User blog:ToaAuserv/Please Read and Comment: To-Do List Following Reboot Announcement

Hi everyone. As you're obviously aware of by now, today was the big day and we finally have confirmation that BIONICLE 2015 is a reboot as well as some basic information about the story. I'm just speaking as a member of the community here, but since no one else has done this yet I figured I'd take the opportunity to get this out there to save an admin the trouble of writing it up. As follows is a rough list of things that need to happen regarding the 2015 information in no particular order. Some of this stuff people can be doing now, and others I think we should talk about as a community.

Naming Scheme
I started out naming the reboot pages that had the same name as existing articles with (2015), as in "Mask of Creation (2015)". Bold Clone moved them all to (Reboot) instead which seems to be what we're going with right now, but I still kind of feel that (2015) would be better. As you can see here and on their social media pages, even Lego is using the #BIONICLE2015 hashtag as a way to distinguish the new BIONICLE from the old BIONICLE. I feel that (2015) also looks more encyclopedic (and, not to mention, it's less of a hassle to type with the links). I'm cool with (Reboot) if people prefer that, but I'm just curious to see what the community as a whole feels is best.

If we do stay with (Reboot), I think redirects at least need to be made at "Mask of Creation (2015)," "Makuta (2015)," etc., because several pages were already using links to those which are now redlinks to articles that already exist. That is a recipe for wasting people's time writing dupe articles. On another note, I'm not sure why Maskmakers (Reboot) should have the (Reboot) tag when Okoto, Mask of Control, and Ekimu do not. We need a consistent policy on how to handle the titles of the 2015 articles and it needs to go in the Manual of Style.

Other Incarnations
We also need to figure out how we want to deal with signifying the articles for versions of the same character/object from the different continuities. I was doing this under ==Other Incarnations==, but several pages now have it under See Also with smalltext "(original story counterpart)". This seems like the better idea to me, as several articles have existing See Also sections while only a handful would need Other Incarnations sections and for the foreseeable future no Other Incarnations subheading would actually have more than one item in the list. In any case, we need to come up with a standardized way to do this, put it in the Manual of Style, and put it into place across all eighteen pages currently affected (i.e., the pre- and post-reboot articles for the Toa Mata, Teridax/Makuta, and the Mask of Creation).

Templates
We need a template like Template:Toa Mata/Toa Nuva for the 2015 Toa. This should be quite easy for someone to do and put on the seven pages where it would currently belong. I would do it myself but I'm afraid I'm totally inept with templates.

Additionally, I think it would be prudent to replace the word "Kanohi" in the character infobox with "Mask." From what I understand, the word Kanohi is not being dropped in the reboot, but we haven't seen it used even once yet and it looks like we will at the least no longer be getting unique names for Kanohi. To avoid the awkward presence of the word "Kanohi" on the 2015 articles where it might not be a relevant term, I suggest we use the neutral term "Mask" which will work for all character articles.

Articles we still need
We have information on the Protectors, albeit not much, but enough for an article. We also still need Mask of Unlimited Power. A Skull Spider/Lord of Skull Spiders article might be merited but I personally would hold off on that until we know more about them and their role in the story. It might be a good idea to make an article for the video Lego released today, with a summary and link to it, but this could go on the 2015 page instead (which I'll talk about more in the next section).

Protections
The 2015, Lewa, Gali, Tahu, Pohatu, Kopaka, Toa Mata/Toa Nuva, Mask of Creation, and Legendary Kanohi pages are all protected and no longer need to be. 2015 needs to be created. The rest are irrelevant to the new story and will not be subject to spoilers because of the existence of the articles for the 2015 articles for those characters now, so they should be available for people to edit as needed. We don't have to worry about leaked images or information for the time being and probably won't again until the summer sets start to leak which won't be for months.

New theme and general TBW improvements
This is a longer term thing, since I don't know if we actually have anyone who knows how Wikia themes work here, but the Bara Magna theme is obviously way outdated and it would be cool to have something more representative of Okoto, or to return to the old Bioniclepedia theme if nothing else.

And hearkening back to SM's blog entry here, we need to work on our Manual of Style, the navigation bar on top and the main page badly need to be updated, and all in all there's lots of work to be done if we want to be taken seriously as a Bionicle wiki going forward into the new story. TBW still comes up before BS01 on most Google searches, so while we're well beyond the hope of overtaking BS01 as prime Bionicle wiki or anything, we can revive this community with the traffic our favorable Google spot combined with the return of Bionicle gets us.

But we need to be ready for that influx of new members. Right now we don't even have a Site Leader, there are only two active admins out of the five listed on wiki staff template on the main page, Bold Clone isn't even on there, and the only member with bureaucrat powers has not edited any Wikia wiki in nearly a year. Expanding and restructuring the admin team is a must, in my opinion. I think it would be a good idea to begin a community-wide discussion on who should be the new Site Leader (a status which has traditionally come with bureaucrat powers, I should point out), whether we should promote additional bureaucrats, and whether we should promote additional sysops. If we do decide to promote new admins, we either have to get MG's attention or ask Wikia Staff.

This is just a side thing but it just occurred to me and I figured I'd mention it. I think we should have an IRC channel. Back in the day, #bioniclepedia on Mibbit was a nice little hub for the wiki's members to chat, and I think having a #tbw on Mibbit, or enabling Wikia's chat, would be fun and help to bring the community together. It's something to consider.

TL;DR
In list format:

Things for us to discuss

 * Restructuring and expanding the admin team
 * Starting an IRC channel for TBW

Things to do now if you can

 * Removing the protections on the Toa Mata/Nuva pages
 * Making TBW a new theme based around Okoto
 * Discussing the items of the above list!

Even the TL;DR wound up pretty long, whoops. Anyway, please discuss in the comments or the wiki forums if you prefer.