Announcements:Issue 10 - Missing In Action

To see all announcements, visit the Announcements Main Page

Hey Blaseball fans,

Welcome to a new Era, both for Blaseball and the Wiki. We have a few announcements to make about how the Blaseball Wiki will operate in the coming Seasons.

First of all, the Wiki team is taking a step back from being the primary recordkeeping organizers of Blaseball. In previous Seasons, we would spend every week chaotically working together to ensure every decree, new players, and every change period was recorded for posterity. It may have seemed like this was automated, or it may have seemed like this was the undertaking of many people, but our core team is now five people. As you may imagine, our entire team is burnt out. If the new Era is to be documented, it must be done by you. This is a free encyclopedia that anybody can edit. Sign up for an account and get started.

On a similar note, our moderation actions are going to be a whole lot slower and less able to seek consensus for any conflicts that may arise. It is difficult to convey how much emotional labor the Wiki team undertook in the previous Era of Blaseball. On more than a few occasions, we've had to moderate Discord discussions between the whole fandoms of different teams, hearing their concerns and attempting to find a solution that was amenable to as many people as possible. More recently, we have been asked to moderate fundamental schisms over what does and does not qualify as offensive. This is not sustainable, particularly since we're volunteers. We will do our best to address anything brought to our direct attention, but there are still some ongoing conflicts that have not been fully resolved. We cannot continue with how we've operated in the Discipline Era, so please adjust any expectations.

We have had major personnel changes in the Wiki team: please give our long-time administrator Nesbitt a fond farewell, and welcome Alter Eagle as a newer moderator. We would still like to call for more help, however, so please DM risky#9552 on Discord if you would like to join the Blaseball moderation team.

Thank you for reading. We'll end this message with a few personal notes from some members of the team.

Messages from the Team

Hello, this is Risky. It's been a very long time since the Discipline Era. Looking back on it, it's a bit hard for me to believe how much work we've put into this thing. I don't think it would be an exaggeration to say that the Wiki mods and admins have put in as much community management work as some of the official Blaseball Keepers, and I'm proud of the work we've done to resolve conflicts and make people felt heard. I am so very grateful for all the moderators, recordkeepers, and team liasions who have worked with us over the years. They've really done a lot of labor that is invisible to most of the community, and everyone working on the Wiki could not be appreciated enough. Thank you for your support over the years.

As Inumo rightly points out below, the entire wiki team is now burnt out and mostly absent. It's both a sad state of affairs and completely understandable. We document things as best we can, and then folks complain when we miss a detail. We try to resolve as many conflicts as we can, but then we get blamed when we don't resolve them perfectly. We've been called names, blamed for problems, and straight up forgotten in conversations about the Blaseball fandom. It's been an uphill battle.

I do not know how this new Era of Blaseball will work out, but I do know that it must do so without our invisible work. May this Era be an interesting one.

- risky#9552 / Pitapot

---

This is Wiki Mod Inumo writing. I... don't know how much of the Wiki team is active? Risky came out of her slumber to help with this announcement, but I suspect she's going back to sleep shortly. Might as well give you a bit more explanation of what's going on backstage, though.

The short version is, unsurprisingly, the whole team's burnt out. Though the Ongoing Everything continues, the pandemic is officially "over" and so we all had to go back to work, dramatically shortening the amount of time we had available for the Wiki. So, we had limited resources, and then those limited resources were taken up with moderating some... very exhausting conflicts, let's just say. It came to a head back in June 2022 and the team has never really recovered. Certainly doesn't help that the Official Blaseball Discord's moderation community very rapidly cut ties with us (we thought it was just because of the June 2022 incident but it seems like they're cutting ties with any unofficial community space; our incident was just a good excuse to get the ball rolling). We used to rely on them for help with deciding community standards, but now we're on our own, like so many other Blaseball communities.

Suffice to say, the Wiki team has very little to give to the Wiki. I just happen to be someone with enough spoons to write something for y'all and enough of a "heck it" attitude to not worry about whether it represents the team holistically or in the best light.

What this means is that the Wiki is not going to be up to ideal standards. I'm deliberately trying to take a step back, because the June 2022 incident was infuriating both for its causes and the lack of support I received from other members of the team. I haven't heard from some other team members in a long while. I think we've all been traumatized by the constant drama we were mired in starting back in 2020, and more than a few of us have chosen (or, y'know, """chosen""" 'cuz it's a trauma response) to be avoidant about the Wiki. This means if there's gonna be a reorganization of the Wiki, it's gonna have to come from you. If there's gonna be new standards for whatever this Era brings, it's gonna have to come from you. If you develop a new version of Help:Example Player or other organizational pages to keep up with it all, shout and I can probably see about throwing redirects around and such. And if there are fights going down on Talk pages, well, expect some really variable results out of the mod team if we get called in because who knows if/when we'll take action & how much consideration that action will have been given. I know this sucks for a lot of folks; whatever the team's faults, I know folks trusted us to maintain a good space. For my part I'll still be doing what I can, but being honest, I have enough on my plate yelling at collaborators about the paper I'm trying to publish to finish off my PhD. I don't wanna spend further time arguing about the difference between self-exaltation and fetishization/exoticization or whatever.

TL;DR Mods asleep. Please don't wake us up. Good luck.

- Inumo