User talk:Mindedif

Welcome to the Order, Mindedif!

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Feel free to contact me on my talk page if you need anything. Sol Pacificus^(Cyfiero) 13:48, July 26, 2017 (UTC)

Citing to Wikipedia

Hey Mindedif, I just wanted to welcome you to this community and also thank you for replying to my forum post. Our wiki has suffered from a loss in manpower lately, with most people—even the administrators—on long hiatuses, so we could definitely need and would appreciate some new editors such as yourself. :)

Anyways I'm glad that you understood my reasoning for my proposal because I felt like I wasn't sure I was coming across clearly. You're totally right about the fact that citing first and foremost is about explaining and showing honestly where you got information, not whether it's reliable or not, which comes second. While ideally we should always strive to use the most reliable of sources, absent that, we should use the best we can even if it is not a decent source at all. Citing to even unreliable sources, if that is where we really took the information from, allows readers to verify and gauge the reliability of your information in turn. So I'm really glad you understand this. (I'm just going to go ahead and repeat this part in the forum for the others actually xD).

My only concern is that I wanted to double-check if you understand the context behind why the others might not be in support of my proposal since you're new here. You see, technically, the default policy for any franchise wiki (like Star Wars for example), is that every information we take has to be from the official franchise source. We are not allowed to take any outside information whatsoever. This is part of a policy called Attribution. Our wiki doesn't explain our policies too well, so see Wookieepedia's Attribution policy for the same thing, only in Star Wars instead. Just substitute Lucasfilms, Ltd. with Ubisoft and you have the same policy here.

Because for various reasons explained in my forum post, even the admins of this site are making exceptions to this policy. Personally, I think that is fine, but it's an un-codified thing. They want to allow exceptions to the Attribution policy, and yet not clarify to readers they're making these exceptions -_- because they feel like they're violating the Attribution policy if they do. What they fail to understand is that, saying you're taking information from outside sources isn't violating the purpose of the policy; it's taking information from outside sources that's violating the policy. It seems they think that if they take information from outside sources without admitting it to readers, they're not going against the spirit of the policy. At that point, though, they should just modify it. (I'll just go ahead and repeat this in the forum for the others also xD.) Sol Pacificus^(Cyfiero) 13:48, July 26, 2017 (UTC)

Helping out with the wiki

So this is about your side-note in your post. As I said, it's really nice to have a newcomer ^_^ because my goodness, you can't believe how much more hands we need around here. :(

I understand if you feel nervous about editing. Actually, we haven't mentioned this in this wiki, but if you go over to Wookieepedia or Wikipedia, there's a policy called Be Bold which actively encourages editors to be confident about their edits. It's much more efficient that way so everyone provides as much input as possible. Of course, there's always the possibility of editors being too arrogant or aggressive, but that would be more of an issue of failing to compromise or be courteous. As long as you know when to take a step back and negotiate when someone disagrees, then it's perfectly fine to be bold.

But anyways, I understand if you don't feel the confidence for that just yet, and that's okay! Take your time and edit at your comfort level. I myself sometimes am afraid I'm too intimidating about my corrections of other people's edits.

If you want to help out more with policy and, as you suggested, verifying sources rather than editing, I would actually very much welcome it. Usually the former is more of an administrative affair, but since the admins are mostly all absent, we could use some help in that area. If you'd like, I could give you a list of all the issues we have with policies, and you can lend your thoughts on them or even help carry out some needed changes. Or if you just want to focus solely on verifying information from cases where editors are taking from external sources, that's fine too. Sol Pacificus^(Cyfiero) 14:07, July 26, 2017 (UTC)