Board Thread:General Wiki Discussion/@comment-29848568-20170917085808/@comment-24101790-20170917150230

Here's my take:


 * 1) That's what it's going to do unfortunately and really adding extra work feels like it's being done to make less work for the authors themselves (which I don't agree with. Writing is a time-consuming process. It requires hard work and all the excellent stories we find here (Banning, Dupin, yours, etc. are the product of putting time in. It eats up a lot of time, but is rewarding.
 * 2) I never said it was impossible, I just referenced how hard it is in the guide (an entire section was dedicated to outlining the difficulty of it). It would be counter-intuitive to describe the challenge of it and then approve a lot of stories that I feel were lacking just for the sake of increasing participation in the community.
 * 3) We could always use more activity (all wikis could), but I don't feel like this is the way to achieve it. We could really up our activity if we accepted every story that was posted, but that's how we got to a bloated 13,000 article site page and the general assumption that most creepypastas are low-quality stories that an author bangs out in ten minutes. In the long-run, I think it would result in participation dropping back down. We've brought back PotM to improve participation and add incentive to be active in the community (reading, editing, and looking for the next big story to nominate) and we'll constantly be looking for ways to increase popularity (through contests, PotM, and other ideas), but we do have to take ideas and look at possible consequences.
 * 4) Here's my take on the contest and appeals. Banning's story won the contest by popular vote. As a prize (per the contest rules), he was featured on the site and given more exposure (take of that what you will). The runner-ups got featured on the page as well. To appeal to be featured on the site feels contradictory to the purpose of the contest. It could also result in other people appealing as well, and then what was the purpose of the original contest? Additionally, given how that genre of stories has been received, I can't really see how jumping back to it after distancing ourselves from it (with deleting the original, restricting the premise, and discouraging similar tropes) would be beneficial. It would be like a user participating in the upcoming Werewolf contest and then petitioning to be featured on the main page alongside the winner. They can say that this is their home away from home, but in the end, it still detracts from the winner. The JtK contest was set to have one winner and I think that's fair. While we should have put our foot down and stated that from the beginning (especially since I was the one working on the SA), it is a bit of a tightrope walk to make sure everything's handled diplomatically without alienating the audience while also being fair. Admins make these mistakes all the time (see my attempting to re-arrange contests so authors can participate in both and the front page wouldn't be overloaded) and will likely continue to make them while trying to make the best horror literature wiki that we possibly can.