Board Thread:Wiki Improvement/@comment-3002957-20150330222252/@comment-5142578-20150414183923

Fair enough. In my defense, however, I said " a  main attraction", not " the  main attraction". I agree that the main space should be the main thing everyone contributes to, but it's undeniable that chat has a lot of attention. Yes, perhaps too much attention.

However, going for the idea that we should not have a chat just like the old days doesn't seem like a step forward, but instead a step back. When I frist came on, I never used chat, only talk pages. And, yes that worked fine... for a while.

Part of what drove me to go to chat for the private messages feature is that I eventually got annoyed with the fact that some users didn't seem to get the idea of "minding their own business" and were reading everything I wrote to another user, then coming back to me and making fun of it. :/ In all honesty, there really are some things that are discussed with another user that shouldn't be anyone else's business (for example, maybe personal troubles that you need to confide in a friend), and sadly, talk pages are basically right out on the front lawn for anyone to stalk. And now, chat has become a habit that's difficult to kick.

But, I digress. As previously said, part of what discouraged the community from making edits to mainspace is fear of being chastized for their work. So, if you lose your nerve to edit the wiki, but don't want to leave the wiki, what do you do? Going to chat becomes the obvious choice.

Trust me, I WANT to get this wiki back on it's feet. It's practically a second home for me. However, I can personally attest that being judged or chastized for my work has put a dent in my self-confidence to edit. Now, it wasn't the wiki as a whole that did this to me. It was ONE user. Now, if one user can create such a blow to my confidence as a article maker, then imagine how much more discouraged a new or inexperienced user would be if they felt a good bit of the wiki community was against them.

True, we want good articles that at least look well organized and decent. However, many of the users who do come and don't do just that, as I eventually learned, are not doing that on purpose. They're honestly trying the best they can. However, when their page becomes marked for not having quite enough content, or they're chastized for their character being "too OP" and maybe even accused of being trolls, that can REALLY discourage them from editing again. I admit, we HAVE had people who were trolls who made ridiculous articles on purpose. However, there have been a few times where we were suspicious of a genuine article and drove away a potential contributer from the main space.

Call me naieve, but I DO believe that the wiki isn't dead yet. It can be revived. However, killing the chat isn't likely going to get the result we want (more activity to the mainspace). Enforcing people to edit by removing the chat is likely to discourage them from ever returning. What we need to do is (metaphorically speaking) is ditch the stick and find a carrot.

And I think we can use the chat to our advantage for that. One thing another user mentioned to me (who pretty much only goes on chat) is that we could try having more discussion about character articles and ideas on the mainpart of the chat. Doing that may actually encourage people to go out and try these ideas. If there's one thing I noticed about chat prior to recently, it's this: We talk about EVERYTHING on the chat EXCEPT Sonic Fanon related topics (and even Sonic stuff in general).