Forum:NIWA and Us

Ok, so all of us that aren't living under a rock know that we are going to at least affiliate with NIWA, hopefully completely move there. The reason we have not done so already is because we have not heard everyone's opinion on this. So this topic is just for that purpose, to see what everyone thinks. Except for Anons, as we have not had the best track record with them and having good content. Also when/if we move you will have to make an account to edit, and this has an incredibly low chance of going away.

So, you already know my opinion on this, so I'll mostly just moderate.--Sir Pikmin

More About NIWA
I just want to clarify a few things. After reading some messages, I should let you know there's no NIWA to move to. It may seem to be another wiki generator like Wikia, but its more like a brotherhood, a collection of independent wikis on Nintendo published content. If this wiki decides to move, you'd be moving to your own property and url. Someone at NIWA could help out every step of the way, but unlike Wikia staff, we aren't paid for the work we do, We just do it because we want to see great wikis and have strong partners to show members of our home wikis so they can see Pikmin info/fanon.

For example, the story of WiKirby. I was an active and well liked admin at ZeldaWiki.org. I was looking for independent wikis to affiliate ZeldaWiki.org with. There's a lot of Kirby references in Zelda games and a few Zelda references in Kirby games. Linking to Wikipedia was getting too boring. I wanted to link to fanmade wikis run by people that care about the subject and not just accomodating it to turn a profit. I found Kirbypedia, but it seemed dead, the Recent Changes were a ghost town and the owner never responded to me. We didn't ask the Wikia guys for a partnership because at the time ZeldaWiki.org was having tons of problems from Zeldapedia.wikia.com. We decided that even if the Wikia of a series wanted to partner with us, the actual Wikia staff could change it all to their own Zeldapedia. Sooooo time went by and we started NIWA, with one goal being to have fan-run sites to link to for specific series, and another to help each other figure out new coding, extensions, and bug fixing. We decided that a hub forum would be the best meeting ground, members of our wikis can meet other wiki editors. I thought, "Well somebody is going to create an independent Kirby wiki. So it might as well be us, that way we can make something high quality." And thus WiKirby was born. It would not be near as good as it is without the help of people from MarioWiki.com and Bulbapedia, plus us from Zelda Wiki.

They helped us with alot of stuff, constant support, gave us traffic with the NIWAbar on their mainpages. And we helped them with some stuff. We helped Wars Wiki get things done, We suggested to Bulbapedia to put all of the rounded corner code in a template like we did and have cleaner page code-ups, We've told Mario Wiki guys how to automatically rotate things on their mainpage, but I think they prefer to assign it as regular jobs for staff members. The list of how each wiki helped one another could go on for a long time, but I'll stop there. In short, I own WiKirby, I can change the skin tomorrow if I want to, but I have no power over any of the other wikis, and they have no power over WiKirby. It's a peaceful friendship. But yes, we carefully review which wikis are going to be actual members of NIWA. It's something that has to be earned and not just given out. There are wikis working on earning their membership now, and will be more in the future. Sorry for the long post, thanks for reading and I hope that clears up everything about NIWA. Hope to see you guys independently running soon! Be your own bosses! Axiomist 05:20, September 8, 2010 (UTC)


 * Long posts are fine! Yes, I know that there is no NIWA to move to, I'm just using move for a lack of a better word I guess. I get that NIWA is more like a brotherhood of independent Wikis, willing to help each other out but with none having control of the others. This is great and we really want to be a part of it, but the only thing that is currently holding us back is money sadly. I can't legally work yet, and it appears the same for Peanut. Game does work, but he has been away for some time. And Portal has been gone for a long time, he is also an admin here..


 * Then there's also the issue of gaining support and user migration. I'm almost 100% sure we'll lose Yoshord once we start up the new site, but it appears the everyone else will make the journey. That's bad because he basically keeps the peace around here when we are busy, and he's my favorite user so I'm kinda biased here.


 * On a side note, I read that NIWA would affiliate with Non-Nintendo sites. Is this correct? If so, I have a website that would be looking to affiliate. If it helps, it is also tied in with this Wiki as it is (soon to be) the prime distributor of all its' fanon games with the community's permission. And it's my site, if you hadn't already figured that out. --Sir Pikmin

New Wiki Set Up
Thanks to Volatile Dweevil for alerting me on the response. I just asked Porplemontage if his offer still stood and he wrote back "I set up a wiki at pikminwiki.com that they could move to at any time." I'm not expecting that to cost any of you any money at all. Axiomist 04:16, September 10, 2010 (UTC)


 * Don't move yet guys, I asked Porplemontage if we will be able to manage the site ourselves. This should allow us to utilize features such as non-wiki pages and subdomains easily, and hopefully he will be able to help us move in when we want to. Volatile Dweevil 06:15, September 10, 2010 (UTC)


 * Actually, I've been here, just hidden. Gamefreak75

The easiest way to move pages would be to use the MediaWiki import/export pages feature. I'd like to keep the wiki itself locked down, and I would manage your extensions. But I'd be happy to give you access to other subdomains or directories on the site for you to manage. --Porplemontage 19:43, September 10, 2010 (UTC)

Volatile Dweevil's Thoughts and Ideas

 * Ok guys, here's my evil plan thoughts and ideas.


 * I messaged Greenpickle on Pikipedia, asking if he wanted Pikipedia to also move to pikminwiki.com. If Pikipedia agrees, then we can either totally integrate the two wikis (bad idea) or we can separate the wikis into two sub-domains, like maybe fanon.pikminwiki.com and pikipedia.pikminwiki.com, and use the pikminwiki.com as a navigation page. I, personally, am for the latter option. We could also create a forums.pikminwiki.com for forums. From what Porplemontage said, this seems to be completely possible. I'm very well acquainted with html and could design a nice navigation page. If we went with the subdomains we could add whatever other features we think of later. Think about it for a bit while we wait for pikipedia's response. After that, we can decide on it and contact Porplemontage to tell him the final results.


 * Also, we need to decide if we want to invite Pikminia, the German Pikipedia, and maybe we could add a de.pikminwiki.com.


 * Also, if either Pikipedia and Pikminia decide to join us, would be be able to create an interwiki and/or interlanguage sidebar(s)? This seems like it would be simple, but I'm not sure if anyone on this wiki knows how to make one of these


 * To Sir Pikmin: I'm not so sure about losing Yoshord... He wouldn't just leave his wiki because the domain name changes, would he?


 * If we are going to join the NIWA, we should have a nice, neat logo for PikminWiki like all the other NIWA wikis. What does everybody think about this:


 * PikminWiki_Logo.png


 * I think it looks nice, neat and is to the point. Any suggestions?

Please read everything and at least the admins should respond one section at a time to this comment.


 * V o l atil e  Dwe ev il


 * I was honestly hoping for a friendly rivalry with Pikipedia, but it doesn't really matter. In addition to w:c:de.pikmin, there is also w:c:it.pikmin and w:c:fr.pikmin, even though they are empty, which wasn't really worth noting. I might drop out if I have to sign up for another site, but I won't, probably. Lastly, nice logo. --Yoshord

Greenpickle's Response
I was actually already contacted by someone else regarding this, and waiting on a reply from another person, but I'm not sure if it was getting anywhere. So yes, I'm for the move.

Firstly, and I don't mean to play down the importance of this wiki, but I think Pikipedia should be where the currently set up wiki is (at the domain's root), with this one in a 'fanon' subdomain. I've always thought of Pikipedia as the primary one, considering that wikis are traditionally encyclopaediae, comprised of facts and canon stuff, whereas user creations are less commonly presented as wikis - and the fact it's 'the original', as it were. Of course, if this happened, you'd link between them. Any other-language wikis that wanted to move would be fine at the standard subdomains, as Wikipedia and Wikia do it.

Regarding a separate subdomain for forums, I'm not sure: an advantage of forums within the wiki is that there's no need to create an extra account, and you can embed images on the wiki and more easily link to articles. Of course, if there were ever enough activity to make a separate social forum (not discussing wiki matters) useful, it would be fine. Actually, most of the conversations on talk pages would be better somewhere like that. Although, thinking about it, wouldn't NIWA's central forums suffice for social stuff?

Your logo: obviously, being fans, we instantly see the end of the game, but otherwise, the Pikmin is a bit indistinct. As I see it, logos should be simple - you know, something like a leaf or flower on a bit of a Pikmin stem. And maybe stylistic, not from the games: look at Bulbapedia's, which I think is great. The best logos use bright colours, are scalable and are recognisable even at a small scale. And I'm not trying to attack you, but to be honest, I hate the text, both colour and font.

I think it would be best to design a logo along with a skin, so it all fits: plus, competition is great. Regarding that, if we're thinking of it already, I think it's easier to have something that lets the content area stay white for various reasons. Maybe themed around an in-game area? Something along the lines of the title screen? (This is pretty.) I'm not very creative, though, so that's a question for others.

Also, it's obviously a bit late now, which kind of makes this not worth bringing up, but I'm not a fan of .com - it's synonymous with commercial organisations, whereas .org is more widely associated with non-profit organisations.

About the migration: I've heard Special:Export/Import are prone to timeouts for large numbers of pages. If whoever's doing it has trouble, Wikia makes partial (pages only) database dumps available at Special:Statistics, which are probably meant to be imported directly into the database somehow. Otherwise, we could run a bot to migrate everything. - Greenpickle

No offense to you at Pikipedia, but my initial idea was to set up our own Pikmin Wiki... But, in the long run, the best canon Pikmin articles do exist at Pikipedia, so it would be wiser if we link up. So, all of these ideas work great together, and I think this could work out.


 * Some comments:

@Greenpickle: I believe the logo that Dweevil made was great, but your simple logo idea was better. Although I would frown on having Pikipedia's current logo, it could be the default if we can't come up with a good logo by then. We could colorize the Pikmin icon from Brawl, because it sounds like a good idea to me.

@Gamefreak: I knew you hadn't left us. :)

So, anyways, I will make a makeshaft logo in a little bit, and let's see what everyone thinks. -Peanut64



Done. This one is without words, until we decide what to call us when we move, then I will gladly add words. -Peanut64


 * Oh, no, I wasn't thinking of the Pikipedia logo. I think the Brawl icon is perhaps too simple on its own, and I'm not sure of the licensing on it, but I do like it. Of course, if we had a new skin that wasn't green, it would be better in another colour (since all you did was colour it). It'd be nice to see ideas from other people too.


 * Also, heh, 'makeshaft'. - Greenpickle

New Logo/Domain Name
What about one of these old pictures I made for the rank system? (Yes, I could make a pink bud, too, but I doubt people would vote for it) V o l atil e   Dwe ev il

I thought these matched the description of simple, but not too simple. In addition, these images are not copyrighted. In response to the domain name, I have a new suggestion. A navigation type page between the wikis will be at pikminwiki.com. This navigation page will hopefully help traffic more users to visit Pikmin Fanon, allow easy access for german speaking users, and, all english speaking users will be pikmin fans anyways, so they would almost certainly still visit Pikipedia. Pikipedia could be at pikminwiki.com/wiki and pikmin fanon could be at fanon.pikminwiki.com. To me this sounds like everyone wins. Oh, and does anyone mind the amount of space my "No Signature Policy" sig takes up on the edit page? V o l atil e  Dwe ev il

Ok wow, a lot to get to. First off I would like to thank Green for coming in and expressing his concern about this and to thank porple for setting up the site. I've begun to use the Export feature to copy some pages over to my computer for the move. Now to answer everyone's comments.

@Green:The basic idea was to do it the way you described, with the fanon things with a fanon namespace. And I'm not really sure what we'd do about the background and the logo, but maybe we can just use the background that Pikipedia currently has for now, and then change it later if necessary. We can just use the recolored Brawl logo, as that one is ambiguous enough until we figure out our new name.

And a big problem arises with the two of our wikis joining together, what will our admin situation be? And a slightly smaller problem is, what do we do about Crys? A solution could be to have your magnificent hide/show x for the recent changes on, so a user could copy the code and change it as needed. Would you think that would placate him?

And "heh, 'makeshaft'" indeed.

@Yoshord:OK, thanks for replying and I'm sorry that I made that semi-maybe-baseless decision about you not coming with us. But I'm sure you could see why I would make it. @Peanut:I put a message on Portal's talk page, so he should come soon and see what we've been up to. It's just now fair to leave him out of this for any longer.

@Game:That's one of the reasons why I would want a 'Who is Online Now' feature somewhere, even though I know that the Find a User thing we have can tell you the users' last log-on time. It just isn't that economical to have to click over three times to get to that.

@Dweevil:Yeah, your NSP sig is a bit too big on the edit page. Perhaps you can template it into a subpage of your userpage, such as Volatile Dweevil/NSPsig?

And many thanks to all of the NIWA people for making this all happen! --Sir Pikmin

Our Extensions
Ok Porple, so now that the separate Wiki is up we have a bit of maintenance work to do. First off should be re-installing our current extensions. Here's a list:
 * Ogg Handler
 * The one for Achievements, which I can't seem to find anywhere. The Help Wiki classifies it as the 'Achievements' Extension, but the actual MediaWiki Extension download place doesn't. If it can't be found then that's fine, but I hope we can find it.
 * Maybe blogs if the community wants it back, as we had them disabled.
 * And of course the other required ones, but that goes without saying.

Thanks! --Sir Pikmin

We need to sort out the domains before we install any extensions, move any pages, or do anything to the new domain. And about joining them together? We're not. My proposition (see above) was to have pikminwiki.com as a navigation page, pikminwiki.com/wiki as Pikipedia, and fanon.pikminwiki.com as our wikis. The navigation page would ensure higher activity on both wikis, without another wiki stealing potential users. No, I don't think we should just "join them together." That pretty much fixes our Crys problem.Volatile Dweevil

Be that as it may, I was under the impression that we were. Though I am wondering where this decision about having them come with us came from in the first place, or who even made it. I assume that you did Dweevil, and upon inspection of the Pikipedia Recent Changes you did. While you really should of asked beforehand, I would of agreed to let you do that. But you didn't and it's too late now, so we're stuck with whatever decision is made. Just like before with Peanut, but not as bad.

And this is the worst time to have to do this, but I don't really have a choice. I'm not going to be here for the next two or three days for some things I'd really not want to mention anywhere. But as I'm kinda-almost-maybe-semi-important around here it'll be on my userpage so you know what's going on. Can you guys keep from doing too much important things while I'm gone? --Sir Pikmin


 * "Though I am wondering where this decision about having them come with us came from in the first place, or who even made it." - Like I said, I was separately contacted by different people from NIWA, but Porple happened to create a domain before anything happened there. I think having both wikis together (as in, at the same domain as discussed, not integrated in one wiki) would be great, and really help the communities mix and flourish, with joint social forums.  I think using /wiki/ for canon is okay.


 * The Achievements extension is probably created by Wikia, then. Their code is obtainable, but undocumented AFAICT.  I'm not sure what you use this extension for here, but it does sound better-suited to the fanon wiki only, because of the way users are creating the content.  Blogs, I'm not enthusiastic about, and since they're more social, might be better integrated in the forums.  What are these 'other required ones'?


 * A note: I assume canon stuff here would be merged into what we set up at /wiki/, to avoid duplicating content?


 * On the to-do list, then, is get Porple to set the wikis up, install Ogg Handler, migrate all the data, and announce this at Pikipedia. I agree with using the Brawl logo and current Monobook skin temporarily, then setting up a proper competition to design the new logo.  There's no rush.  How does having an altered version of the decided logo for the fanon wiki sound?  Something to indicate it's user-created, and to differentiate between the two? - Greenpickle


 * About the achievements system: I will somehow handle that. I was working on an "RPG"-ish thing for Pikmin Fanon, but I will wait til' we move. Also, Yes, we should make separate logos for the Canon/Fanon places. What I want to know is what will happen to my Taxonomy Project? It is semi-canon with a dash of Fanon. Please get back to me on that. Also, about my earlier "hubs" suggestion on the forums, what we said now is what I originally wanted to do with this. And blogs, well, don't get me started on that. I dislike them because they are turning a Wiki into a Facebook... But all of these ideas are great! About the RPG thing, It will be a Pikmin themed Server based RPG. I will integrate points, matchmaking, and a whole amount of other things. To do that, I must go off to learn HTML and PHP. -Peanut64 (Talk)

Update.. both wikis are installed. They both have a ton of extensions you guys should be familiar with, and you only have to register once and your login will work on both wikis. Right now it's just pikminwiki.com and fanon.pikminwiki.com--pikminwiki.com/wiki/ sounds a little redundant. Maybe you can just feature a prominent link to the fanon wiki on the main page, and in the sidebar instead of using a splash page? --Porplemontage 20:47, September 12, 2010 (UTC)


 * I think anonymous users should be able to edit; it's what wikis are for. Obviously it increases the vandalism potential, but look at what it's helped Wikipedia become.  And if it turns out to have more negatives than positives, it can be disabled again at a later date. - Greenpickle


 * Ok, I made an account there, but I am not sure how to move any articles right now. I also don't know how we will grant the current Admins Adminship... -Peanut64 (Talk)