User:Stephane Lo Presti/News/January 2014-December 2015

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I want your opinion on an idea (and wiki "at risk" period on July 8th) - July 1st, 2015[edit]

Hi everyone,

Someone floated an idea past me and I'd like to know what wiki editors think about it. The current community of editors is doing an amazing job at updating content on the wiki but could use some help from players that are not regular editors, or who don't really want to do the jump to becoming editors.

We want to encourage more people to contribute to the wiki without having them having to necessarily be "part of" the wiki. So the idea would be to tell players that they can "dump" information that they see missing in articles on the talkpage on that article. Editors could then use this as material to update the article if it's relevant and/or accurate. We have no idea whether this is something that players would do but before we get there, the most important factor is to be sure that the community of wiki editors is ok with such a systerm.

Tell me what you think in that discussion on my talkpage.

Last but not least, we'll be doing some configuration changes on the wiki on Wednesday July 8th at 10AM Pacific Time. We're tweaking caching mechanisms to see whether we can improve the situation and avoid the downtime issues we had last week (the update notes overloaded the wiki servers). This should be a fairly transparent maintenance but it's possible that people will be seeing incorrect information during this process.

Thanks everyone for your hard work here :)

Wiki maintenance on Tuesday April 14 at 10 AM Pacific - April 13, 2015[edit]

Hi everyone,

On Tuesday April 14 at 10 AM Pacific Time, we’ll be performing maintenance on the wiki servers. This maintenance is expected to last about 90 minutes and the wikis will not be available during that period of time. The goal of that maintenance is to update the software of the wiki infrastructure. We'll be deploying MediaWiki 1.24.2 and Semantic MediaWiki 2.1, and updating a few extensions.

If you do see issues after the maintenance, please report them on the Guild Wars 2 social media channels (Twitter, Facebook and Google+). You can contact me before and after the maintenance via my talkpage. Note that the Guild Wars 2 forums will also not be available during that maintenance.

Let me know if you have questions or comments, thanks.

Armor pictures and more weapon ones - February 18, 2015[edit]

Hi everyone,

First of all, since it's my first journal entry this year I'd like to wish everyone a happy year 2015. It's going to be a great one with Heart of Thorns coming! :)

Armors![edit]

The work of Chiubi and Think on bringing better pictures to our wikis continues without stopping, but they're now taking a big step forward with ...drum roll... armor screenshots!

You can see the first gallery they put together on the German wiki: de:Galerie_der_Kleidungssets

And new backpack screenshots were also added here: de:Galerie_der_Rücken-Gegenstände

For a full list and more as they get updated, check Chiubi's contrib: de:Spezial:Beiträge/Chiubi

All these pictures are currently on the German wiki so someone will need to upload all of that goodness to this wiki.

Wynthyst memorial[edit]

Don't forget to share you thoughts and memories of Wynthyst on her memorial page:

Guild_Wars_2_Wiki:Wynthyst_memorial

--Stephane Lo Presti talk 18:17, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

Maintenance done and Points of Interest Episode 8 - September 23, 2014[edit]

Hi everyone,

Software upgrade[edit]

We're done upgrading the software and are now in the process of rebuilding the Semantic MediaWiki databases. As indicated by the Site notice! Enjoy the new big and little things!

Points of Interest Episode 8[edit]

As I announced in my previous journal entry, PoI 8 next week will focus on 2 meta-events:

I'll put a note on each article's discussion page, in case anyone wants to make sure these pages are up-to-date!

Wynthyst memorial[edit]

Don't forget to share you thoughts and memories of Wynthyst on her memorial page:

Guild_Wars_2_Wiki:Wynthyst_memorial

Upcoming maintenance of the wikis on October 1st (and more) - September 23, 2014[edit]

Hi everyone,

Software upgrade[edit]

We're finally ready to deploy the MediaWiki software version 1.23.2 and Semantic MediaWiki version 2.0! This will happen on Wednesday, October 1st, at 10AM Pacific Time (5PM UTC, 6PM in Great Britain, 7PM in France and Germany). The maintenance is expected to last up to 90 minutes and the wiki will be unavailable during its duration.

More Weapon Pictures[edit]

I've got more links to galleries of Weapon Pictures that you should feel free to import to this wiki.

Off-hand

Both hands

Main hand

Underwater

Weapon details for the New Player Experience[edit]

Following a request by a wiki editor, I put together a list of all the weapons unlocked by profession, feel free to re-use for the New Player Experience article:

http://pastebin.com/ZwCrnzqD

Upcoming PoI on meta-events[edit]

The topic of the Points of Interest show on October 10 will be "meta-events". We want to give you a heads up in case there's an on-going project about them or they need some freshening up. When we get closer to the show, I'll probably share more specific information about the meta-event(s) that will be covered so that corresponding articles are ready for the players we'll send!

Wynthyst memorial[edit]

Don't forget to share you thoughts and memories of Wynthyst on her memorial page:

Guild_Wars_2_Wiki:Wynthyst_memorial

Thanks again and again for making this wiki the greatest source of GW2 information and the best community! --Stephane Lo Presti talk 18:08, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

Quick update - September 10, 2014[edit]

Hi everyone,

I've got some fresh news for the wiki community. Feel free to discuss these on the relevant sections of my talkpage.

Software upgrade[edit]

We've been working for a while now on preparing to upgrade the wiki software. This has been a long and tenuous path because we're putting in place a process to test and bring these kinds of upgrades on a regular basis. But we're at the end of it!

We'll be upgrading the MediaWiki software to version 1.23.2 and Semantic MediaWiki to version 2.0. This will bring tons of little improvements with the tools that some of you use and fix a few SMW bugs. I'll post again here when we have confirmed the date of the maintenance.

Wiki Editors: an interesting number[edit]

As you may know, the Special:Statistics page will tell you how many editors have been active during the last 30 days. We ran a query on the wiki database to see if we could find that number for a longer period and it turns out that we could. So over the last 13 weeks, there's been a total of 649 active editors. Since we usually get around 300 for a 30-day period, it looks like there's a potential to increase the editor population by engaging them more.

I've mentioned in the past Pre-release news#Bring_more_editors_to_the_Wiki_-_May_21.2C_2014 ideas related to editing and I've got an other idea that I'd like to develop (interviews of editors) but I'll only mention it when I'm ready.

I'll also share this very interesting article from the Wikimedia blog about sixty ways to help new editors: https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/09/04/sixty-ways-to-help-new-editors/ There are probably a lot of good ideas to reuse!

Last but not the least, don't forget about the September 2014 Feature Pack contributor contest

TP widget[edit]

We publicly release the new GW2 Commerce API 2 days ago and poke was quick in creating a widget to use it on the wiki: [[Widget:TP prices]]!

Templates have been updated so you can already see the change now!

Pictures of Weapon[edit]

I've worked with some members of our community to bring something that was asked a few times: pictures of the Guild Wars 2 weapons! It's an ongoing project that will also be extended to armors, in the meantime feel free to import these pictures to this wiki:

This is only the beginning and there'll be more!

Wynthyst memorial[edit]

Don't forget to share you thoughts and memories of Wynthyst on her memorial page:

Guild_Wars_2_Wiki:Wynthyst_memorial

I'm glad that IGN was able to talk about it thanks to Colin: http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/09/05/the-people-who-live-forever-in-the-games-they-loved

Thanks everyone for continuing to make this wiki the awesome site and community that it is! --Stephane Lo Presti talk 17:37, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

Wynthyst memorial - July 9, 2014[edit]

Hi everyone,

I'd like to inform everyone about this memorial page that we created for Wynthyst, who's been very influential in the wiki community and we have all been saddened to learn about the news:

Wynthyst memorial

Feel free to contribute with a few words in her memory at the bottom of this page if you knew her.

Thanks.

Wiki maintenance on Thursday May 29 at 12PM Pacific - May 27, 2014[edit]

Hi everyone,

On Thursday 29th May at 12 PM Pacific Time, we’ll be performing maintenance on the wiki servers. This maintenance is expected to last about 6 hours and the wikis will not be available during that period of time. The goal of that maintenance is to update the software and reconfigure the hardware of some part of the wiki infrastructure. While we’ve already performed upgrades “quietly” (without any user-facing visible impact) on some part of this infrastructure, it is unfortunately not possible in this case and we have to take the wiki offline to perform this operation. We’re performing these series of upgrades to our infrastructure to make sure that it is up-to-date and allow us to then perform the series of software upgrades to MediaWiki and Semantic MediaWiki.

If you do see issues after the maintenance, please report them on the Guild Wars 2 social media channels (Twitter, Facebook and Google+). As I'm out after this maintenance, you won't be able to contact me via my talkpage but there'll be someone to relay any problem to our engineer. Note that the Guild Wars 2 forums will also not be available during that maintenance.

Let me know if you have questions or comments, thanks.

Bring more editors to the Wiki - May 21, 2014[edit]

Hi everyone,

I'd like to tell you about a story I heard this morning and use that as an opportunity to see if we can work together on making more readers of the wiki to edit it. A colleague mentioned that she was discussing with a guild member about a wiki page, who then wondered why ArenaNet wasn't updating the page he was reading. She pointed to the grey text box at the top and apparently he didn't notice it. He even mentioned that he would like to help by editing pages. Morale of the story: we're probably missing great opportunities to make the community of wiki editors bigger and better.

This leads me to the topic of bringing more editors to the wiki. It's something I already mentioned a long time ago as a big project we'll have to address. I had a chat with User:Zesbeer and we imagined that a better version of Guild_Wars_2_Wiki:How_to_help, with pictures rather than words. I even suggested that a video would be really cool and have much more impact that any guide we could make. I want to work with wiki editors to make this project happen (and then relay it on our social medias) and knowing this wiki community I need to have as many people onboard as possible. I guess we should have a project page to discuss this, unless there's already one?

Let me know what you think on this section of my talkpage.

Thanks.

Wiki maintenance postponed - May 14, 2014[edit]

Hi everyone,

Due to timing and resource constraints, we have to postpone the maintenance. We'll announce the new date and time when we have the details.

Thanks.

Wiki maintenance on Wednesday May 14 at 12PM Pacific - May 12, 2014[edit]

Hi everyone,

On Wednesday 14th May at 12 PM Pacific Time, we’ll be performing maintenance on the wiki servers. This maintenance is expected to last about 6 hours and the wikis will not be available during that period of time. The goal of that maintenance is to update the software and reconfigure the hardware of some part of the wiki infrastructure. While we’ve already performed upgrades “quietly” (without any user-facing visible impact) on some part of this infrastructure, it is unfortunately not possible in this case and we have to take the wiki offline to perform this operation. We’re performing these series of upgrades to our infrastructure to make sure that it is up-to-date and allow us to then perform the series of software upgrades to MediaWiki and Semantic MediaWiki.

If you do see issues after the maintenance, please report them on the Guild Wars 2 social media channels (Twitter, Facebook and Google+). As I'm out after this maintenance, you won't be able to contact me via my talkpage but there'll be someone to relay any problem to our engineer. Note that the Guild Wars 2 forums will also not be available during that maintenance.

Let me know if you have questions or comments, thanks.

Wiki maintenance (User database split) on Wednesday Wednesday April 2nd at 10AM Pacific - March 28, 2014[edit]

Hi,

If you’ve been editing the Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2 official wikis, you know that you only have one account across both wikis. This will change on Wednesday April 2nd at 10AM Pacific when we’ll be running a maintenance to split the wiki user databases of these 2 English wikis (non-English wikis will be unaffected). This maintenance is expected to last about 10 minutes.

When the maintenance is completed, players with existing accounts on these wikis will effectively have 2 accounts, one of each with the same name, passwords and settings, and future changes to each of these accounts (e.g. preferences) will be independent from each other. Players who create an account on either wiki will not have an account on the other English wiki.

The goal of that operation is to remove the dependency of the GW2 wiki on this part of the GW wiki, so that future changes can be prepared more easily for us. For example, Semantic MediaWiki is only installed on the GW2 wiki, so it'll allow us to prepare the next update (to version 1.19) without having to worry about the dependency on the GW wiki database.

If you do see issues after the maintenance, please report them to us on our social media channels Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and the GW2 forums. As I'm out next week, you won't be able to contact me via my talkpage but there'll be someone to relay any problem to our engineer.

Let me know if you have any question or comment, Thanks.

Update about our work on the availability issues and ability for the GW2 wikis to use NPC audio - March 13, 2014[edit]

Hi,

I've got a quick update on the availability issues I posted about yesterday. We're not so sure now that image upload is a probable cause, because the issue occured when there was no image upload. For reference, the issues we've seen on our graphs occured on the following occasions (for about 10 minutes except today):

  • Tuesday 11 March at around 12:30PM (Pacific Time)
  • Tuesday 11 March at around 1:30PM (Pacific Time)
  • Wednesday 12 March at around 8:30AM (Pacific Time)
  • Wednesday 12 March at around 9:30AM (Pacific Time)
  • Wednesday 12 March at around 1PM (Pacific Time)
  • Wednesday 12 March at around 1:45PM (Pacific Time)
  • Wednesday 12 March at around 3PM (Pacific Time)
  • Thursday 13 March at around 7:30AM (Pacific Time)

We're going to make a quick configuration change on a part of the wiki backend to see if it alleviates this problem. This change will happen today at 4PM (Pacific Time) and should only affect people using the wikis for a very brief time. If you do see issues, please report them to us on our social medias Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

I also got a good news for all the GW2 wikis. Following a request from the French wiki, we can announce that all the GW2 wikis can now use audio from the NPC dialogues directly on the wiki (they shouldn't contain any music though). Here's an example:

fr:Journal_de_Scarlet_Bruyère#Lire

We'll probably be installing an extension to facilitate this at some point in the future (we'll look into that once Semantic MediaWiki and MediaWiki are updated).

Thanks.

Update about our work and availability issues - March 12, 2014[edit]

Hi everyone,

To break a bit the pattern of silence, I'd like to let everyone know the work we're doing behind the scenes to make our wikis better. This is mainly infrastructure and backend work at this point, so barely visible to most editors and not impacting players "directly". The goal is to improve reliability, resilience and management of our wikis and their infrastructure.

First we've built better test environments that allow us to streamline update and management. And the first application of this is that we're in the final stages of testing a user table split for the GW and GW2 English wikis (which currently use the same user table stored on the GW database). This will decouple user account creation for these 2 wikis (non-English wikis will not be affected), but should not change anything for players who already have an account on those wikis apart from the fact that they'll technically have 2 accounts (one on each wiki) that are almost exactly the same. I'll post more information and an announcement about when the maintenance for this will happen at a later time.

Once we've used and finalized this update flow, we'll be able to push updates in a more manageable (and hopefully frequent) way. Once the database split has been done on the live wikis, we'll be focusing on 2 things: fixing a reliability issue (see below), and upgrading first the Semantic MediaWiki software (to a much newer version) and then the MediaWiki software.

Last, but not the least, we've seen over the last few days the 5 wikis becoming unavailable for rather short periods of time. Although we’re currently not seeing a pattern from the data we’re seeing, we’ll be investigating what’s causing this. We’ve once seen this happen as there was a long sequence of “frequent” (2 per minute maybe?) uploads of pictures on the German wiki. It may not be the direct cause but we’re not sure that we can easily/quickly determine the actual cause. In the meantime, it’d be super useful if the wikis could investigate whether an AbuseFilter rule can be created to limit the rate of upload of pictures. If this is done, please let me know so that I can circulate it around to all wikis and that our engineer’s investigation.

I also forgot to give an update on the Wiki Weekly Statistics. I’ve stopped doing it due to a high workload and I still have to investigate an alternative route for (semi-)automatically creating this report. If this resource was needed for some rather important work on the wikis, please let me know and I’ll try to go back to posting these reports.

As usual, feel free to drop a line on my talkpage if you have questions, comments or anything to discuss! Thanks.

A quick message - February 7, 2014[edit]

Hi everyone,

I've been silent for a while because I'm busy with other Community tasks but wanted to drop a little message here. And also remind everyone that my talkpage is open for your questions, although I'm not sure how quickly I can reply.

I also wanted to mention this interesting work: http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/1x9sy4/in_anticipation_of_the_final_two_releases_i_have/ The wiki sounds like the perfect place for this and if anyone wants to get in touch with /u/Plagiarised it would be great :)

Thanks.

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