u/BrawlPlayer34

Hello. I'm a War Thunder player, and a volunteer, amateur writer on the Wiki. However, I've noticed major flaws with the way publishing articles is handled, and I hope that describing them here will help others realize why it still, after over a year since its launch, fails to live up to the old Wiki in most people's eyes.

The new version of the War Thunder Wiki is often criticized because of a lack of content, and while that's understandable, there's a good reason for why so little seems to get published on it. I've published a relatively low amount of articles so far, that being four, but even that has been enough to expose me to a large flaw with the way articles are reviewed, which is very discouraging to writers and damaging to the Wiki's consistency.

I will preface this with a simple explanation of how publishing an article on the Wiki works. It's rather simple in theory. You write an article, you hand it off for review, a reviewer takes a look at it and either rejects the article or suggests minor improvements before passing it on to be published.

Now, that seems simple, but there is a major flaw with this pipeline, and it lies in the reviewer's "minor improvements".

It appears that the reviewers, referred to in the Wiki and from now on in this post as Skilled Authors, have very little standardized requirements on which to base their idea of how an article should look. I can estimate that such requirements do exist, as an article can be rejected for not meeting them, but I can confidently say that they must be very vague and highly subjective.

This confidence comes from my experiences with having published four articles. The first time your article is passed on for publishing, you receive advice on what to improve and touch up on before publication. You follow that advice, you take it to heart, and your article is published. Then, you decide to write another article, with the improvements you were told to add last time. You submit for publication, only for the reviewer to then request actions that completely contradict what you were taught in the last publication. So you carry out these actions, your article is published. You then write a third article, taking into consideration the lessons of your second one, only to be again told to fundamentally re-write and re-structure most of it, because this time, the reviewer has yet another differing opinion on what an article should be. Every Skilled Author appears to have their own idea of what an "adequate article" is, and it is very clear that these ideas do not match.

The result of this is that the publishing process for War Thunder Wiki articles is extremely tedious and discouraging. Every publication imposes different standards, experience with past publishings is effectively dismissed because the particular Skilled Author has different expectations, and your every article feels like it's your first, because there's so much to fundamentally change and re-write. To put it in perspective, it's like studying for an exam, getting a good grade, then going to the next exam with your accumulated knowledge, only to be told that everything you learned for the first one is actually incorrect and has to be re-learned. I think it's easy to see how that would be discouraging.

This is if the Skilled Author even responds. I have had a case where for every minor improvement I was told to add, I did so within a day, but the Skilled Author took upwards of three weeks to respond to that improvement and suggest another one, which happened several times.

So to re-iterate, every reviewer has different requirements. Every article undergoing publishing has you fix things that did not need to be fixed in your last publishing, and often doing things that contradict what you were told by the previous reviewer. Your writing experience doesn't matter, because that would suggest there's a consistent set of criteria you're learning to meet, which is not the case. The publishing also often takes up to two months, as the reviewer drags his feet with responding to quick changes that they requested. This results in an extremely discouraging publishing experience that turns away new writers and punishes those who choose to stay.

I think we all know the main problem with the current Wiki 3.0 is that it seriously lacks content. The idea was for informational sections from the old wiki to be replaced by articles, but as of today, the vast majority of vehicles still don't have a single article. This leaves the wiki feeling barren and somewhat useless if you're looking for information about a vehicle that isn't one of the most popular ones. I wrote this post to try and explain just why there is so little content, so that people can understand it's not a matter of writers being lazy, but of the system built for them to publish articles being extremely inconsistent, poorly coordinated and discouraging.

However, I feel like it's not fair to simply criticize without suggesting a solution. I also hope that some Wiki Staff may see this post and decide to take this to heart. While I may have only written four articles, with my limited experience I can already recognize that much more standardized and less subjective article criteria are required, to allow for less ambiguity and more consistency between what each reviewer expects. Perhaps better communication is needed between each reviewer and between reviewers (Skilled Authors) and Wiki Staff, to ensure that everyone is on the same page about how an article should look.

Regarding the long delays between responses from reviewers, it's understandable that they wouldn't respond instantly, as these are volunteers with their own lives outside of the game. But when a reviewer takes three weeks to respond to a minor edit, I believe that begins to cross the boundary of what is reasonable into what hurts the wiki in the long run and causes the content drought it is currently experiencing. Maybe increased activity checks, or Wiki Staff checking up on publications that have been left without reviewer response for more than two weeks.

In the end, these are just my experiences with the Wiki and suggestions which I believe would help. I speak only for myself, not for every writer out there, but I think there are quite a few that will agree with what I've said here today. I don't claim to be an expert on this, and I'm sure there are issues with the suggestions I've made at the end there. I'm not making this post to ask Wiki Staff to do what I said. Just to ask them to do something, anything, to address this glaring, discouraging inconsistency with the Wiki. I really want to see it grow, to see it outshine the old Wiki, but I just can't see that happening with the way things are working at the moment.