User blog:Wikikinetic/Chima Community Update

Hello, everyone! I'm here to announce a big step forward in the Chima wiki community, as well as what's next on the agenda for trying to make things even better than they already are.

For a bit of background: I have a great interest in trying to unify the Chima community and in making a place where all Chima fans can gather to help improve information on Chima, share their ideas on it, and, above all, be a cohesive community where people can see that other people exist and can interact with them.

With that out of the way, I'm pleased to announce that, with the conclusion of the recent eight-way Chima wiki merger project, all of the official Chima information from across all wikis dedicated to displaying Chima information has now been moved to this wiki, creating a single place for people to write about canon information (and, to a lesser extent, creating a place for people to talk about Chima via the wiki forums and the Discord server).

That said, there are still some things that I think could be even better, and I have some ideas for how to fix them. Below I'm going to list what I see as still being some problems, and how I think that they could be fixed.

The problem that I'm seeing is: Although all of the Chima canon wiki information is now here, allowing people to fix it up and work together in one place, the community itself isn't unified yet. The wiki merger and the amazing networking efforts by the community have indeed made this wiki's community become a reality; however, although there is this community on this wiki for official information, half of the Chima community as a whole is on various wikis for fan-created Chima works. Furthermore, even on this canon wiki, most of this wiki's editors (myself included) have an interest in creating fan works themselves, causing some problems with both official and unofficial items being here, both being on the fan wikis, confusions as to what should go where, and so on. As a result, there are two communities that essentially cover the same topics, but that are split by these wiki designations.

The solution that I have in mind would be to merge the fan-made information into this wiki. Of course, fan information would be flagged as such; I certainly do not want any confusion over what is official and what is fan-made. However, with that distinction in place, I do think that it would make sense to take all Chima information, official and unofficial, and place it on this wiki in order to allow the participation of all Chima fans, whether their interests are in official information, fan works, or both, and thus allow all Chima fans to work together on anything Chima-related as a community.

Those are my thoughts on this. If anyone has any thoughts about this, please let me know on Discord or in the comments below. I'm also telling the editors of the fan wikis about this idea in order to let them give their input as well, as I really do want input from anyone interested in and involved in the Chima project.

Thanks in advance for any feedback! I look forward to seeing your responses.

• Done: Announced the merger to see what people think of the proposal.
• Done: Waited a week to get feedback.
• Done: Create a template to place at the top of fan pages denoting their fan status. (link)
• Done: Write up a policy supplement on what fan content can be uploaded and how it should be dealt with, adjusting the current policy to deal with this and to fit the current Chima community. (link)
• In progress (≥3/4 done): Import the fan pages from the four fan wikis (not including the Roleplay one) into this wiki.
• In progress (≥3/4 done): Import any images from the above pages to this wiki.
• In progress (3/4 done): Have the four fan wikis (not including the Roleplay one) closed by Staff.

See this merger document for further details.

To-Do (show/hide)