All posts by Gunshow20

If you want to start editing, feel free to reply to this message or leave one on my wall if you need help with anything. If you haven't already, I highly suggest you set your default editor to the Source Editor - the wiki's articles all have a few templates and formatted text on them per the standard, and this is the easiest way to deal with those once you've learned the symbols. There's always plenty of small stuff around here to do yet too, to help get acquainted with the editor before moving on to the bigger stuff.

Regarding adoption, the thought has crossed my mind a few times but I haven't yet been able to bring myself to fully commit to it. I told myself I would only consider it if another user brought it up to me, and even then I still have my doubts about whether or not I'll be continuously active enough in the future to justify it. Not to toot my own horn too much but given that I already have a few years of experience being an admin here, I am basically the default candidate for it.

The only other user I would nominate for an admin role is BiggestShip. He is a skilled template editor and had previous experience running another GTA wikia site (for a large SAMP server). But I am not sure how much interest he has in remaining on the wiki. A few of the other new users here could be Patrollers, though the lack of activity means having a dedicated team of them is a bit much as their purpose is mostly to maintain article content and moderate the forums.

I am a bit skeptical that there has to be any rush to fill up the staff. In fact, I have seen it over and over on this wiki that drama tends to occur the most when unqualified editors are brought into the staff - in the past, many users were promoted from having lots of forum posts and comments counted as edits. The wiki has a bit of an issue treating staff membership as a reward for meeting certain edit count/age thresholds, when what really needs to be considered is their temperament (the most important thing), followed by editing ability (not count).

If I were to return to the staff myself, the main issues to address would be the infobox (this one is extra annoying, because the compulsory switch to the portable infobox system happened just a few months after I redesigned the infobox, but too late to where I was already inactive on the wiki) followed by a rewrite of the policy (much of which is still copied from GTA Wiki.) Another concern is finally updating the front page, not just the timed stuff but also doing a redesign of the whole thing. There's also about 50 or so articles I think ought to be deleted from the wiki, mostly consisting of the existing CFDs, some of the beta weapons pages (ones that have no in-game content), and a few articles with dumb concepts outside that. A few PWH expansions too (and I think that whole policy should be changed over, but that is another can of worms). Those are the only things I can think of that require administrator rights to change.

I haven't seen much disruption on the wiki in the time since I've been back, which either means that it was there and users were able to police it themselves, or it was never there in the first place. The only issue is a few spammy pages - one of the only things users can submit but can't delete.

I feel like the loss of activity can mostly be attributed to the loss of the forums (replaced with this current Discussions system) and wiki-based Chat. Those were the main two sources for activity especially for users who weren't too skilled at editing articles. It was also a good place for people to discuss myths and their sightings, since a lot of other GTA forums don't allow myth posts, and the new setup of Discussions breaking HTML formatting probably draws away people from posts that necessarily require lots of images and text.

In terms of the mainspace articles, there isn't much left to add. Even ~1500 articles is far beyond what most people ever thought we would reach when the wiki first launched. The wiki will never be 100% complete, but I feel as though we've gotten close to completion in terms of documenting myths from some of the games (Vice City currently has more articles than San Andreas, for example, but I believe that won't be the case once I've finished my to-do list and split a few articles). For my current return to the wiki, a lot of the articles I've been working on have mostly come from searching old forum posts from 2004-2010, so basically highly niche and forgotten myths. I'm not too familiar with III, IV, or V myth hunting though and I feel like there is still a lot of room left for growth there.

Welcome back, Jak.

I haven't actually watched the VI trailer yet, though I did enjoy seeing the new screenshots of some of the returning areas from the original Vice City, like the hotel that's the first safehouse.

As for the wiki activity, I've been trying to get somewhat active again, spurned on by nothing in particular. I've accumulated a large to-do-list over the years (about 50 articles I plan on creating, give or take) so I'm hoping that it will at least inspire people to see that there are still plenty more myths to document. Not sure how long I'll stay around once the list is complete, but I know it's going to take a while yet.

Still hard to believe that it's been 3 years since the pandemic. Ironically enough, 2020 was the year I pledged to some other users that I was going to quit the wiki, then COVID came around and I ended up stuck here for a while again because I had nothing better to do.

Most of the regular wiki users aren't active anymore, and some of them I don't even have contact with anymore. Not that it means much, because I'm also preoccupied with other things these days - had someone not messaged me on discord about a problematic user in the last couple of days, I probably wouldn't even be in this thread. I might end up editing a little bit for just a while, but that's because it feels like I'm basically tethered to this wiki forever.

Not sure what to say for the future. On the wiki side, the forced updates which killed the forums and changed up a lot of the web page design basically killed all of the wiki's activity overnight. Couple that with the disastrous release of the GTA "remastered" trilogy and GTA V being brought into the next console generation instead of a new game in the series, and it makes sense that there's not really anything for people to talk about even if they wanted to be active. My only real worry is that with none of either the 2013 or 2016-2018 generation users active, new users who don't understand the wiki's culture, memes, and unspoken rules will slowly begin to take over and perhaps make bad changes. But that is something that I could both write too much about, and that will only be relevant many years in the future when I most definitely won't be on here anymore.

22 edits, which are mostly reuploading existing videos on the wiki, editing your userpage, and trying to revive irrelevant years-old drama, is a pretty good indication that you are not a good choice for an admin position.

Most of the wiki's activity was on the forums, so this horrible new discussions thing is definitely to blame for that. Though the new terrible site layout Wikia introduced this year certainly isn't helping either.

Probably never. The Youtube account was controlled by VaultBoy, who despite a few appearances in 2020, is mostly inactive.

Already been tried a long time ago, with not much success. Since most people on the wiki collaborate together when coming up with new theories, splitting them up into groups doesn't really last for very long.

If you're earnestly trying to improve the page in good faith, then there's nothing to worry about. Especially with such a time gap.

When coding the infobox template, use the variable "|image =" for the image followed by the image's file name, like Example.jpg. Multiple images can be added by use of a Gallery tag.

Yes, definitely. Normally the wiki has a process for changing the existence label, but if you come across something that's obviously wrong then feel free to take the initiative and change it.

Insignificant and false myths are still within the scope of the wiki. There are a few pages with questionable concepts, but overwhelmingly even the false pages don't need to be deleted.