If you look at the PR Wiki (well, not right now, it's down for the moment, I mean when it was up ), they had a lot of graphics that looked pretty cool. The Wiki opened to a menu with buttons, and to get to the Vehicle section, for example, you hit the button with "VEHICLES" on it and a picture of a helicopter or whatever. Added a lot of life to the place.

Also, the articles themselves had more graphics overall, though I feel we're doing pretty well in that respect.

Other than that, I just had a look through the Wiki and was reminded of how short many of the pages were. Take the E-11 Carbine, it's only a couple lines long. I say we either make these articles longer by adding tactics, background information, stats, etc. (a big and burdensome task which would just be icing on the cake anyhow), so just stow the articles together into one or two longer ones. For example:

Weapons
--Rebel Weapons
   --{Article detailing every Rebel weapon, sorted by class}
--Imperial weapons
   --{Article detailing every Imperial weapon, sorted by class}

In other words, the front page has a link labelled "Weapons", which in turn takes you to another page with the links "Rebel Weapons" and "Imperial Weapons", which in turn take you to the respective articles.

If you think Category pages are dull, i would suggest complementing them with actual "Vehicles" "Hand weapons" pages etc, that provide a more general overview, and further link to pages/categories.

All pages also needs to be standardized in layout, with infoboxes and so on.

Anyways, I was afraid I put to much emphasis on that part of the post. I want to know what you guys think about the actual content...Only SafeKeeper has really commented on that. Ideas to fix what I consider needs fixing (See Checklist), other things YOU think needs fixing, etc. Ideas for color schemes, layout, logo, etc.

Go on safe, I'm serious about really wanting to see this

I'll do the BI Article !

Actually, I'd be interested to see that.  The reason I disprove of it is simply because the majority of people that have came to BI found us ingame or through other means, I'm not really after placing us up in the forums and the like, especially if the articles are going to be written by one of our own members.   But yeah, I wouldn't mind seeing your take on this, if a decent job was done of that I'd have no problem editing it 'till it was complete.  Good luck! 

On a more serious note...

Organization is a simple matter of using Wikia's Category function. Assign categories such as Rebel Vehicles, Imperial Vehicles, Weapons, Maps, etc., then instead of listing every single asset in the mod on the front page, list their headlines only. Clicking on any of these category headlines takes you either to the Category listing, or to a custom, user-made list of assets of that category.

So for example, on the front page you would have a link saying "Ground vehicles". Clicking on this brings me to the list of ground vehicles in the mod, perhaps further divided by faction.

The only question is how to organize this. For what it's worth, I disagree with the separation of atmospheric craft and spacecraft, most of all because space fighters no longer only make appearances in space maps. Make ground vehicles (Landspeeder, Firehawke, Freerunner, Sandcrawler) one category, aircraft (T-16, X-Wing, shuttle, etc.) another, and starships (Gallo, Frigate, Carrack, etc.) a third.

• Improve Appearance - Make the Wiki more attractive and nicer to look at. Possibly make a custom skin...No

• Improve Navigation...No

• Improve amount of information and raw statistics in articles...No

• Add more pictures...No

• Improve uniformity...No

• Improve User Guides...No

• Add BlackIntel Article...Gwynzer Disapproves

And it really does need improving. It's ugly, for one, and not very exciting or overly helpful. It functions fine as a "search for what you're looking for" wiki, but I want it to be more then that.

I've been exploring a couple ideas.

The first, most drastic, and hardest change involves hosting our own wiki on the fsmod.com domain alongside the main site and the forums using the MediaWiki source code. This would require a more or less complete rebuilding of the wiki but it's benefits are an increase in customization and personalization...We can do pretty much whatever we want and don't have to do things the way Wikia spells it out for us. This will eliminate adds, or if we wish, we can use adds that will generate revenue for payment of the site, etc. However, I know very little about operating a wiki that isn't hosted by someone else. I know my way around basic HTML and Javascript, and how to set up a website, but I'm not very familiar with PHP which is what wiki's use. I don't expect this to be a likely idea, but if we had to start over, it's an option.

At the very least, we need to improve the appearance and navigation through a variety of smaller ideas.

I'm going to see if I can make a custom skin theme, or at the very least, improve our color scheme.

Then, there's the navigation. We currently have an ever-growing contents box that, while convenient, needs improving.

We need more uniformity, more pictures, more statistics. Weapons should have an infobox. Maps should have the actual top-down tactical maps available.

A while back we experimented with adding Guides. That needs improving so that they are better organized and get more attention.

And of course, BlackIntel needs an article.

And so I want your input, your feedback. What do YOU guys think? What should it look like?