Board Thread:Wiki Running/@comment-3225604-20150314155732/@comment-188432-20150323160816

Bot runs have been completed, but I really didn't find that much to change. This is largely because the bulk of remaining changes were in the polls, and there hasn't been, with all due respect to Imamadmad's explanation upthread, adequate community discussion about making changes to polls.

Places where I refused to act
The bot didn't find that much to change, anyway, but there were some places where it could have changed something, but I disallowed it.

Misplaced discussion pages
Because they seemed like discussion pages that were in the wrong namespace, I didn't touch the following pages in the main namespace:
 * Edit Requests:List of Levels
 * Difficulty/Sandbox

Polls
I also didn't change any polls. There's been no real discussion about this, and I'm not prepared to destroy community discussions without genuine community consent. As I see things, one community member correctly noted that making this word change would reset the poll — and no one really responded to it.

Given that pages like Level 100/Poll contain not only reasonable numeric response, but also detailed discussion on the current state of the poll, I'm very wary about just blanking out the results. As I read a page like Level 100/Poll, I found both the poll itself and the response to it very useful. To destroy the poll would be to make the discussion surrounding it a complete nonsense. I'm not really prepared to destroy a lively, useful community discussion for the sake of minor semantics — unless there's very clear community support for doing so. Within the context of every poll I looked at, there's no trouble understanding the meaning of the choices. Changing the names would merely destroy the poll results — it wouldn't actually bring greater clarity. In fact, it would bring confusion because of the number of comments about the current state of the poll.

I know that someone has manually changed a few polls already. Nevertheless, I strongly recommend opening up a separate discussion about destroying the current state of the polls. That discussion should point out that it would invalidate the discussion already on the page, and it should likely suggest that, if the polls are going to be changed, the article comment area should be blanked, so that future readers of the poll pages won't be massively confused. Other possible course of action:


 * keep things as is, but add a little note on the /Poll pages explaining what "considerably easy" and "considerably hard" mean
 * leave the /Poll pages alone entirely, since it's obviously just an 8 point scale.
 * archive the current /Poll first by moving it to a new name, then rebuild the page with a wholly different kind of poll. The wikia feature doesn't work at all on mobile, which is a considerable disadvantage to you, since your game is mostly a mobile one. So you'd probably be better-served by rebuilding with a Google Form or some other free poll product.

If that discussion succeeds, I'm more than happy to help you figure out the quickest possible way to effect the changes.

Places where human follow-up is required
By far, the namespace with the greatest number of changes was the template one. This is the namespace that typically requires manual changes, not bot ones, because a bot can't tell whether the change being made will have unforeseen impacts. Nevertheless, the templates here all seemed to require these words as mere input. So I made the changes to the following templates, under the theory that you guys could go back and manually check whether the change had any unexpected results:
 * infobox version
 * infobox quest version
 * infobox quest sandbox
 * infobox quest iOS
 * infobox quest
 * level
 * infobox level idea
 * D
 * Difficulty
 * infobox past level/Twin

Places where no changes were indicated
Despite a call from Imamadmad to make changes to the Module namespace, the bot found nothing to change.

Equally, I didn't find any categories to change. In future, it's really important to note that if you're going to ask for bot help, don't do the categories yourself. It's much, much more difficult to change categories manually than by bot. Really, you should have done templates manually, but have left the categories to the bot — since you're more likely to know what the templates do than the bot is.