Forum:Board Meeting - January 19th, 2020

Forums: Index > Board Meeting - January 19th, 2020

This page or section is an archive. Please do not edit the contents of this page. This thread was archived on 27 March 2020 by Elessar2.

Hello wikians and welcome to the first Weird Gloop board update for 2020! After the elections, a meeting was held on January 19th at 24:00 GMT and ran for almost exactly 4 and a half hours. There were more than a few topics discussed in regards to projects, the community and the board itself that we’ll be talking about a little later.

We had full attendance from all board members, with a couple of brief disconnects that were quickly remedied.

General meeting minutes January 19

Resolutions

A handful of resolutions were passed by the board, found here, essentially boiling down to pinning down the number of board members needed, what specific roles these board members can take up to help Weird Gloop day-to-day, clarifying the election committee position for future Weird Gloop elections and re-affirming Cook and Gaz as directors.

In terms of board member roles, the position was put to a vote during the meeting, with anyone interested in a specific position throwing in their hat. Only the PT-BR liaison position had more than one nomination with Yuri and Cook vying for the position; Cook unfortunately received not one single vote. The remaining positions were all single candidate nominations and all passed unanimously. If you would like to see which board members were chosen for which roles, the Weird Gloop Board page lists this information as well as a brief description of each role itself.

The board

A previous iteration of the Weird Gloop constitution had that there must be 4 general meetings per year but this point was removed prior to the official circulation of 2020. 1 adoption of new articles of association special resolution. This led to some confusion that perhaps people wanted there to be fewer meetings per year however we would like to clarify that the clause was removed so that the 4 meetings per year would not be a constitutional requirement, and that it was still the current intention of the present board to meet 4 times per year this year.

The topic of whether or not board members should be more visible to the wider community, particularly who they are was brought up. It was agreed that board members should be listed on a specific board member article on the meta wiki, listing their names, roles and flavour text of each member. It was also agreed that relevant company documents such as the articles of association and passed resolutions be posted to a specific document on the meta wiki. These pages have since been made and can be navigated to from the sidebar on the meta wiki as well as the navbox at the bottom of each page.

An issue with the current constitution being written in legalese was also brought up; the constitution itself being an important document and well worth the read for those in the community but fairly difficult to parse without some specific background or experience. To combat this, there are plans to have an “easy-read” version of the constitution written up that boils the document down to the base meaning and intent. Watch this space.

Competitive position

We’re currently doing really, really well in terms of market share, being first for the vast majority of searches and page results and we have *very* consistent pageviews in the past 6 months or so, at approximately 92% market share against Wikia's 8%.

Technical position

There have been discussions with the sysadmin team about moving hosts from OVH to Google Cloud Platform. This requires a significant amount of work as there is a change in the basic hosting architecture with the move that needs thorough testing, but supposing all goes well, this would mean servers in Amsterdam, Iowa and Sydney instead just France (though we have been heavily relying on Cloudflare caching) meaning users will hit much closer servers and see better response times (especially for logged in users, and editing) as well as less downtime.

Projects!

Several technical projects are going on currently to help usability of the wiki and the Weird Gloop at large!

There are plans to move Grand Exchange infrastructure currently on the RuneScape wiki to an offsite location in the form of an extension that the RuneScape wiki would then hook into. This would have the benefit of refactoring how the GE data is stored as well as allowing non-english speaking RuneScape wikis and other 3rd parties to also easily hook into the extension. This project was initially a priority when edits to the exchange: pages were taking up a significant amount of server storage resources. However, following the fork, a solution was found to massively reduce server storage space, and so the GE extension was no longer urgently needed. In the short term, technically savvy members of the community intend to work with sysadmins to help translate specifically the GE exchange module on RSW to PT-BR but also other vital modules that PT-BR may need to get the same infrastructure as is on RSW.

The events interface on RSW which was recently implemented also has plans for improvement by the way of moving all time-based events on the wiki into the interface, as well as offering more endpoints so 3rd parties may use the information for interesting websites and projects.

Twitter archival is also on the cards as there is a limit to the number of old tweets visible without the direct link. This causes issues with particularly active Twitter users Mod Ash, as we don’t archive every single tweet.

There is also a tentative plan to introduce new video, image and animation formats to help empower editing of technical articles, at the request of the community (particularly those looking to make high-level PvM guides). Research is needed to determine compatibility and viability but the plan is to have .webm capabilities at the very minimum as current compatibility with browsers is high and allows for much higher fidelity than .gifs.

Visedit has had a couple of problems in the way of switching between visedit and source causing issues as well as generally messing with tables. Plans to look into these specific issues have already been underway with switching-bug having already been fixed, thank you sysadmin team! If you are having any other issues with visedit, let us know in the #wiki-tech channel on Discord.

Jagex

The relationship we have with Jagex is in a great place. Shauny leaving was potentially a little fearsome for us but Shauny, even post Jagex, has continued to work as a bridge between us and the RuneScape community. In general, Jagex have been fairly open with sharing information with us and have been accommodating with implementing endpoints and wiki integration from their end. Congratulations to RSW on getting /wiki added in-game and OSW on getting the wiki button implemented in-game.

Community

We’ve got a wiki newsletter in the works! The plan is that this newsletter would be a compilation of important things done on the wikis in the past quarter and aimed at the wider RuneScape/OldSchool community rather than just editors. That is, it would be essentially similar to the year in review but more frequent and less formal, likely just as a meta wiki forum post, rather than a dedicated webpage. The cadence is not set in stone and less than quarterly may be more likely, depending on the amount of updates to post. Expect to see this posted on Discord, Twitter and Reddit.

In order to sustain the wikis, there needs to be constant projects for the promotion of community editing. Outside of One Small Wiki Favour, interacting with specialist communities is a good method of getting valuable information on the wiki but doesn’t translate very well to committed editors. The idea of having wiki editing streamed live was discussed as well as the use of a Reddit AMA as a potential tool where a bunch of Admins just answer questions from the community is also a viable idea. If you have any ideas for grabbing more editors from the wider community let us know!

With a number of fansites winding down and increasingly becoming unhosted, the information they contained is becoming lost, a travesty for the history of RuneScape. It was discussed whether it was possible to support these fansites to preserve the information they contain.

Old School wiki update

One Small Wiki Favour launch went really well and translated to a bunch of new editors who have remained as regular editors. There was a slight issue with people being very committed to the OSWF scheme and working on multiple, different tasks in a batch and claiming multiple bonds but it has not been overly worrisome at this point.

With the plugin changes made to Runelite, plugins in general are a lot more approachable for non-developers in terms of creation and installation; this is good for the wiki as data collection plugins can be developed and disseminated to the community to help determine accurate rates for skilling and item interactions. There has been a significant level of development of calculators on OSW as of late with User:Jakesterwars work on basic (though surprisingly complicated) skilling calcs and User:Gau Cho’s DPS calculator. When all are rolled out, it is going to be a huge boon for the wiki.

Both Runelite and Jagex have been a significant help in terms of determining drop rates through the use of analyzed droplog data. Plans are in the works to have base ironman mode guides similar to those of ultimate ironman mode and the twisted league guides which were very popular. Twisted league pages (when combined) are the most popular pages on OSW post-fork. There has been a significant cleanup of infoboxes by User:Riblet15 (and the rest of the editing team) which means that they are more consistent and vastly more readable. We also welcomed a new bureaucrat to OSW, User:Laagone or as many of you know her, Julia!

RuneScape wiki update

We recently launched the events interface on the wiki, housing a bunch of different timed and rotating content from RuneScape. Very well received by the community and generally very popular with plans to add some analytics and tracking to the interface to help better determine the popularity and interaction with it. OSWF has been typically focussed on recent updates, ranch out of time and farming in general receiving a significant number of projects to help get the new information on the wiki. The interaction with this new content is lower than expected so the information being added to the wiki is also low.

There was also the recent recipe templates that were added to thousands of articles that help document how things are made and interact and has been very useful for the community. Almost all item and NPC articles have been mapped to their respective in-game IDs with User:Elessar2 diligently working on interactive scenery, the OSWF team also putting in some work in this regard.

RSW doogle maps has been developing well thanks to User:Mejrs, with a plan to soft launch within the month so expect to see some Map frames on articles soon. Pathfinding is definitely still on the table but a very complex task, so don’t expect it too soon.

Charity event

User:Cook Me Plox proposed a charity event to attract new first-time editors, as an alternative to OSWF and the Wikian. Instead of focusing on a few editors with large contributions, attracting many first-time editors could translate into some long-term editors. The hypothesis is that once that first-edit hump has been overcome, people are much more likely to edit in future.

The proposed idea was a charity editathon event where editing is promoted on social media, by popular streamers, by Jagex and other parties to get as many people editing as possible. There would likely be curated or thematically specific projects for streamers to work on to make sure it’s still interesting content to be streamed. There would be some kind of donation goal or charity that all the money collected would be given to, as well as incentive for new people to edit, perhaps by donating $1 per new editor. The plan is still rough around the edges and needs some work (particularly, ideas for things that 5000 people could do), but if you would like to help brainstorm ideas and work on the project’s write-up, contact Cook.

Discussion

Comment - The OSW also introduced its recipe template around the holidays with the help of Choppe filling in a lot of tick information post-application. This was a part of the OSWF as well upon release. - Jakesterwars (talk) 01:02, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

Closed - Closing this as the next meeting is coming up, to see the agenda or suggest topics please see Forum:Upcoming board meeting April 2020 - Elessar2 (talk) 19:30, 27 March 2020 (UTC)