User blog:DestructionDerby/Back from the dead

Good morning, DD community! It's been a while hasn't it? I launched this wiki many years ago as the core place of Destruction Derby on the interwebs. It's fantastic that we got to this point with lots of content, created by me and many other contributors who joined here. I want to start by giving my thanks to all these people who have contributed on the wiki throughout the years. While the fanbase isn't that large these days (with the last game having been released 15 years ago), these dedicated contributors are still keeping this wiki somewhat active, so thank you.

Now I've got a personal life too and haven't been able to keep up with this wiki. As you may see on my contributions history, my last series of major edits was in November 2015, with only a handful minor edits since then up until 17 months ago. I recently came here again seeing how the wiki is going. There have been many great contributors who have added content since (particularly, I've noticed, on certain DD1/DD2 competitors). There has even been one contributor very familiar with DD Arenas, and he/she has made many articles about power-ups and other stuff about that game. It's awesome.

The game articles have had very few changes - they seem almost unchanged since I made them circa 2012. They are in need for some revamping and a format change. Also since 2015, Wikia (or FANDOM as it's now called) has had interface changes, and I will take a look if I can capitalise on that regarding the design.

New DD-specific editing rules will be specified out so that articles will look much better. This will soon be compiled into a Guidelines page, accessible from this main page. There need to be standards in common with usual FANDOM wikis - this includes blogs, which I have enabled here today and is how this message will be communicated. Previously when giving out announcements like the 20th anniversary notice, I just used plain text on the front page - I wonder now why I never bothered with the blogs back then. I also strongly want to introduce referencing here. Some of the content for instance were copied over from Wikipedia revisions many years ago (again, c. 2012). Under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) content from Wikipedia can be reused but as long as the author is attributed. This is a strong reason why referencing is necessary. There are only few articles that have copied content but they are still notable, such as the race tracks of DD1 - this content was written by a Wikipedia contributor back in 2006, but has since been removed from there. Referencing should also be necessary for most image files - I regret not doing this before, because back in c. 2012 I found many interesting 'beta' screenshots of DD games on the web, but today when I try to search, they are nowhere to be seen except on this site. I also want to increase the usage of categories on this wiki, another part that would make navigation better.

Anyway, the announcement is that I will become increasingly active on this wiki again for the foreseeable future, to perform some much-needed refining. There are many things still to explore and improve about this wiki, and I can't wait to get started. Happy editing everyone!