Team Fortress Wiki talk:Wiki Cap/Nominations
Explanation of Wiki Cap nomination hiatus
Rationale
With my sincere apologies to the editors at large. We have to read the writing on the wall at some point.
TF2 is spinning down into maintenance mode, Valve is moving to an outsourced device-and-app store model as a company and as a whole we don't have the level of staff cohesion we used to. Both in terms of us mostly being a skeleton crew at this point and - more importantly - lacking the community engagement required to have substantial loc reviewers for each given language. And due to TF2 having slowed down in general, most of what gets nominated is for loc editors. STS being dissolved and removing the badge-incentive there didn't help us much either despite itself.
Otherwise, I'm sensing a possible problem occurring with the queue at this point that I thought we ALL - staff and regular editors alike - agreed wouldn't become a problem. Which is that the hat is turning into a compulsory participation trophy that people think must be awarded on a systemic basis.
This is not true and never has been. In fact it's contrary to the point of the hat as a token for valuable contributions to encourage more of them per the years-old disclaimer we put in the Active nominations section. We owe it to past recipients to maintain our branding for scrutiny. And fact of the matter is that issues with the last two nominees - including the flimsiness of their reviews and nominations in the first place - is good enough of a canary for me to call it quits on this experiment for the time being. We cannot - and I personally will not - allow the hat to turn into a blue ribbon based on friends nominating friends and staff having to take single reviews at face value.
One more time for anyone in the back not listening: We owe it to our recipients past and future to maintain the strong branding of the hat. And it's our responsibility as community project stewards to do this even if it causes us the badfeels in present time.
Again, I apologize to editors at large who didn't get to participate. But we've been doing this on a consistent volunteer basis for over 10 years now. This project was a success by any standard and maintenance mode is an inevitability sometimes.
FAQ
Is this closure a proposal or RFC? Are we voting on it?
That time came and went. The primary issue at hand is staff cohesion, staff interest and lack of a sibling project (with their own badges) like STS to source from organically. Our system doesn't match the activity level from editors currently either.
Why though? Is this closure forever and no more wiki caps?
I'm letting our old staff off the hook for volunteer work they have long since moved on from in spirit anyway. And work which is unfair to ask current staff to do for the time being without strong support. How long it lasts is mostly dependent on how long it takes Valve to decide they want to pay attention to fundamentals again and bring the community together. Finally fixing a few high priority bugs is a good sign.
Let's just make more people staff or force current ones to vote more actively!
We have, but this doesn't solve the issue of loc-based nominees getting ever-harder to strongly verify/review. And in keeping with how stringently we've reviewed past nominees.
Let's just lower the vote threshold/requirements and devalue all past awards!
No. And my response will be much the same to any similarly self-evidently bad ideas.
-- Lagg 
18:44, 21 August 2022 (UTC)
