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The Vs. Battles Wiki Problem

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Sera EX said:
No, we are overstaffed. We don't need 70+ staff members as I've explained (value of contributions and trust should not be tied to one's position). That's not debatable. I am not however, calling for the demotion or retirement of those who are inactive or are semi-active. Us being overstaffed is not tied to people's activity, just the fact that we don't need that many staff. Wookiepedia has about six times the amount of pages we do, and is about a mainstream topic unlike our niche one, yet they have 14 staff members.

Your argument only works for my understaffed argument, which in that case fine, we might not be paradoxically understaffed but we're undeniably overstaffed.
Why don't we need 70+ staff members? Sure value of contributions and all that, but there's still busywork that needs to be done that isn't being done. Overstaffing can only be when there's so much staff that there's no work for some of them to do, or if there's generally a bunch of staff that aren't doing anything, neither of which is true. Comparisons to other wikis feel really faulty due to how different this wiki is in operation than other ones.

We are undeniably not overstaffed.
 
Yeah, Wookiepedia is a pretty simple wiki that's just there to collect everything there is to know about Star Wars, it's not like this one where people are constantly fighting each other over who's favorite character is the strongest. And that we try to give clarification peacefully, but doesn't end well for other reasons. And maybe it's less about trying to recruit as much staff as possible and more about other staff might need to become more active.

As a side note, we usually demote staff if they've been inactive for 3 months without telling anyone that they may take a long term inactivity. Which Dark649 did exceed that. So I agree a demotion may be in order if he doesn't come back soon. But not against the idea that he's always welcome to have it back if he does come back.
 
Regarding the audit:

I apologize for my own lack of push in it. Me and Wok made it to a big verse and after that we just sort of never returned. I feel bad, genuinely, and can probably pick it up again if Wok wants to tear through said verse's audit (JoJo's Bizarre Adventure). I lack a defense outside of the audit being very patience-eroding work, digging through dozens of profiles for links to find original sources for abilities/stats/etc. The fact that Elizhaa has continued the work is an absolute credit to them.
 
No problem. Also, as I mentioned earlier, I definitely think that Elizhaa deserves a promotion.
 
@Agnaa

I already said why. What busy work can be done only by staff that can't be done by normal members (excluding things like banning, closing threads, etc.) Why do we have so many discussion moderators when administrators can do all they can and more? Why do we still have chat moderators when our chat is hardly used anymore and an admin (of which there are plenty) can easily do anything a chat mod does? Why has there been staff drives in such rapid succession even with a lot of staff already? Imagine having another staff drive with 7 candidates, 5 of which actually become staff. Add that to our 67 staff members and we now have 72. In the next month or two, another 6 get made staff. Now we have 78. See the problem? I think if our numbers were reduced to about 40 staff members, the site will be ran the same with no difference. Again, it's the mentality as to why we have this many staff in the first place is what needs to change. I empathize with Antvasima, I really do, but if we put more faith into the regular members (remember what I said about the staff losing the ability to assume good faith in the wiki's members) a good deal of this could be mitigated. We have a very large community. Everyone could (and should) pitch in, not just staff.
 
Well, the staff are needed for verfying that content revision threads and edits are in order, and are selected from the most helpful, reliable, and/or rational members, and we get input from as many current staff members as possible to ensure that we do not enlist anybody that might cause problems. I do not think that our current number of staff is a problem, and given that they gradually quit, we also constantly need new recruits.
 
@Sera Well, excluding those two things, I don't pay much attention to this but apparently some matches need to be added that haven't been yet. A profile I recently made hasn't been locked after being up for hours. I still don't think we have enough calc requests getting fulfilled and calc evaluations getting done.

I believe we have discussion mods when administrators can do all they can and more because staff members feel more comfortable promoting someone to a position where they have a little responsibility and can't do much damage, like discussion moderator, before promoting them to a position where they can cause a lot of harm like administrator. I think this sort of tradition does have a good purpose behind it, even if it does end up with weirdness like with me having to be in a discussion moderator position for a month before I go to admin (where it doesn't seem like much of a trial period since the conclusion and timeframe is already decided).

I can agree with the Chat Moderator position getting removed due to chat not really being used any more (I believe FW resigned for this reason). But even cutting these staff and any staff that don't contribute any more would barely put a dent in the total number of staff.

I believe Ant's said that the recent staff drives have been in much more rapid succession than usual and the same won't continue for the foreseeable future.
 
No, given how many important and productive staff members that had quit recently, we needed to find potential replacements, and as Agnaa said, promoting them to administrators immediately before we know for a fact that they can handle the responsibilities, is definitely not a good idea.

Also, some staff members are only interested in helping out with one area, whether that is edit-patrolling or content revisions, but that is a less important reason.
 
There is also the fact that we needed a solid large staff assembled before the forum migration, given that we likely won't get any recruitments done for quite a while afterwards.
 
Actually... I don't think we should add vs match results to pages since stats tend to change frequently. It creates unnecessary work for virtually no reason.
 
So how does audit work go, anyways?

I am sorry for possibly playing a role in killing the Chat Mod role.
 
We have a spreadsheet listing verse pages. These were roughly divided into chunks and assigned to pairs but the majority of people aren't participating in the audit process so there are large chunks still unaudited.

Audited verses are judged by the standards of the site and sorted into different groups depending on how much they live up to those standards.

Grey verses (which have zero pages & nobody working on them) are deleted. Others are given chances to improve.
 
Something else I forgot to mention is we kinda gotten lazy with AP descriptions through powerscaling. If Character X scales to Character Y, then X's explanation should list Y's feat/statement (as that's why they scale in the first place).

For example, Character X's AP description should look something this:

Attack Potency: Star level (fought on par with Character Y, who absorbed the sun)

You know? Rather than just "fought on par with Character Y".
 
That is indeed legit a pain in the ass, but then there's also the problem that it sometimes turns the profiles bloated.
 
I hate it when profiles just link to profiles that link to profiles that link to profiles and it's impossible to actually find the calc.

I would love it if we could link calcs on profiles more often.
 
Agreed, there needs to be a way to include the calcs without making the profile too bloated.
 
I agree with Sera that listing that feat performed by the other character would be a good idea. And yeah, me and Elizhaa kept going even when some super big verses like Goosebumps and Godzilla were on the list.

And yeah, I noted a calculations section on a Verse page is also good for easy access as that's always been on the Fire Emblem page before that was suggested.
 
The God Of Procrastination said:
Maybe if people didn't decline becoming staff...
Probably because people like me who declined the offer has other things to do irl and don't want to take responsability of stuffs in the wiki.

Regarding the whole thread, i've not much to say since i've mostly lost interest on debates and revisions on this website so my philosophy is that now that i've contribuated at some verses i wanted to revise, peoples can make the CRT they want if they find something dubious on the profiles.
 
I agree that keys being mentioned are important. Example Tiki had (Stronger than Medeus) as her justification. But (Superior to Earth Dragon Medeus) was more reliable given she's actually below my Dark Dragon form.
 
DarkDragonMedeus said:
Which Dark649 did exceed that. So I agree a demotion may be in order if he doesn't come back soon.
On October 27, he told me that he will return in November to do some stuff. But that was the last I heard from him.

I'd still hold off on demoting him just yet given that he has been an extremely helpful staff when it comes to edit patrolling and mass editing (second only to Ant I believe) among other things, which is evident from his sheer amount of edits.

Maybe there was some kind of emergency and he got stuck and couldn't inform us. It will be pointless to demote him only to promote him again when he comes back (if he comes back). So probably wait a bit more.

That was only my suggestion, the decision is not mine to make. It's the bureaucrats'.
 
I do agree with waiting some more, and indeed he is valuable. Only pointing out, but giving him a little more time.
 
@AKM & Medeus

Yes. Dark649 has easily been one of our most helpful staff members. I don't mind giving him some extra time. Does anybody here keep in contact with him via Discord or e-mail?

@Kepekley23

Well, like I mentioned, I would like to promote Elizhaa and recruit Dargoo to the calc group, but the few other potential candidates are probably of less of a hurry.
 
@Assaltwaffle; it wasn't a serious example. I was just using Sera's terms.
 
@Assalt we know that. It's why Superman isn't 4-A for absorbing red solar radiation potent enough to blow up half a galaxy. We were just trying to make the understanding of Sera's question easier.
 
"Absorbing the sun" depends on context. Absorbing solar energy means little without more in depth context. But absorbing the entire GBE of the sun would be Star level. It is however noted that energy extraction feats are only accepted as AP as far as Joules per second is concerned; unless the timeframe is less than a second.

However, if "Eating the sun" was made literal, that could be 4-C. And mass energy is also a thing, which would get results much higher than 4-C, but Mass-Energy conversion feats do require very specific statements.
 
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