User blog:Tullis/August News!

Mass Effect Galaxy. ME2. A new comic. Rumours of new DLC. It's a good time to be a Mass Effect fan, and the wiki is really stepping up to match -- thanks to its editors.

Overhauls
Our amazing new site skin and new front page, courtesy of JoePlay, have prompted a lot of revamping to bring everything up to a similar standard. The Races, Characters and Classes pages have all had a makeover to match. The biggest change was to the Characters page, because maintaining a full list of characters manually was getting increasingly impractical. Thankfully we have Category:Characters to give an alphabetical list, allowing us to focus on showcasing those who are most important. The menu on the left has also been updated to point to assignments, systems and equipment.

SpartHawg948 and I have also been combing the wiki to cut down on merge candidates and unnecessary short pages. There's a lot of new content on the way and we want to keep the wiki as clutter-free and user-friendly as possible. The next overhaul category will likely be merging the various short Alliance Navy pages -- Fifth Fleet, Second Fleet etc -- onto one page, then a clearout and tidy of the combat pages.

As part of our revamp, I'm trying to add screenshots to as many pages as possible, which leads me to...

Screenshots
Silverstrike, LLlaxmep, Gideon1000 and Carolccute all deserve thanks and a shout out for donating amazing screenshots. Silverstrike's PC Tweaks have allowed some amazing shots -- like this one -- and LLlaxmep's Ilos shots are stunning. Meanwhile, Gideon1000 and Carolccute have both quietly improved our armor pages significantly by taking shots of every single armor set.

See here for a gallery of new screenshots: it's currently Ilos-tastic.

An Alert
The Mass Effect 2 page is currently protected against edits by new and unregistered users. There's a long explanation on its talk page, but, briefly, it's intended to make people wait and think before adding information that might get reverted later. Don't panic: registered users can still edit it.

Interesting Statistics
(Caution: level of interest may vary.)
 * Mass Effect Wiki is currently the third result from Googling 'mass effect'. We get beaten by the official site and ME's Wikipedia entry.
 * Our most popular squadmate page is Liara T'Soni, followed by Ashley Williams.
 * The most edited page is (no surprise) the Mass Effect Guide, closely followed by (sort of a surprise) Human Armor.
 * Eletania is our most popular uncharted world.
 * Saren's page has been edited over 150 times.
 * The most-used (non technical) picture is the Adept's class image, linked to 8 times.

Finally...
I want to say thanks to everyone who contributes. Not just those who check for vandals and clean up misspellings, but to people who sit down and record every stat for all Mass Effect's weapons, armor, grenades and omni-tools; not to mention every Codex entry and, astonishingly, every single planet's vitals. It's our incredible dedication to detail which makes us such a good resource. A wiki is only as good as its editors, and I still think MEWiki has some of the best editors on Wikia.

Happy editing,

Tullis.

Useful Resources
Style & Editing Guide · List o' Templates · Community Guidelines · Wanted Pages · Screenshot Wishlist · MEWiki Statistics

Your admins
SpartHawg948 · Tullis · DRY