Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-15636815-20151020174348

This thread is to help us plan some major changes to our wiki. We have started some of these changes but not finished them. We have discussed some of these changes but not started them. We have thought about some of these changes but not discussed them. The longer we wait to get things under control, the worse they will get.

So, let's talk about this. What things do we need to improve? Once we have a more concrete idea of what we need to do, we can start organizing and dividing the work.

Here is a partial list of things we've discussed or have already started.
 * updated Style Guide (Manual of Style) - Our community and our wiki are so large that we need clear guidelines to create consistency. I'm working on a draft version now. When it's ready, we can all discuss it, change it as needed, and start using it.
 * updating templates - Mostly, this means our major infobox templates (train, wagon, trainset, shop), although some other things are included, also. We need to update some of the parameters because of game changes. We need to improve the way some of the output is displayed. And other stuff.
 * pages of tables - Wikia's best practices clearly state that wikis shouldn't build entire pages out of big, long, complex tables. In spite of this, their "don't list" accurately describes many of our pages. We need to find out if there are other, better ways to display this content. If we find a better way, we need to update all those pages.
 * making us mobile-friendly - More than 50% of our users visit using some kind of mobile device, but they can't even read huge portions of our content. The most popular pages on our site are contract lists. Yesterday, I spoke with an iPhone user who said Alan's page never loaded for him. It just showed him a white page with grey lines.
 * cleaning up categories - The categories we have are appropriate. The problem is that we need to organize them better. For example, instead of having Category:Contracts contain contract lists, contractor shops, contractor stories, and every building and decoration from every contractor's shopeverwe could use subcategories to make things easier to find. Maybe we create subcategories for shops and stories. Definitely we create subcategories for shop items. And so on.
 * interlanguage wikis - Currently, German and Dutch versions of our site exist, but they're too small to be useful to people who speak those languages. We can help them duplicate our current content and add new content as we create it, all while linking every page on each site to every other language we have. We have one or two Danish-speaking users who want to translate our site, and there may be others who ask for translation once we make that part of our site more visible.

What other ideas do you have to make TrainStation Wiki better? 