12:03, November 7, 2009 (UTC)
 * If you're going to copy an article over, it's best to do more than just say "all edits before this point were done at Wikipedia." You need a more proper way of attributing all of the authors than just saying it was written on Wikipedia. A number of wikis have a template that does just that, such as Template:Wikipedia on Wookieepedia. You'd put the template on the talk page and then say what the article was in the template so it can properly link to the authors, like so: . - Brandon Rhea  (talk) 18:43, November 7, 2009 (UTC)
 * I meant after you copy over the entire edit history, then place a marker saying that all edits were done at the Wikipedia before that point marked, thus avoiding a problem mentioned above. The users who contributed may appear as red links here, but people will know who they are and where to find them, if there was anything to discuss with them or anyone actually cared.  D r e a m Focus  20:11, November 7, 2009 (UTC)
 * It's not that they'll appear as red links. It's that they won't appear period. Wikia and Wikipedia do not have the same user database, so just because an account exists on Wikipedia doesn't mean it'll exist on Wikia. If you export an article on, say, Memory Alpha to Wookieepedia (don't know why you'd ever do that, but follow me here), the accounts will appear as red links, but those accounts will actually exist because Memory Alpha and Wookieepedia have the same user database. The same is not true for Wikia and Wikipedia. The accounts will be shown to be non-existent. I don't believe it'll even show a name with the edit, because that account would not exist. - Brandon Rhea (talk) 20:19, November 7, 2009 (UTC)

The relevant discussion that Dream is talking about is here. I like the idea a lot. Anno1404 18:17, November 7, 2009 (UTC)

wikia email?
Hello I'm Dadidedu and I wanted to ask you something.I'm looking at your user page and I noticed that you have a wikia email address,so I'm curious enough to ask: How the heck did you get that email address?--Dadidedu 23:01, November 7, 2009 (UTC)


 * Sarah is an employee of Wikia and part of the Community Team. Please see User blog:Sarah Manley/Excited to join the Wikia Community! ~Joey~  ” ^Talk^ ” 23:04, November 7, 2009 (UTC)
 * Yep as Joeyaa stated, I am the newest member of Wikia's Community Team. Thanks for the message. Sarah (talk 17:07, November 9, 2009 (UTC)

Random Survey Thing I Got
I don't really use help pages or ask wikia staffers for help. I got help from a few nice users when I was first starting out, now I'm the veteran user helping others. Not very helpful, I know :P Ghost sangheili 02:36, November 20, 2009 (UTC)

Advise
Hello, I'm Angélica Casarin Hartmann, 20 years, a Brazilian sysop from Desciclopédia (the Brazilian Uncyclopedia) and an user was banned because he/she didn't respect our rules, and now he/she create a page on your wiki only to offend me. Please, I need that your staff delet it, and preferencially give me the IP from the user. I need your help, thank you. 189.30.215.225 21:39, November 24, 2009 (UTC)
 * Hello Angélica. I have deleted the page you requested. If you message us at Special:Contact with their user name, I can run a check user for you and send you back the IP address. Thanks Sarah (talk 22:34, November 24, 2009 (UTC)

Question about copying history from Wikipedia articles
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Export I followed the instructions, but can not limit how many histories I get from an article. The default setting at a thousand, which results in an article being far too large for my Wikia to import, it 24 megabytes in size! The special parameters aren't working, I unable to just grab 100 history edits instead. Is there a way to either make it export only 100, or to make Wikia import a larger file size? Either way would work. I'm trying to grab the history for Total Annihilation.  D r e a m Focus  18:09, November 25, 2009 (UTC)