Over the past year or so, I've made several major changes to the wiki that I haven't officially announced anywhere, most of which were done to address mine and other wiki editors' growing inactivity. This is just a thread to compile them for transparency and future reference.
Additional administrators
Pengugeneral, AwesomeA1733, and Pleaseletmehalp received admin rights in late 2021. During the time, the wiki was a target of several vandalism attacks, which I was unable to effectively moderate due to my inactivity. These users initially received their rights as an emergency measure to deal with the vandalism while I was gone, but because I've continued to remain inactive, I decided to let them keep their admin rights without having to go through an RfR.
History section
The History section is now in the process of being added to item articles. Because we staff members have been increasingly busy with school and other real life obligations, we decided to add this section to reduce the clutter on item pages and make it easier for us to do our daily updates. Similar to the Animal Jam (Play Wild) Wiki, the section uses a table to display the release information, but the table is generated with a Scribunto template that automates summary text, categories, and other formatting features. We hope that readers will find these changes useful for assessing item availability and item worth. Currently, over 25% of item articles already have the History section; if you would like to help us add this section to more item articles, please see Template:History#Adding History Section to Articles for more information.
Some other useful things to note:
A significant amount of seasonal items have already been updated with full release dates. This includes most/all items from recent seasonal adventures as well as recent seasonal parties. While not all seasonal items have had their full release history added, we will be updating them as they are released and going through past seasonal items to record when they were last released.
Item pages (including unreleased items) will now include future release and removal dates up to a month in advance. These dates are found in the files, but they can also be discovered by changing the system time while in-game. While this does raise the possibility of scamming, keep in mind that scammers can already obtain access to this information through the aforementioned methods. Therefore, publicizing these dates on the wiki will only help normal players avoid overtrading for items that are going to be released imminently, preventing them from getting scammed. In addition, releasing these dates reduces the total amount of edits performed on a page and helps us keep item pages more up to date.
Items with a long release history may be missing dates or have slightly inaccurate dates. There is not really much that can be done about this as information is bound to be lost over the years. However, a lot of these dates have been recovered and approximated through page revision histories, game files, external blogs, and YouTube videos, among other sources. Even though these dates aren't completely accurate, they can usually be backed by a source and are still better than nothing.
If you see a page you want us to update with detailed release information, please let us know and we will be happy to help!
Future changes
Future changes are likely to be introduced informally, either through internal discussion among staff members or wiki discussions. Considering that this community has shrunk significantly over the past few years, it will be faster for us to implement changes through informal discussions rather than through voting threads. However, major proposals that do not have a consensus will still be put to a vote. We will continue to take into account community feedback and document all changes to the best of our ability.
Other
Personally, I just want to say that I really appreciate your patience as we work to add more release information to articles. If you have any questions, suggestions, or concerns, feel free to reply to this thread or contact a staff member. Your feedback will be greatly appreciated!