User blog:Misterhaan/Wow, there are six admins here and it’s still this much of a mess

I started playing Terraria and thought a reference like people usually set up on wikia.com would be useful, so typed in terraria.wikia.com and found this site. Easy; I already use wikia so I can jump in and fix the awkwardly-worded stuff and add links that are missing, and I can get a lot of the information I’m looking for.

So that was cool for a while. I looked up a bunch of stuff and got most of the information I wanted, and made some small improvements as I came across things I could make better.

Then I tried to move in a little; set up more on my user page than just when I bought the game and a link to my Steam profile. I put up screenshots of my bases. In one of the file’s descriptions I linked to the articles of the stuff you could see in my base, but I didn’t want “copper chandelier” to be capitalized since it’s not a title. That works fine for pages with one-word titles (you can do door, or even doors and have it link to Door), but since mediawiki makes titles case-sensitive except for the first letter, you need to either put copper chandelier every time you want to link to it, or just once create a page with a lower case title redirecting to the page with the upper case title. I went with the redirect page because it helps everyone else.

Then I get a poorly-worded message on my talk page which said (paraphrased) “I saw you added some redirect pages so I deleted them. Don’t do that anymore.” Whoa, I’m just trying to help make this site better, but right away an admin decides to undo part of my work and breaks my links. So now the idea of helping out any other way looks like it may be a waste of time because this admin might just undo it out of the blue without bothering to find out why I did it. I asked why it was a problem to have redirects from lower case page names to upper case pages and explained why I wanted them and decided to stop making edits here until I heard back in a way that at least gave me an idea of what sort of contributions were unwelcome here.

A short time later I stumbled across the official Terraria wiki when looking for a program that would show my what my Terraria world looked like if I could see the whole thing lit up all at once. If you’re interested, I found a program named Terra Firma that was pretty slow at zooming in and out but otherwise did what I wanted. I thought it was strange that there’s activity on wikia for Terraria when there’s an official wiki for it. Maybe the people here don’t know about the official one, or they like some of the features wikia offers that aren’t available in the less-customized mediawiki in use at the official wiki. Either way I found that the official wiki is more complete, better organized, looks better, and has less grammar and spelling problems. Also it’s official so that’s a bonus. So I decided to use that instead. I don’t like the new popup preview that wikia does (and I can’t seem to turn off) since it doesn’t look like the page is actually going to look. More specifically, it doesn’t understand redirect pages and it doesn’t show categories.

I hadn’t seen a response from the admin who deleted my redirects yet but updated my user page to say I wasn’t editing here anymore because I found the official wiki. Out of curiosity, I looked at the main page and the Terraria pages on the wikia Terraria wiki to see if there were any links to the Terraria sites like the other wikia wiki sites I use do. I noticed there’s no external links on the main page, but there are SIX admins listed. Somehow that doesn’t seem to be enough though, because there’s a lot of poorly-written and / or poorly-organized content here. Maybe there’s a small army of low-quality editors keeping the content quality levels low that’s really too much for six people to keep at bay, but based on my interactions with one admin I assume the good people left for the official wiki and the ones left don’t really know what they’re doing. I don’t intend to be mean to the admins here by saying that, I’m just trying out wikia’s blog feature to detail my experience.