User blog:Sci100/2014 - A Year of Change: The Final Update

As you know, I released an important blog about a year ago ago concerning 2014, which I have dubbed "The Year of Change". This blog is to explain the changes that have happened and will happen, to reflect on what has been accomplished, and to prepare for our future as a wiki.

Changes that have Happened

 * 1) Community Guidelines, the Blog Policy, the Chat Policy, and the Upload Policy were updated.
 * 2) The Ultimate Guide to a New User was created.
 * 3) Featured Picture was officially closed down
 * 4) Featured Character was voted as the replacement for Featured Picture
 * 5) Page Creation Portal got admin support again.
 * 6) Visual Editor was tested for one week
 * 7) Template:Universe was expanded from the Main 52 to the Main 100.
 * 8) Category:Candidates for Deletion was emptied.
 * 9) Voting For Featured Character began on 2/1/14.
 * 10) The First Meeting of the Fanon Con Commitee occured on 2/8/14
 * 11) The Wiki's Navigation was updated.
 * 12) The Page Creation Portal was updated.
 * 13) Changes were Made to Fanon Con
 * 14) A Writing Contest was added
 * 15) Fanon Con became a weekend event, in different parts instead of one big blog.
 * 16) Creating a new welcome message
 * 17) A grand total of 559 Pages were categorized, including pages from Uncategorized Pages and Category:Pages requiring further categorization.
 * 18) A new “wiki holiday”, Ester Sunday, was created.
 * 19) Our policies were updated
 * 20) The Second Meeting of the Fanon Con Commitee occurred on 5/17/14
 * 21) Fanon Con had a major update occur to it
 * 22) AnOld Administrator was demoted and a new one took his place
 * 23) Our Canon Pages are being Archived
 * 24) Category Reform is occurring
 * 25) New suggestions are being made
 * 26) Admin forums are being used for discussions

Upcoming Changes

 * The Wiki will get a winter theme
 * The Main Page will get updated
 * The Wiki will receive a new logo to start off 2015
 * Winter Fanon Con 2014 will occur w/ a new host
 * 2014 – A Year of Change becomes 2015 – A Year of _____

Review
Well guys, this has been one heck of a year. Even though this is the fifth update, we’ve done a lot in these last eleven months. First of all, Jack stated that we’ve only blocked 79 users, which was a miscalculation. The correct number… is 66. We’ve only blocked 66 users. That’s a 57% decrease in blocks. Frankly, this is amazing. This is the type of change that I wanted when I wrote my first Year of Change blog. If we were to divide the amount of users blocked in 2013 by 12 months, and the amount of users blocked in 2014 by 11 months, there’s a big different. 153 divided by 12 equals 12.75 users, but we’ll just say 13 users. 66 divided by 11 months equals 6. That’s 7 less users every month. 7 less blocks. 7 less conflicts and problems. What an improvement guys. Pat yourself on the back.

Secondly, when I finally stopped pushing, when I became quite, what do you know? Change happened. Paper introduced archives, which is finally dealing with the issue of Canon pages. Ulti has been pushing a reform of categories. Ren has finally helped create a main page that can replace the outdated main page that hasn’t been updated like it should since the summer. And then (although it was unofficial), Jack made his statement on what he felt like needed to be addressed in the upcoming year. People are actually concerned with making change. I’m shocked and happy at the same time.

Competitions
We certainly have changed things, but is it enough? “December 31st - Candidates for deletion are re-emptied, Wanted Pages should be at a maximum of 200 pages, Uncategorized Pages should be at a maximum of 200 pages.” < -- this was my original goal for Wiki Cleanup. If you take a look, we are not even CLOSE to this. The pages requiring further categorization category still has over 900 pages. There’s 223 Candidates for deletion. Wanted Pages has 1000 or more pages that need to be made or un-linked. We’ve gone far, but we certainly haven’t gone far enough. So I am proposing a series of competitions. The first is for fellow administrators. Out of us administrators, which can delete the most Candidates for deletion? The second and third ones are for everyone. The second competition is for the wanted pages. I urge you to enter Wanted Pages, find all of the pages that belong to you, and do two things: Either A. make the articles that belong to YOUR movies, YOUR Series, YOUR Characters, YOUR Franchises. Don’t make pages for other people, just yours. Or B. Find what pages that the wanted pages you own (what links here), and remove the links from all the pages. If there’s stubs, well that’s another issue we can handle later in 2015. The third competition is for categories. Many months ago, I had a contest to clean up uncategorized pages and pages requiring further categorization. This third contest is the successor. The same rules would apply.

The competitions would begin December 6th and end on December 27th. But I need to know if you guys are up for the challenge. So we’re voting, the voting ends on December 5th at 11:59 PM EST. If you agree with these competitions, use, and if you disagree, use the template.

Since there are multiple things to vote for, I’ve come up with quick ways to say which thing you’re voting for. The following are examples:

Please use CFD, WP, and PRFC when using these two templates above to vote. You’re also welcome to explain why you gave your vote a certain way lol. Note: Only vote for CFD if you’re an administrator. Non-admin votes for CFD won’t count.

Wiki Groups; Featured Object; Minimum Word Count, etc.
Certain things addressed in previous 2014 – A Year of Change blogs either were not addressed this year or did not happen. Things like Wiki Groups, Featured Object, etc. will be dealt with next year. This includes International Week (forgot about that, didn’t you?)

2015
What? Talking about 2015 during 2014? That’s heresy! Blasphemy! It’s illegal! Well too bad. With 2015 around the corner, we need to see what was good this year and what wasn’t. What does the WIKI want to improve on? To do? What kind of year do you want to have? To you want it to be a Year of Progress? A Year of Innovation? What kind of things do YOU want to deal with next year? To do this, I’ve made a thread where you can comment on these kind of things, and give the administrators a sense of where this wiki is going. Also if you have any ideas for the name of next year, 2015 – A Year of ____, you can list them below.

Other Notes

 * Take some time to vote for Featured Series of the Year and vote on the new Main Page look in Thread:233899. This thread also has information regarding Archives, Fanon Con, and more.
 * Thread:231747 Voting for the next Fanon Con host is still going on for a few more days. Get your votes in now!
 * If you’re wondering why I haven’t addressed anything in Jack’s blog about 2015… well, let’s just say that an OFFICIAL blog will be coming January 2015 and it’ll address the unofficial blog’s topics as well.

Personal Thanks
(copied/pasted from Jack’s blog) (end of copy/paste)
 * Sub-Creating blogs to spark activity.
 * Sif-Creating blogs to spark activity.
 * Paper-For being an active-admin.
 * Reo-Helping suggest article stub ideas.
 * Redo-Helping suggest article stub ideas.
 * Ulti – for helping deal with the category issue
 * Ren – for helping work on the new main page proposal
 * Everyone Else Who Has Helped With 2014 – A Year of Change: Thank you so much, and thank you again for reading this blog. NOW GO VOTE DANG IT.