ModEnc needs your help!

Renegade

Dear fellow community members

Five days from now is ModEnc's second birthday. Much has happened in these past two years. We matured as a project, we survived vandalists and spambots, and we overlived rippers and other n00bs. Through RockPatch's Wishlist, most of the RA2/YR community has come in contact with us, and with ETS's Wishlist now here, there'll probably be a few TS nuts checking us out, too.

However, "few" is the operative word.

ModEnc lacks manpower. Badly.

Anyone can edit ModEnc, yet no one does. Sure, there is a minimal core community who's not afraid to change something if it's wrong or outdated, and dozens of IPs drop by every week to add their wish to one of the Wishlists - but the truth is, the only people really doing stuff on ModEnc, on a grand scale, are DCoder and me .

And that is sad. Not only because it hinders the evolution of ModEnc dramatically, but also because, would we unite to create a solid base level on ModEnc, we would immediately help all of us now, and ease entry for all yet to come. I have made clear what the general advantages of ModEnc are often enough. Today, I want to talk about what we need:

No strings attached
The things below can be done without any long-term commitment. It's a simple question of feeling like editing and doing it. We need...

People re-writing the still untouched Guide pages
People filling the Unit, Building, Super weapon, XCC and OS namespaces
People adding content for Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert
People adding content for Tiberian Sun and Firestorm
People adding content for Generals and Zero Hour
People writing or extending the pages about the games

Take responsibility
If you are up for a more long-term agreement, you could do one of the following things - again, you are technically not bound by anything, but once you put a certain amount of work into them, you'll probably not want to leave on your own...

Maintain a namespace - take general responsibility for one of our namespaces (control the pages they contain, add missing ones, add cross-references, create main pages, etc.)
Pimp our Pages - many pages include enough text to work with, but are horribly (or not at all) marked up and lack style. Simply going through pages, adding color, sidebars, templates, screenshots, etc. would help a lot.
Specialist - every detail is helpful. So if you can't be arsed to do something on the grand scale, how about doing something minor in the background? Like specialising in providing screenshots for every building and unit? Or going through pages and fixing links? Hell, even the simple task of using the templates to flag pages that still need work is helpful, 'cause then others at least know where to start.
Patrols - logged in users can see whether a revision was "patrolled", i.e. whether an edit was backchecked and found unhostile; we need people doing those patrols (basically, you look at the diffs of the latest revisions and click "Mark as patrolled" if it's okay, or revert to a previous version or start a discussion if it's not)
Riot Control Officers - the more people we get who edit pages, the more people we need watching over those pages, too.

Mods
What many people don't realize is that mods most definately have a place in a Modding Encyclopedia. So, even if you can't be arsed to do any of the general stuff up there, how about doing something for your own mod? You can start by simply adding a small page for it, but if you want to, nothing stops you from writing detailed sub-pages about every single unit you added. If there're enough pages, we'll even give your mod your own namespace, just like RockPatch or XCC have them.

All you need to do is start
On problem with community contribution might be that, back in the day, when we started, ModEnc was rather inaccessible to newcomers. The help pages were just empty, much had to be hard-coded through HTML, and there were no general guidelines you could hold onto. All of this has changed, but many people don't know that. Today, if you click the help link in the navigation, you'll be presented with all links necessary to find, and to find out what you want to know. And if you don't, we have an IRC channel were you can join and ask us right away.

Contributing to ModEnc is as simple as clicking the nearest "edit" link when you see a typo. Don't shy away from it. For you, it's just one minute of your time, but for ModEnc, it's one step closer to perfection.

Please help ModEnc. Just visit it. Try pages that could potentially interest you. And if you find something that needs fixing, nothing stops you from doing it.

That ends our plea for help for today, but there is one last thing I want to ask you for: Even if you don't decide to write, at least read. ModEnc has a page for every tag described in DeeZire's RA2/YR Editing Guide. The only thing you could need from the Guide is the AI.ini guide - everything else you can find either on the same level, or better on ModEnc. There is no logical reason not to choose ModEnc over the Guide. If you do so anyway, all our work is for naught. Sad