Scioly.org

There are a few standardization issues on the wiki that bother me. I have started editing, and will continue editing them, but I wanted to share my concerns.

There does not seem to be an emphasis on writing in an informative way... I often see articles written in first person or addressing the reader as "you".

There is not a standard way of dealing with events which have multiple topics, but the prevailing way does not seem ideal. My suggestion is that if you look up an event with multiple topics, the page with the events title should serve as a disambiguation page for directing the user to what they are looking for, or as as well as a page with general non-specific event information. (including event rotation patterns, history, and consistent event format) This is the case with Anatomy. However, some events just redirect to the most recent event topic, such as Dynamic Planet redirecting to Earth's Fresh Water. There should be a page with information describing what Dynamic Planet in general. However, I would like to point out it would make sense to link to the current topic from the main page, instead of just redirecting Dynamic Planet. Meteorology has the same issue as Dynamic Planet. Astronomy has the current topic on the event page while putting past topics on pages titled accordingly. Why doesn't the current topic have it's own page as well, so that "Astronomy" can describe the event in general? Junkyard Challenge does not have separate pages for its topics, it just contains previous years' topics in spoiler tags.

Another issue I see is that event pages are not being kept up-to-date on their titles. For some reason it has become standard to redirect new event titles back to old event pages rather than moving the old pages to the new titles. To keep everything up-to-date Science Crime Busters should be moved to Crime Busters, Physical Science Lab to Wind Power, etc.

I hope you thoughtfully consider my suggestions.

I completely agree that more standardization is needed. I'm trying to standardize the state wikis. I've made some headway in filling up all of the infoboxes, updating results, and cleaning up the template stuff, but there's still more that can be done.

You are correct the wiki is not standard across every single page. This is something that starpug and I had started on but did not finished during the last roll over

At the last season roll over the standard way of dealing with multiple topics was to have a page for each topic with a redirect from the main topic towards its sub-topic. This saves user clicks to get to the information but also makes it more difficult to find past events quickly. The Anatomy page is a more organized way to do this and should be considered more of a standard to work with.


The redirect system was to keep from having the exact same page mirrored on the same wiki. However moving pages would be the better way to go.

But lets not forget that the wiki is a community tool. This means that anyone who sees a better way to do something has the chance to do what they think is better (small things) so or suggest how things could be done (large things like this). Your thoughts seem to be beneficial in the long run, and I see no reason why they shouldn't be worked towards.