The 'Shroom:Issue 130/Community Survey Analysis

Community Survey Analysis by and

Hi there! This is Lord Bowser here, along with my apprentice The Pyro Guy, and we're here to give you a detailed rundown on the results from the Community Survey that took place a few weeks ago. I'm happy to say we got a nice turnout for the survey, and I'm glad that the concept itself was warmly received! We will surely be doing more of these in the future. I found that this survey, focused around the wiki community as a whole, gave some nice insight onto how others may find the general vibe here. It also served as a way to provide anonymous feedback and criticism on various parts of the community, which I hope can be used to further improve the wiki environment. On behalf of the Poll Committee, along with our behind-the-scenes programmers and, I'd like to heartily thank you all for your participation in this survey, and I do hope the ending image was worth the trouble! Enough talk, however; let's get onto the results!

Analysis

 * Do you interact with the extended parts of the MarioWiki community, such as the Mario Boards, IRC, or our Discord servers? -- It's safe to be unsurprised at this one. While this website and its extended areas are home to a lovely community, at heart we are a wiki, and this is what the majority of information-seekers see in us. However, fret not; while the majority voted for the 'Not at all' option, we still have a good chunk of people who didn't vote that. Just over 30% of the voters have at least interacted with us a couple of times, with over 15% voting from the 'occasionally' to 'all the time' range. These may seem like relatively small numbers, but that's still just under 200 people voting in this range. I'll take that!
 * Aside from the wiki, what do you use to interact with the community most? -- And thus begins a trend of leaving out the bottom option to focus on analysing the nitty-gritty. So the most used platform is our forum, the Super Mario Boards. This is probably because it's the most easily accessible out of the lot, being a publicly viewable website. After that is surprisingly the 'Other' option. This perplexes me. I cannot think of another community outlet other than the ones listed. Perhaps Twitter? The IRC channel is next, being a long-standing venue for anyone to pop in and have a quick chat. The least used ones are our two Discord servers. I was expecting this; Discord is a relatively new platform, and one of our two servers is invite-only.
 * If you have interacted with the community, how have you found your experience? -- Again, we're going to ignore the lowest option, as it isn't particularly helpful beyond establishing that we're a wiki first and foremost. But out of the 315 opinionated voters, only 23 of them were in the negative range. Twenty-three. Just seven percent. That is a very, very good result. We clearly have a great reputation amongst these people, and it's amazing to see what this community has become to achieve that reputation.
 * To what extent are you aware of community projects, such as The 'Shroom and the Awards Ceremonies? -- Unlike the previous two polls, only a quarter of our voters are completely unaware of our activities, and just over half are aware of both. Another notable statistic is that a significant number of viewers are unaware of the Awards Ceremonies. This may be because they're only an annual activity, whereas The 'Shroom is monthly and easily viewable all year round. While the Awards polls that go up in the month or so before the ceremony may attract attention, as they tend to get a lot of votes, perhaps the voters don't know what they're voting for? Who knows.
 * When you first joined the MarioWiki, how welcome did you feel? -- The MarioWiki is a fairly welcoming place according to our votes here. It's great to see that we're overall pretty nice to newer users, as otherwise we wouldn't have nearly as sprawling and diverse of a community as we do today. I hope we continue to get lots of new users, since it's always great to see our tight-knit community grow ever more!
 * What do you primarily use the MarioWiki for? -- As one could expect from a wiki, most of our voters use us to browse general Mario info. A fair number of votes also went towards Mario news, which helps establish us as a reputable source of information... even if Fake News is literally right over there. The rest of the votes were fairly evenly spread. It's nice to see we're not only just an information hub, and that we have other aspects that intrigue our visitors!
 * What would you consider the best aspect of the Wiki as a whole? -- Almost everyone loves our articles! It's really nice to see so many votes go to our quality articles, since it only further sets us apart from other wikis by being a quite valuable source of info. A good number of votes went to various community-related options, which is nice to see! I'm glad everyone likes the people of the wiki. A lot of the write-in votes here were either variations of "everything" (which is nice to see) or joke answers, but there seems to also be a liking for the "Did You Know?" and "Mario & Nintendo News" sections on our Main Page, and even some love for our very own Community Polls! Thanks for the kind write-ins!
 * What would you consider the worst aspect of the Wiki as a whole? -- This poll was a bit more divisive. Many votes went towards vandalism, an annoying but unfortunately typical aspect of any wiki, while general difficulty while editing also scored a fair number of votes. Most of the other options were relatively evenly spread out, but there were much more write-in votes here compared to the previous best aspects poll. Most of the write-ins were simply variations of "nothing", which is understandable as many of our voters may be anonymous and disassociated with the main wiki, but a few common write-ins were intrusive ads, difficulty finding pages, lag and long loading times, insufficient subject information, and overall design of the website.

While I'm here though, I'd like to explain my reasoning for the inclusion of a certain option on the worst aspects poll, and also why I voted for it; the attitude of the editor community.

'Please note that the writing below is solely the opinion of myself, Lord Bowser, and does NOT reflect the views of The Pyro Guy, the Poll Committee, The 'Shroom, or any other external entity. If you have any complaints about this, direct them at me.'

I've been on the wiki, lurking or otherwise, for several years now, dating back to 2012. I've become pretty immersed in the community, being director of Fun Stuff and chairman of the Poll Committee. I really like the wiki's extended community, on the forums, IRC, Discord, and the like; it's quite honestly the best community I've ever been a part of. However, I cannot say the same for the wiki's main community of editors. Quite frankly, I've noticed a general elitist, hostile, and trigger-happy vibe among the wiki, which is very off-putting. I've seen this done all across the wiki, but most notably in proposals, both main proposals and talk page proposals. The comments sections of said proposals quite often get very heated between two users on opposing sides, making them honestly irritating to read due to the vibes of sheer hostility and pretentiousness I personally get from it. I've also noticed a very uptight and excessively strict adherence to the rules among non-staff members, which is what kills my motivation to come back and edit full-time on the wiki; I'm not interested in dealing with multiple talk-page messages telling me how I messed up one small thing. Yes, I know rules are essential to keeping the wiki stable and running smoothly, but I question the necessity of basically breathing down a user's neck when they make a few mistakes and firing off a multitude of warnings; I feel that only serves to discourage further good-faith edits from said user. In short, I truly feel that the wiki could use a bit of an attitude adjustment; the general pretentious attitude I get from here is a huge turn-off. It makes me unwilling and demotivated to work on the wiki at all, and I now only edit when I really feel compelled. I know we're all passionate about our favorite franchise, and that's totally fine, but when that passion turns to hostility towards your fellow editors, then that's a problem.

Anyway, rant over.

Conclusion
Looking over the results the general trend is that whether we are just a source of information to the public reader, or a community of people to interact with, our presence and quality is appreciated by the internet. It's great to get a confirmation like this; even if there are improvements we can make to this wiki, I guess we're now officially a GOOD WEBSITE, as indicated by our results.

On that note, thank you from both of us for reading through this section, and we hope to continue having more surveys like this in the future. Stay tuned for more polls, more news and more similar projects. Bye!