Hello everyone,

as you probably know by now, after 9 or so long months, the World of Tanks wiki, once one of the best tools to look for info in, has returned. However, even after 9 months of work, I think we can all agree that the page is, to put it mildly, undercooked. I ran through it (not very thoroughly I must admit) and I found following issues:

Some parts are completely missing, such as the gallery of the STB-1 for example.

The Japanese section generally is a mess, some tanks are missing history:

This unfortunately applies also for tanks where their history could be easily googled (such as the Chi-Ri), it simply was not done.

There are temporary tags all over the place, the page looks like a construction site – not that it’s such a TERRIBLE bug, but considering the wiki is now owned and managed by Wargaming, it’s unprofessional.

I will not judge the quality of tank evaluation and how good the advice and performance estimates on various tanks on the webpage are. There are some parts of the text that are objective however, such as the history texts and some of them are seriously wrong. Notable examples are the Aufklärungspanzer Panther “historical” text, that mistakes the Beobachtungspanzer for a scout variant. Another is for example the GW E-100 “history”, saying how it was an artillery project on the Entwicklung chassis – this project was never developed and it is not mentioned in any books! It’s a complete fake, yet it is presented as a real tank. And these are just Germans, I didn’t check other nations to be honest.

Of course, you could say “it’s a wiki, fix it yourself” – yes and no. On one hand, it’s a wiki indeed, but on the other hand, it is managed by and owned by Wargaming. They had 9 months to do this stuff right, I am not going to do a job for them. I also heard (but only heard) that some folks from EU forums ran into some mistakes in tank stats, but I cannot confirm that – in this sense, I do believe the wiki is reliable.

But I cannot help but wonder…

What on earth took 9 months – a couple of new graphic doodles?

Luckily, I don’t have to guess anymore. A wiki editor (one of those, who worked on it in the past months) decided to talk and explain the situation, naturally with me agreeing on not mentioning his name first (noone wants trouble). I know who it is and he/she is a very decent person, so the text I consider to be completely true (at least as far as the conscience of the person goes, everyone can be mistaken however). I did not edit this text in any way (apart from removing the author’s name). Here goes…

Wiki editor:

Okay, let me explain properly where I don’t have to worry (too much) about what I’m allowed to say. It’s about 95% WGRU’s fault from what I can tell. They closed everything down with no warning last November, as you know, and I don’t think even the regional offices knew it was coming. After that, there was basically no news in NA/EU/SEA (we all share the same wiki ) and Skype channel, although I never see WGEU people.) until March, after the RU wiki launched. The first time I saw the new wiki (Incidentally, it’s a wiki, not a wikipedia. Wikipedia is the big site with everything, a wiki is a site of that type) was in a leak on FTR (before that, of course).

While you’re right that wiki code comes in a nice neat package (called MediaWiki), WG significantly modified it to get the new wiki. I’m not sure what exactly they did to it, because it should theoretically be a simple visual change and not at all something that would take several months, but whatever it was broke most of our templates and coding. Now that I think about it, the system for having the different national wikis as one might have taken some time, but it still shouldn’t have been that much and I don’t know why the different national wikis had to be merged in the first place. It took a week or two just to figure out everything they changed, because the only documentation we got was in Russian.

We also only have one person who knows how to do that (the old code had been around for years and I think most of the people who built it are gone), and he/she is kept busy with other things most of the time, meaning we spent most of our time waiting on them to fix it. Don’t start thinking we didn’t do anything, because there was quite a bit of grammar error fixing and file moving and page moving that had to be done, also as a result of the coding changes and other things.

Without getting into too much technical detail, there were two different ways of displaying tank stats, an older one that was more compatible with what we had and displayed more info but didn’t always update reliably, and WG’s new widgets that had less info and didn’t match our stuff, but matched the RU wiki and showed exactly what was in-game, for better or worse. We decided to go for the info, especially since it matched what we had, but the code to display it still had to be rebuilt.

Anyway, we had everything ready to go by late April- early May, which is really not bad considering how much stuff was broken. We were given a firm launch date, which was then delayed, and then WG said LOLNOPE at the last minute because our wiki didn’t look like theirs. Note that we’d already asked them whether we’d need to match their wiki before we decided what we were going to do in the first place. We then had to rebuild the tank pages again (This is where the ammo cost and autoloader tooltips and all the missing info disappeared IIRC.), and God forbid WGRU actually help us, along with moving all of them to confusing names to match the widgets, and we got that ready probably about three weeks ago, then eventually WG gave us a date (today) again and it finally launched.

So, timeline: WGRU started working on it behind the scenes last July, then locked everything down in November with no warning. In March, the RU wiki re-launched and the NA/EU/SEA editors got access shortly afterward. By the beginning of May we were ready for a launch, which then got pushed back when WGRU decided we needed to fix it, and fixing it and waiting took up the time between then and now.

Why did it take so long? Why not just keep the old wiki open and updated until the new one was ready? I have no flipping idea. Meanwhile at Wargaming.gif.

Could the wiki editors have done a better job of cleaning it up? Maybe. We probably had time to do more grammar checks and stat updating such, but would you have? We’re all volunteers, we don’t get paid enough to deal with WG’s crap. We don’t get paid at all, as a matter of fact, and we all have plenty of other things to do instead of editing a wiki that’s continually being screwed with by powers outside your control. We also don’t have many (if any) people who are historically knowledgeable enough to really clean those sections up. I’m barely even playing WoT anymore, personally, and only stick around on the wiki team because they need all the help they can get. We did fix some of the worst issues, and I think most of us were sort of waiting for WG to get their crap together enough to launch it after a while. (I mentioned that we were ready two months ago?)

Like I said, the way I see it, 95% of the slowness is due to WGRU’s incompetence. The other 5% is some combination of a lack of wiki editor manpower and various other issues. The various regional offices have been doing their best with what RU gave them as far as I can tell, especially NA. Tanitha in SEA just checked in every once in a while, and I don’t think EU did anything, but they at least didn’t seem to get in the way. (I was also extremely surprised to hear that Tan’s supposedly in charge of the English wiki, because that’s not what it looks like at all from here).

Silentstalker:

Well, there you have it. In the end, the editors are the ones who will get “beaten” over it, because they will get the blame, while the real fault likely lies elsewhere…