User:Riffsyphon1024/Roundtable

From CooperTFN's TheForce.net Roundtable Discussion on March 4, 2006, the one year anniversary of Wookieepedia.

Who'd've thought we'd actually get into Series 3 with these? When I became aware of the impending first anniversary of the Wookieepedia, I decided to do this Roundtable in its honor. Joining me are the site's two founders and one of its earliest administrators; in other words, three guys without whom the site wouldn't exist. If you were heretofore unfamiliar with this site, let me apologize now: a lot of this chat will go over your head. But really, isn't that just one more reason to sign up?

The guests:
 * Aidan Hennessy, aka QuentinGeorge, site administrator.
 * Chad Barbry, aka WhiteBoy, site-co-founder.
 * Steven Greenwood, aka Riffsyphon1024, site co-founder.

And after a two-Roundtable absence, I, Mike Cooper, am back in the moderator's seat.

You have just entered room "EU Roundtable."

Mike Cooper: How did you all get your start with the wiki world?

Chad Barbry: well, I'm a techie kind of guy, and some of my friends were telling me about wikis

Chad Barbry: then one day they told me about Wikipedia

Chad Barbry: got hooked on Wikipedia pretty quick

Steven Greenwood: Well I basically got into Wikipedia in January of 2005, after searching around on Google. My life was a total mess at that point and contributing to it gave me some solace.

Steven Greenwood: I started editing the article of my hometown, and increased its size dramatically. I was hooked and added more things here and there, mostly to articles pertaining to local things

Mike Cooper: what's your hometown?

Steven Greenwood: Clarksville, Tennessee, a city of over a 100,000

Chad Barbry: I was editing all kinds of stuff on Wikipedia ...various topics of interest

Chad Barbry: and, obviously, one of my main interests is Star Wars

Steven Greenwood: i also added info for my college

Aidan Hennessy: I think my entry into the Wikipedia world was pretty much similar, there, but I might have been in a bit earlier than these two guys.

Steven Greenwood: but I agree with Chad, the biggest contributions afterward were to Star Wars articles

Chad Barbry: lol...me too when I was a noob...I did a copyvio )

Mike Cooper: earlier

Aidan Hennessy: Early 2004 was when I started delving into that realm....and believe it or not, it was mainly non SW related articles.

Steven Greenwood: see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Riffsyphon1024 for more details

Mike Cooper: i think it's really interesting to see the early work of people who contribute all the time now...i for one was locked in publicity mode for a while

Chad Barbry: looks like I started on Wikipedia around October 2004

Steven Greenwood: included in there is a list of article's Votes (articles) for Deletion that I attempted to save by the deletionist GRider

Aidan Hennessy: Ah, you and I weren't too far off then Chad.

Steven Greenwood: henceforth known as the Great LucasCruft Purge

Mike Cooper: were you guys both involved in the purge?

Steven Greenwood: Kappa and I were, Chad was not

Chad Barbry: ah, the Great LucasCruft Purge

Mike Cooper: kappa?

Steven Greenwood: another Wikipedian

Aidan Hennessy: I had written some of the articles that were purged, but I wasn't involved in the deletion articles.

Steven Greenwood: but never moved over here

Aidan Hennessy: Not sure why....I guess I wasn't aware of them.

Mike Cooper: hat happened to kappa after the move

Chad Barbry: yeah, I got involved kinda late it the purge

Steven Greenwood: im not sure where we went, probably still there contributing

Steven Greenwood: he

Steven Greenwood: as for my part in the Purge, my article of Repulsorlift was one of them, it was decided to be kept fortunately

Mike Cooper: maybe you should expand on what the purge entailed for people who haven't heard about it

Mike Cooper: no linking here, sadly =)

Steven Greenwood: lol

Steven Greenwood: could you reword that please

Chad Barbry: tell him about the purge

Aidan Hennessy: Basically, several Wikipedians with a point to prove decided to rid the wikipedia of articles they deemed too minor to be of interest

Steven Greenwood: right

Mike Cooper: thank you, chad =)

Chad Barbry: good summary aidan

Steven Greenwood: yes, as they were non-notable for wikipedia they were sent to the VFD grinder

Mike Cooper: but it was primarily SW-related items

Steven Greenwood: basically yes

Chad Barbry: yes

Steven Greenwood: GRider went out of his way to find articles of SW nature

Mike Cooper: i'd imagine something similar must've happened with other subjects, trek for one

Steven Greenwood: just to get them deleted

Steven Greenwood: i wouldnt know about trek

Steven Greenwood: except that wikipedia has an article on every episode

Chad Barbry: that's about when I met Riff

Mike Cooper: i've heard that the pokemon article is fantastically out of proportion to its importance =)

Aidan Hennessy: IIRC, a similar thing happened to Trek and Doctor Who articles

Steven Greenwood: lol

Steven Greenwood: was it the same person or different

Mike Cooper: there's an article for every episode of every series

Steven Greenwood: nearly

Mike Cooper: wow

Steven Greenwood: its getting there

Aidan Hennessy: What you bring up Cooper is actual a common criticism of wikipedia - Geek related culture seems to have articles on the most trivial things, but there is no articles, or very limited ones, on things considered to be of greater academic importance

Steven Greenwood: its called pop culture

Aidan Hennessy: This, most likely, is due to the type of contributer to Wikipedia. )

Steven Greenwood: not to be picky here

Chad Barbry: right...it was an effort to make it more encyclopedic

Mike Cooper: i have heard that, but i have to say, i've used it for a whole number or non-geek-oriented subjects and i've never found it lacking

Mike Cooper: usually there's more than i have time to read, no matter what the topic

Chad Barbry: definitely not...it's a great resource that I continue to use (except for Star Wars info)

Mike Cooper: so moving on, chad and steven, how did you guys begin working together?

Steven Greenwood: yea, but it really depends on the contributor, there are alot of intelligent people on wikipedia doing other subjects, SW however

Steven Greenwood: well i didnt like what was happening with the purge, and i noticed most characters were getting merged into this ghastly lists

Steven Greenwood: these

Chad Barbry: Seems like we met on a talk page, and he told me about the purge going on

Steven Greenwood: and i went around and met Chad on the Talk:Star Wars page

Steven Greenwood: an anon first submitted the idea for a separate wiki

Steven Greenwood: around August, which was already there in text

Chad Barbry: we talked about it a while, and I saw both sides of the argument

Steven Greenwood: and then came up with names

Chad Barbry: hehe

Steven Greenwood: i tryed to come up with something similar, chad hit it on the head

Steven Greenwood: i gave wicketpedia

Mike Cooper: i have to say, though...even if this GRider fellow had it in for you, in the long run, it was probably for the best what happened. both for wikipedia, and us SW geeks

Steven Greenwood: yea

Chad Barbry: yeah, probably so

Steven Greenwood: but imagine if my name went through

Steven Greenwood: thankfully Chad came up with Wookieepedia

Aidan Hennessy: Definately...here we can have articles that say "Reytha was a planet" and no one can stop us! )

Steven Greenwood: mhhahaha

Mike Cooper: heheh

Chad Barbry: lol

Mike Cooper: and boy do we

Steven Greenwood: thanks to JustinGann for those

Mike Cooper: what exactly did you have to do to set up the site? all i know is that angela from wikicities helped a lot

Steven Greenwood: aka SenatorClighal from TFN

Steven Greenwood: Chad did more of this than I

Chad Barbry: it seemed to me, though that Wookieepedia should be linked to Wikipedia...no need to duplicate effort

Steven Greenwood: I originally thought we could transwiki, we were wrong )

Mike Cooper: only for items worthy of remaining on wikipedia, you mean like luke

Chad Barbry: so I submitted the idea to the Wikipedia board of creating a sister site

Chad Barbry: right

Steven Greenwood: and more information would be elsewhere on wookiee

Chad Barbry: major articles would remain in Wikipedia

Chad Barbry: exactly riff

Steven Greenwood: at the time we still called it the Star Wars Wiki

Chad Barbry: so I submitted it and kinda forgot about it

Steven Greenwood: Wookieepedia was not official yet

Mike Cooper: the name came from Chad, correct? i think it's fairly self-explanatory beyond that =)

Chad Barbry: about 4 weeks later I think, I heard back from Angela telling me the decision of the Wikipedia board

Steven Greenwood: yea he came up with Wookieepedia

Mike Cooper: it took a month

Chad Barbry: seems like it...I'm not sure how often they meet

Mike Cooper: was this before wikicities existed

Steven Greenwood: we're not sure how involved Jimbo Wales was, however he did mention us on C-SPAN

Steven Greenwood: this was after they were created

Steven Greenwood: Jimbo by the way is the founder of Wikipedia

Steven Greenwood: and Wikicities

Mike Cooper: correct

Aidan Hennessy: and Wikicities.

Chad Barbry: no, I don't think so...Angela explained that there was a for-profit site that Jim Wales had started that would fit this better than a sister site

Mike Cooper: how long after you got the approval was the CSPAN mention i assume it was too early for him to have mentioned it because of its size?

Steven Greenwood: September 26

Chad Barbry: so since this was the recommendation of the council, that's what I did...taking it as the final word

Steven Greenwood: that was roughly 6 months after founding

Mike Cooper: ah

Chad Barbry: I talked to Angela about how I thought it should be linked to Wikipedia

Mike Cooper: so we were already pretty big by then

Steven Greenwood: we were becoming popular around that time

Chad Barbry: so she worked with Wikipedia and they setup cross-site links

Steven Greenwood: TFN was just starting to notice us

Aidan Hennessy: A lot of the early work was directly copying Wikipedia articles over here.

Aidan Hennessy: And decoupling those lists...

Mike Cooper: beyond approval, what was the first actual step? did they create some kind of blank template for you

Steven Greenwood: yea thats how we grew in the beginning

Chad Barbry: you could link to WikiCities with a w:cstarwars:Luke Skywalker

Chad Barbry: but that doesn't work any more on Wikipedia...it does on WikiCities, tho )

Steven Greenwood: and then we wookified the articles by removing Luke was a character in Star Wars stuff

Steven Greenwood: to make them In-universe format

Steven Greenwood: in addition we decided all articles should be in past tense since this happened a long long time ago....

Aidan Hennessy: Yes, the decision to make it in universe was the first style decision.

Chad Barbry: Cooper not sure what you mean by blank template

Steven Greenwood: with the exception of out of universe (OOU) articles, which were in present tense

Mike Cooper: i dunno, like a completely empty site

Mike Cooper: i guess

Mike Cooper: whatever a wiki looks like with zero content =)

Chad Barbry: yea...totally empty

Steven Greenwood: yea it was empty

Chad Barbry: I think there's a default blank page, but nothing else

Mike Cooper: and aidan, when did you show up, and in what capacity?

Chad Barbry: so we went to work copying articles under the GFD license

Aidan Hennessy: Basically, riff contacted me as one of the regular contributers to SW article on wikipedia during the Purge.

Steven Greenwood: GDFL

Aidan Hennessy: This was very, very early on in the wookieepedia's development.

Steven Greenwood: yea i was in a mode of recruitment

Aidan Hennessy: So I was one of the first members - doing a lot of the early work like bringing across wikipedia articles and the rest.

Chad Barbry: riff did almost all the recruitment

Chad Barbry: he was hooked in with all the communities

Steven Greenwood: others who were instrumental in the beginning were Aidje, SparqMan, Shadowtrooper, and Imperialles

Steven Greenwood: all but one are admins now

Mike Cooper: they all started out at wikipedia

Steven Greenwood: ill have to look back at that

Chad Barbry: I think most were from TFN

Chad Barbry: TheForce.Net

Chad Barbry: lol

Chad Barbry: anyone heard of that site

Mike Cooper: i don't think you have to worry about a translation problem there =)

Steven Greenwood: i also have a large SW group on Myspace with a large link to Wookieepedia, which helped

Steven Greenwood: currently it stands at 25000 members, though i cant guarantee all of them are active or even real

Mike Cooper: damn

Mike Cooper: that's not a bad idea

Mike Cooper: people love that myspace

Aidan Hennessy: Heh

Steven Greenwood: its horrid

Steven Greenwood: 40 million strong and they cant keep it fixed now

Steven Greenwood: but i joined that back in the dark ages, 2003

Steven Greenwood: actually no, early 2004

Mike Cooper: so what kind of expectations did you guys have right off the bat? were you surprised when it started taking off?

Chad Barbry: yeah, I was

Aidan Hennessy: As was I.

Aidan Hennessy: I thought....well, this might be fun for a while, until everyone loses interest....

Steven Greenwood: well i figured there were many rabid fans that would help out, more good than bad

Chad Barbry: I had hopes, tho, because originally I intended that unofficial link to Wikipedia to be a stronger hold that it was

Steven Greenwood: star wars will never die, and with two new tv shows coming up, dont expect it to soon

Mike Cooper: the trick is that there's a greater influx than...outflux

Aidan Hennessy: Ah yes...rabid fans...our first Edit War (wipes away a tear)

Steven Greenwood: was that Palpatine?

Chad Barbry: lol QG

Chad Barbry: Star Destroyers, maybe

Chad Barbry: shrugs

Steven Greenwood: yea that too

Steven Greenwood: dont ever say Star Dreadnaughts

Mike Cooper: which was it

Chad Barbry: claims Alzheimers

Aidan Hennessy: It was the Great Birthdate War

Steven Greenwood: there was the big one over whether or not to merge or split Palpatine and Darth Sidious

Aidan Hennessy: Otherwise known as the Great Question Mark Conflict

Steven Greenwood: and a smaller one for AnakinVader

Steven Greenwood: lol @ Quentin

Aidan Hennessy: I think the flaming went for three whole archived discussion pages...

Chad Barbry: yeah, I think it was Palpatine/Sidious split

Mike Cooper: well super star destroyers can be expected to stir up trouble, but things like palpatine/sidious are surprising

Aidan Hennessy: I eventually remember the angry heading THIS VOTE IS A JOKE AND WOOKIEEPEDIA IS IN DANGER OF BECOMING A FANON ENCYCLOPEDIA!!!1111

Steven Greenwood: explains why hes the largest

Mike Cooper: was it all just trivial things like article location, or were there content issues of that magnitude as well

Aidan Hennessy: In case you don't know, the dispute was mainly over Palpatine's birthdate...

Steven Greenwood: fanboys can be fun sometimes, but mostly theyre out of control

Mike Cooper: based on mcdiarmid's age?

Steven Greenwood: yea extrapolation

Aidan Hennessy: The first TFNer to be banned was Darth Nuke/Mane and that was mainly over his insistence on certain aspects of the Mandalorian-related articles.

Steven Greenwood: he still hates me

Mike Cooper: ah, darth nuke

Mike Cooper: he had to get mentioned

Aidan Hennessy: )

Chad Barbry: well, we've changed things over time, but we borrowed alot of the design of the site from Wikipedia...as far as how to organize the site

Mike Cooper: what happened with him? POV problems?

Steven Greenwood: its been a while since that

Aidan Hennessy: I think if you read the discussion page of Fenn Shysa there's probably something there about what happened...I don't really remember.

Steven Greenwood: so many to deal with ive forgotten

Chad Barbry: was wondering how we'd get Darth Nuke in  )

Aidan Hennessy: The two TFNers banned have mainly been over attitude rather than the quality of their contribution....

Steven Greenwood: lol

Mike Cooper: ah, so you did read the old ones =)

Steven Greenwood: yea Rule Number one, don't get smart with us P

Chad Barbry: yeah

Mike Cooper: the other being conservativesoldier, correct?

Steven Greenwood: shall i bring up Wattamb

Mike Cooper: heheh

Aidan Hennessy: Yes....

Mike Cooper: him i remember

Steven Greenwood: or his counterpart of a different name

Aidan Hennessy: I think he was just very young....

Chad Barbry: sighs

Steven Greenwood: KFanII

Chad Barbry: oh, man

Aidan Hennessy: and had a fixation on including blow-by-blow deaths of the Separatist leadership.

Chad Barbry: dredging up old, bad memories

Steven Greenwood: too detailed

Aidan Hennessy: KFanII was interesting...he had a really strange view of canon...

Steven Greenwood: you can see KFan's rant in an email on my user page for display

Steven Greenwood: he claimed he would make his own wiki and outdo us, right...

Mike Cooper: i know one person who had a big impact on my introduction to the site was jack nebulax

Aidan Hennessy: He threatened everyone when we put Palpy's page at Palpatine rather than Darth Sidious

Steven Greenwood: oh neb

Aidan Hennessy: Ah...Jacky boy. )

Chad Barbry: heh...good ol' Jack!

Mike Cooper: i wanted to put up a fan art image for the yuuzhan vong war, and he smacked me down as only he can =)

Chad Barbry: he's quite opinionated!

Steven Greenwood: SOCL has been telling me how much Neb annoys him lately

Aidan Hennessy: Yes....he certainly doesn't mince his words. )

Mike Cooper: it was all of two seconds later, as well...i remember thinking �man, i'm never gonna get any edits in on this thing!�

Steven Greenwood: btw, SOCL is interesting in that he lives here in town and I didnt even know who he was

Chad Barbry: cool

Aidan Hennessy: And of course, you'll notice we managed to get the endless McEwok vs. Saxtonites war to spill over here, as well....

Steven Greenwood: he runs the SW group for my campus on Facebook now

Chad Barbry: it's great to see how many people from all over the world contrib to the site!

Steven Greenwood: but is trying to return to wookiee

Mike Cooper: it seems like saxton-related stuff is all ewok comes here for these days

Steven Greenwood: yea the McEwok battles

Steven Greenwood: and theres plenty more where they came from

Mike Cooper: let's move on...looking back, how would you grade the site's first year anything you wish had been handled differently?

Steven Greenwood: and im sure more to come in the future

Chad Barbry: I can't believe we're at 25,000 articles in just a year

Steven Greenwood: well i wish i had a better wookiee relation with sparqman, we've bumped heads quite a bit

Aidan Hennessy: I would have liked to get firm groundrules down a bit earlier. We had a very stubby manual of style and no real consensus on a lot of issues, and it kind of caught us with our pants down

Steven Greenwood: yea it was always a work in progress

Mike Cooper: like where

Aidan Hennessy: For example, we're only know working out a proper consensus on article names....

Steven Greenwood: now

Chad Barbry: yeah, we still have some work to do in that area...even after a year

Mike Cooper: you call that working it out? =p

Aidan Hennessy: Good point. )

Chad Barbry: heh...nobody said concensus is easy

Steven Greenwood: ive been out of the loop recently due to classes but i try to get involved when i can

Steven Greenwood: and concensus is never perfect, theres always someone that wants something done differently

Chad Barbry: yeah, I'm married and have kids, so I can't contrib as much as most the regulars

Mike Cooper: how does the site define consensus, anyway? a lot of the current debates have been going for a bit now

Chad Barbry: I try to focus on the admin side of things...

Mike Cooper: seems like it's better to form a policy and anger a couple people than leave it in debate forever

Steven Greenwood: maintenance is the biggest problem, noone can end every vote at a given time seeing how large we've gotten

Mike Cooper: we need a new chancellor...a strong chancellor!

Chad Barbry: lol

Aidan Hennessy: I love democracy....

Steven Greenwood: as most of us also like to fix other things like spelling and categories and grammar and add stuff, etc

Mike Cooper: where's panaka when you need him

Steven Greenwood: ...the power you give me... ahem where were we?

Mike Cooper: i actually spent an hour or two early on working my way through the misspellings list...boy was that stupid

Chad Barbry: personally, I pay attention to who's voting what

Steven Greenwood: Aidje took that up also

Steven Greenwood: which lead us to making the admins pages for those who were assigned certain tasks

Aidan Hennessy: Yes.

Chad Barbry: heh..I worked on misspellings, too

Aidan Hennessy: Now there seems to be some sort of guide.

Steven Greenwood: i currently look over uncategorized categories and pages and new pages, though while avoiding Grievous spoilers, i had to hold off a bit

Chad Barbry: ...and wish we still had that feature, but the new version of MediaWiki doesn't have it

Mike Cooper: why'd we lose the spelling list, anyway?

Mike Cooper: did we have a choice?

Steven Greenwood: yea why did they can it, too hard on the system?

Mike Cooper: ah, nm

Chad Barbry: no, MediaWiki is the software that runs the site

Aidan Hennessy: Not sure.

Aidan Hennessy: Not a fan of the new search, either

Chad Barbry: when the site was upgraded to 1.5, we lost it because it was no longer maintained code in the MediaWiki project

Steven Greenwood: a hint for searching, try typing a slash (/) after the word, that will pull up all instances of that

Chad Barbry: thanks...didn't know that Riff

Steven Greenwood: at least you could do that with version 1 like Wookiee and find all instances of Wookiee

Steven Greenwood: sorry i didnt notify you earlier

Mike Cooper: speaking of which, i should mention that we're starting to see bots (automatic users who make lots of minor preprogrammed edits) play a role now...how do you guys feel about that do you think there might be a point when bots will take care of 100% of the minor stuff, and users can just focus on articles and sources?

Steven Greenwood: ah Artoo

Chad Barbry: I like the concept of bots, but there's only so much they can do

Steven Greenwood: automated socities are fun, but humans have to intervene

Steven Greenwood: societies

Steven Greenwood: it would help clean stuff up that is monotonous though

Chad Barbry: they can do things like detect if there's not Sources section and if there isn't add the template

Steven Greenwood: thanks to sikon for programming Artoo

Aidan Hennessy: The bots are certainly useful for the really tedious, repetitive stuff

Chad Barbry: yep

Mike Cooper: right, chad - if they can do that, there's all kinds of stuff that should theoretically be possible

Aidan Hennessy: Artoo's up for Wookieepedian of the month, too. ;) Whatta guy...

Steven Greenwood: it will also change them to dated sources templates

Steven Greenwood: idk about that Quent

Chad Barbry: but you do have to be careful when programming them because they can drag the system if they're not programmed right (from what I understand)

Chad Barbry: QG lol...is he really...haven't seen that

Steven Greenwood: seems he only goes as fast as our fastest humans

Chad Barbry: yep, some of those guys are all over it!

Steven Greenwood: omg, Artoo really is up for WOTM

Aidan Hennessy: Whoops )

Mike Cooper: what i think would be nice is if there could be one that makes stub articles for redlinks...even if they're just �Teevan was a planet� =)

Steven Greenwood: well Quentin what do you have to say for yourself

Chad Barbry: lol...you've been reading the Uncyclopedia article, haven't you?

Mike Cooper: of course

Steven Greenwood: yea that was crazy, i almost fell out of my chair

Steven Greenwood: sikon wrote most of that too

Steven Greenwood: delusions of grandeur, ha

Aidan Hennessy: Hey, it's all true.

Chad Barbry: yeah, it was great

Aidan Hennessy: ....from a certain point of view....

Steven Greenwood: so we're good at adding our own biographies, no biggie

Chad Barbry: heh... who was it that asked us to do that, anyway

Steven Greenwood: someone who really looked up to us

Steven Greenwood: Aziz maybe

Steven Greenwood: Aziz.... light

Chad Barbry: yep...Aziz...just looked on my talk page

Mike Cooper: aziz is a good cat

Steven Greenwood: Aziz is a sport

Chad Barbry: definitely

Mike Cooper: gotta love the name reference

Steven Greenwood: i love that movie too

Chad Barbry: what movie?

Steven Greenwood: The Fifth Element

Mike Cooper: aziz's name is a reference to a line in it

Chad Barbry: ah, yeah..good flick. Missed the reference, tho.

Steven Greenwood: in the beginning the archaologist is looking at the wall with the elements and aziz loses the outside light

Mike Cooper: Aziz! LIGHT!!!

Steven Greenwood: to which he screams Aziz, Light

Steven Greenwood: thank you Aziz

Steven Greenwood: lol

Chad Barbry: lol

Aidan Hennessy: I mainly remember Luke Perry from that scene.

Aidan Hennessy: My main reaction was Isn't he dead of a drug overdose

Mike Cooper: aaaaaaaaanyway, winding down...what's wookieepedia year two looking like so far? plans? hopes? bears? boasts?

Mike Cooper: hey, that almost rhymed

Chad Barbry: I remember spending half the movie trying to figure out if Chris Tucker was a guy or girl

Chad Barbry: lol

Mike Cooper: heh

Steven Greenwood: very eccentric guy

Mike Cooper: that was the absolute peak of his career

Steven Greenwood: he likes women but screams like a girl

Aidan Hennessy: Wookieepedia year two....um.... I guess what I'd like to see is a year of consolidation.

Mike Cooper: he's prince 2.0

Steven Greenwood: a year of cleanup

Aidan Hennessy: We've got lots and lots of articles, but a lot of them are, lets be honest, pretty crappy.

Steven Greenwood: right, not so much expansion but beautification

Aidan Hennessy: Hey, let's not go nuts. )

Chad Barbry: yes, we have alot of articles. Not as many as CUSWE, but we're getting there. But I agree with Quentin

Steven Greenwood: i mean those short stubs need to be expanded, but theres some real crap that needs a wookieeenema

Mike Cooper: the completely unofficial SW encyclopedia is generally said to be around 50k articles; care to hazard some guesses on when you'll pass it?

Steven Greenwood: next year

Aidan Hennessy: Hmm...what are we now?

Mike Cooper: i so did not need the mental image of a wookiee enema

Steven Greenwood: 25K

Chad Barbry: over 25

Steven Greenwood: nearly 26

Aidan Hennessy: around half...

Mike Cooper: but speeding up steadily

Aidan Hennessy: ....so I guess we should hit around there before our second anniversary.

Steven Greenwood: chewie's chugging along in the wikilocomotive

Chad Barbry: we could do it in the next year, but I wouldn't bet on it

Aidan Hennessy: Everything is proceeding as planned.

Steven Greenwood: lol

Mike Cooper: you really don't think so, chad?

Mike Cooper: has new article creation actually slowed?

Chad Barbry: it's really hard to say because we don't have the stats we used to

Chad Barbry: they had to disable that because of the server load

Steven Greenwood: though the biggest advantage we have is the linking and ease of navigation versus CUSWE, theyve tryed revamping to compete i bet

Aidan Hennessy: Yeah...they canned the handy stats page.

Steven Greenwood: poor mr vitas is being overwhelmed

Chad Barbry: but we have alot more people starting this year out than we did the first year! )

Steven Greenwood: yea publicity is key

Mike Cooper: i think he might've been working on that prior to the wiki competition, actually

Steven Greenwood: thanks to TFN for placing us up on top of the forums and making our thread a sticky

Mike Cooper: it was certainly a long time in coming

Chad Barbry: so we could easily do it with so many people working on it

Steven Greenwood: ah ok

Chad Barbry: yeah, thanks!

Steven Greenwood: maybe he saw into the future :P

Mike Cooper: i wonder what the wiki would look like at this point if we hadn't had CUSWE as a resource

Chad Barbry: we really have some talented people in that regard

Aidan Hennessy: Certainly no teevan was a planet ;)

Steven Greenwood: btw, we can still tell our rate of increase by counting the days between article anniversaries

Aidan Hennessy: Squashing fanon would be a lot harder too. So, we've relied a lot on CUSWE.

Steven Greenwood: ive relied more on actual books and less on CUSWE

Chad Barbry: ...in the regard of publicity, that is

Steven Greenwood: LtNOWIS uses CUSWE to find copyvios of which there are plenty

Aidan Hennessy: Unless you own every book on Star Wars ever, CUSWE is still useful... ;)

Chad Barbry: I use CUSWE to help fill in when I don't know the sources for an article

Steven Greenwood: are you sure CUSWE is that accurate?

Aidan Hennessy: It's better than no sources at all.

Steven Greenwood: right

Mike Cooper: steven, i've been using it for around 6 years, and i've never seen an error

Steven Greenwood: yes sir

Chad Barbry: yes, we need to work on the copyvio's...they are way too many, and we're not correcting them enough

Aidan Hennessy: Exactly.

Aidan Hennessy: That's part of the consolidation work that needs to be done.

Steven Greenwood: shall we permanently assign LT to work on that

Chad Barbry: we might identify them, but we've got to work on correcting them

Mike Cooper: the articles aren't always poetry, but vitas is a fact machine

Steven Greenwood: he's been quite the copyvio sniffer

Chad Barbry: yes, Vitas does a great job

Steven Greenwood: yea, but couldnt he at least write in full sentences

Aidan Hennessy: Exactly Cooper, Vitas's stuff has been invaluable to us. So he deserves kudos.

Steven Greenwood: then again i guess thats how we know its a copyvio

Mike Cooper: heh

Chad Barbry: lol

Steven Greenwood: but i agree, Vitas is just as helpful, he's our predecessor

Mike Cooper: i'm usually the first person to make a big deal about grammar, but i'm inclined to give a guy a pass when he's done 50k articles essntially on his own =)

Steven Greenwood: right

Chad Barbry: no doubt

Aidan Hennessy: Exactly....that's why I never picked on JustinGann... ;)

Mike Cooper: lol

Chad Barbry: I wondered...is it really all on his own?

Mike Cooper: hey, teevan was a planet is a gramamtically correct sentence =p

Steven Greenwood: yea, i was too harsh to correct him on his 10000 edits

Mike Cooper: he cites people as having helped, but it's unclear if they�re writing articles and he's just pasting them in, or if they're only supplying the info

Chad Barbry: I could hardly believe that when I first heard that...that's just a machine!

Chad Barbry: work it, man!

Steven Greenwood: now another guy just as devoted, though outside the wiki realm is Carty

Mike Cooper: heck yeah

Steven Greenwood: a personal idol of mine

Mike Cooper: carty being cartographer, webmaster of nav-computer.com

Steven Greenwood: right

Steven Greenwood: anyone who creates a galactic map that complex and detailed is a god

Steven Greenwood: ok maybe thats a bit far but hes quite good at what he does

Mike Cooper: i'm really hoping we end up using the map on the wiki

Chad Barbry: yeah, it's cool how people get their own niches they contrib to

Aidan Hennessy: Yeah

Mike Cooper: just imagine...little zoomed-in sections for each sector article, and so on

Steven Greenwood: i'm all for it and he supports us, even giving us permission to use them

Chad Barbry: like Google Earth!

Steven Greenwood: as long as we maintain to give him full credit for them

Steven Greenwood: whoa

Chad Barbry: that's what we need )

Steven Greenwood: i'm addicted to Google Earth, don�t even go there D

Chad Barbry: that'll be year three D

Steven Greenwood: lol

Aidan Hennessy: Sounds like a lot of work for the poor boy

Mike Cooper: google earth freaking rules

Steven Greenwood:  google earth rocks 

Mike Cooper: i have a 6-foot long satellite photo of manhattan hanging in my room that i put together manually from a site like google

Chad Barbry: is he involved any with Wookieepedia that you know of

Chad Barbry: cool

Steven Greenwood: carty

Mike Cooper: haven't seen him around

Chad Barbry: yeah

Mike Cooper: gotta respect him for sticking to the site though

Steven Greenwood: only to support us but doesn�t contribute if thats what you mean

Chad Barbry: yeah, that's what I meant

Steven Greenwood: Justin was the main contact however and he's since disappeared

Steven Greenwood: we should look through the forums at TFN

Mike Cooper: he's still around as cilghal, i believe

Steven Greenwood: yea thats his name there

Steven Greenwood: to which i believed he was a woman at first

Steven Greenwood: wrongo

Mike Cooper: we all did

Mike Cooper: his fault

Steven Greenwood: lol

Aidan Hennessy: Hahah....

Chad Barbry: :)

Steven Greenwood: but its his second favorite character and ackbar was taken already

Steven Greenwood: btw, Cooper, a little off subject but I have panoramic collages of the martian landscape by the rovers, longest being about 6 feet, hows that for cool?

Mike Cooper: i guess we're basically done...any final thoughts?

Steven Greenwood: vote for me

Mike Cooper: no

Steven Greenwood: j/k

Chad Barbry: thanks for doing this

Mike Cooper: thanks for participating

Steven Greenwood: yea thanks alot Coop

Aidan Hennessy: If we could only harness the power of the Palpatine article to the rest of the wiki...

Chad Barbry: lol

Steven Greenwood: hah

Steven Greenwood: Unlimited Power

Mike Cooper: we should do another one with bob vitas sometime...he was one of the first roundtable participants

Chad Barbry: I was impressed how quickly the Tonnika sisters article happened )

Aidan Hennessy: POWER!!!! Unlliiiimited power!

Chad Barbry: yeah, that'd be cool

Steven Greenwood: that would be interesting to say the least

Mike Cooper: i should try that trick again...just make a news post saying hey, you! make an article about _______!

Chad Barbry: lol...worked, didn't it

Steven Greenwood: and it might happen

Chad Barbry: well, thanks guys

Steven Greenwood: same here

Mike Cooper: i guess i'll just close by saying thanks again, and congratulations on lasting a year...same time in '07?

Steven Greenwood: i guess so

Chad Barbry: sure thing

Aidan Hennessy: Yep.

In closing, I apologize again to those of you who don't know what we're talking about. If there's another Roundtable after this one, and things are looking up in that regard, I promise it'll be more accessible.