Howdy folks. Some of you may know me, for those that don't, I'm Gunny. I was pretty active here from 2011-2018. Due to some recent events, there's been some changes here at the Fallout Wiki (Nukapedia and The Vault). This blog is intended to inform everyone what the future may hold.
First, as you can see, there are a number of initiatives already being worked on to improve Nukapedia. I'd like to give some background: after the loss of one of our bureaucrats, two different discussions began. One discussion was initiated by Fandom, where they invited a large number of active editors to a community round table discussion. Among the topics discussed was a presentation by Fandom on a big drop in google ranking of quite a large number of our articles. Some articles fell so far in google ranking that articles archived on The Vault were ranked higher. A large number of the pages affected also exhibited a dramatic reduction in size. As you can imagine, this is a big problem. A couple of editors here were designated to team up with Fandom's search engine optimization (SEO) team to determine the root causes. They are currently working with the SEO team to dig into the numbers to try to find why. During a second roundtable with Fandom, we were referred to a policy specialist who volunteered to examine our guidelines and policies to determine if there was anything we could do to improve those.
Just prior to that, as I became aware of the turmoil at Nukapedia, I began to reach out to folks I knew, old editors and current, to see if I could help identify areas of concern so that I could suggest improvements that could be made. After discussion on a small scale, I felt the need to talk to a wider group of users to better understand the exact state of Nukapedia. I started a focus group discord server with the intent to let people talk about the issues they had in an open environment, everyone as equals, with no repercussions. I reached out to numerous people here to get a cross section of users: discord, discussions, the wiki, rights holders, regular users, new and old. The feed back has been a tremendous help in all of us coming to an understanding of areas of concern and things we felt could be improved on.
As discussions progressed, we started to talk about different initiatives that could be brought to the wiki for full discussion and possible implementation. Working on a basis of consensus driven dialog, we identified a number of items to discuss and implement at Nukapedia. A number of editors have been working off the list of SEO pages provided by Fandom and are currently restoring and revising pages that were deleted or reduced in size while we wait for final analysis from the SEO team. You may have seen these changes already. We have opened up a forum for discussion of an ombudsman for the site. A new forum to discuss a proposal to remedy problems with the canon policy is incoming. We have opened and are almost done with a thorough analysis of changes that have been made to the guidelines and policy pages to ensure all policies are as they were voted in by the community.
We plan to initiate discussion on a number of other topics as this process continues: There was never an official determination on how to brand the site after the merge with The Vault. We'd like to open discussion about that. We would like to discuss changes that can be made to the front page to engage the community as much as possible with blog feeds, news, etc. There is a proposal to reinstitute some of the source material that was removed and place it in a section of the wiki called "The Vault at Nukapedia" as a repository for this type of content. We will continue the project of merging as much information from pages archived at The Vault with a view to sunset the archive to improve our mainspace SEO ranking. We plan on discussing merging and improving Nukapedia's and The Vault's social media footprint. As more ideas come to fruition, they will be brought over to Nukapedia for full discussion and consideration.
And you can help. You can help the editors restoring content and revising it to meet guidelines. You can help by contributing to any of the discussion forums that are opened. You can help by contributing to any of the projects that start up. You can help by giving feedback, your views matter. If anyone desires to join the discussions ongoing in the focus group, feel free to contact me. We wanted to let Nukapedia know what is being done to help improve the site and what might be discussed in the near future. You can help shape that future by contributing. TheGunny2.0 (talk) 00:11, 13 May 2022 (UTC)