Announcements:Issue 2 - SOME IS TRUE. SOME IS NOT. ALL IS BLASEBALL.

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Early on in the life of Blaseball and of this wiki, this community ran headfirst into the brick wall called Canon. The Canon Discourses of #fan-lore ran for weeks, debating what was considered canon or non-canon, or if the concept of canon was even useful at all. As time went on, we came to a somewhat peaceful understanding that Blaseball is many things all at once, often the core of Blaseball being the multitude of beautiful and diverse takes on all the players in the game. That understanding has held firm, although over the course of the Grand Siesta, it's become clear to us that this wiki is still often viewed as a canonical document. We'd like to start addressing that with an old post in the Discord announcements channel from Umpire Sunman:

CLARIFICATION: SOME IS TRUE. SOME IS NOT. ALL IS BLASEBALL. - Umpire Sunman

Summary

Of course, this blog post is not all about canon. It’s about many things at once as we head into the new era and Season 12. There's a lot to talk about, and to help readers navigate this long post, here are some one to three sentence summaries of the topics below.

New Wiki - This wiki is designed around making collaboration and communication easier, including notifying you when new discussions pop up or changes are made to pages you are interested in. Please make an account and use our features! And don't use the old Fandom wiki!

Style Guide 2.0 - It's a really big document detailing our content guidelines and it's not ready for prime time yet. Please give us more time to work on this document, especially as real life begins to encroach on our time.

New Wiki Roles - Please expect wiki writing of major articles to be slower this era as members of the wiki team just don't have the same freedom to spend 10 hours a day on the wiki as they used to. To help us maintain these articles and the rest of the wiki writing community, we are expanding our team of contributors and you are invited!

Staff Updates - Please welcome Risky as our third admin! Risky orchestrated the wiki migration from Fandom, and has shown great leadership throughout the entire process. You can see an up to date list of all moderators and admins here.

This Wiki Isn't Canon - There's a lot to this, but ultimately, we intend to more clearly vocalize going forward that this wiki is not the only place to share creative writing about Blaseball, and what you read here, by and large, should not be considered canon.

New Wiki

As you can see if you are reading this, we've got this fancy new wiki set up! We announced the migration of the Blaseball Wiki on the first day of the Grand Siesta and completed it about two months later. Any new Blaseball content will be updated on this wiki, not the old Fandom-based wiki. Whenever you see Fandom links out in the wild, we'd appreciate it if you gently pointed readers to this new wiki, while letting the old wiki fall out of date.

Furthermore, this wiki has some great features that will facilitate collaboration within the community. If you are interested in keeping up with changes to your favorite players, we strongly recommend making an account and adding articles to your watchlist, which will notify you of changes and new discussions. This is the biggest feature of this wiki, so we hope you make strong use of it.

You may find that there are still little bugs here and there, remnants from the Fandom wiki that aren't fully compatible out of the box. If you do, drop us a note on the Blaseball Discord or post in the bug report forums!

Style Guide 2.0

In addition to building this new wiki, we've been building a new Style Guide, a comprehensive document meant to guide content creation and collaboration on this wiki.

We've been doing most of our work on the guide in the last two months, since The Return was announced. To be honest, it's an incredibly large document, and we aren't fully done with it. In its raw form, it's over 30 pages long, single spaced. We've been soliciting feedback on the document from leaders in the community, and we wanted to have it ready for The Return. However, work on the project has taken a toll, and with real life catching up to us, it’s going to be a while longer before we make it available to the public. Please have patience with us while we continue to work on this. Questions about formatting or style are welcome on the Blaseball Discord at any time.

New Wiki Roles

As mentioned, development of the Style Guide has been stymied by real life busyness. Several members of the Wiki Team do not have the unlimited free time we used to to work on the wiki going into the era of Peace & Prosperity. To that end, we have been working on expanding our team of people to contribute to the wiki, foster intra-team communication, and maintain the wiki backend.

We have introduced three new roles that community members can apply for: Team Liaisons, who serve as points of contact for their teams to other teams and the moderation team; Recordkeepers, which help maintain the historical record of the wiki; and MediaWiki Hackers, who help maintain the technical backend of this wiki, including user-facing elements, such as the skin of this wiki.

By the time you are reading this, we will already have closed the first wave of applications to join us in one or more of these roles. However, if you are interested in taking on one or more of these roles, please reach out to us on the Blaseball Discord!

Wiki Team Updates

Speaking of new roles, we have an update to share!

king clork risky is admin

Please welcome Risky as our third admin! Risky is the primary architect of the migration from Fandom to SIBR-hosted servers. She will continue to manage the technical and server side concerns of the wiki, and work with MediaWiki Hackers to improve and support the website.

You can find an up-to-date list of admins and moderators on Help:Admins_and_Moderators.

The Wiki Isn't Canon

Now, for the real meat of this post.

The concept of canon and its history in Blaseball is complex and tortured, and is not going to be recapped here in full. However, over the course of the Grand Siesta, notably during the final month or so, the community started asking questions again about the place of canon on this wiki, how the Interdimensional Rumor Mill impacts perceptions of community-built writing, how to square different methods of collaboration, and how to keep wiki writing open to everyone.

We don't have all the answers to these questions. In fact, they are major reasons that we don't have a fully revamped Style Guide ready for contributors today. Separate from the Style Guide, it might take quite some time for us to get the information we need to address some of these major questions. But we felt it was time to start taking a firmer stance on what this wiki is used for, and how as a community, we should recognize the ways in which this wiki exists in defiance of what most video game fan wikis actually look like.


Let's revisit the statement from the top of this post.

CLARIFICATION: SOME IS TRUE. SOME IS NOT. ALL IS BLASEBALL. - Umpire Sunman

Sunman posted this in the announcements channel on the Blaseball Discord right on the cusp of Season 3, just days after the Blaseball Wiki was founded. My memory of those very early days is not very precise, but that was about the time that people started to post their player backstories to the wiki in large quantities. It was also about the time that community members began arguing about how getting to the wiki first was a major influence on community perceptions, creating a de facto "canon" despite the fact that no one had authority to claim their writing as canonical. The discourse continued for several days beyond that, and eventually slowed down enough that we came to an understanding that just because something is not on the wiki, doesn't mean it's invalid.

Some of what you read on this wiki is true. And in fact, things that would classically be considered "canon" do live here. On this wiki, canon consists solely of events that occur in the game of Blaseball. This includes: unchanging information presented on blaseball.com, statistical information, game and season results, active teams and players, any events (planned and unplanned) that occur on blaseball.com, and on occasion, community events that the developers of Blaseball bring into the narrative fold of the game. This list is not exhaustive as new categories of events have appeared through the history of Blaseball that expand what is to be considered canonical. Messages from The Commissioner on Twitter often fall into this category, but not always. For example, it is not canonical that Tony Hawk is in Blaseball Party Time[1]. Tony Hawk does not exist in Blaseball's official record of events.

But Sunman probably wasn't talking about the canonical history of Blaseball by saying some things were true. No one argues that the Forbidden Book was opened in Season 1. It's likely he was talking about the fan-created content emerging in force around Blaseball at this point in time. A lot of fan art was being created for the first time, and this wiki was a blank canvas for creative people and new groups of friends to paint their vision of Blaseball. This creative outburst, Sunman appears to say, is what is true.

"SOME IS NOT" could be read in two ways. First, you could assume Sunman is saying that some of the fan works created are incorrect, like there is a True Form to be discovered. That’s likely not the case. That's why we think this segment is best read more abstractly. The creative work produced by the community is beautiful and valid, and it feels great for everyone's contributions to matter. But it doesn't all have to matter. You don't vibe with an article on this wiki? That's okay, it's not true anyway. You prefer thinking of Sexton Wheerer as a grumpy mushroom instead of a tiny, adorable horse? That's awesome, grumpy mushroom Sexton is your best friend now.

All of this is Blaseball. Blaseball is not intended to be a perfectly enmeshed universe with deep threads running all over the place. It's not even intended to feature only the greatest writing or art. It's intended to be an infinite playground.

This is the approach that we want readers and contributors alike to bring to this wiki. This wiki, while an easy and central place to read, is not the only place to find creativity in Blaseball. Treating the first thing you read on this wiki as de facto canon doesn't align with our mission or community.

The hardest part about this is that video game fan wikis are almost exclusively built around recording accurate information and only accurate information. With that in mind, we ask that veteran members of the community remember that newcomers visit this wiki and community not fully understanding the non-canonical and sometimes non-linear nature of the writing on this wiki. As an administrative team, we intend to preach this message frequently going forward, but we need the help of community members to better infuse the community with an expectation that creative works can and will come from sources external to this wiki, and we need to celebrate them with as much gusto as we do anything written down here.

ALL IS BLASEBALL.

Tomorrow, February 28th, Concessions will open, and we’re gonna have a grand time learning how they work. If you are new to Blaseball and this wiki, or just need a refresher, things like new game mechanics, election results, and major game events are handled centrally by the Wiki Team and Recordkeepers to maintain accuracy. If you wish to help with things like this, please reach out to us via the Blaseball Discord.

With that out of the way, we are more or less minimally prepared for Season 12, The Return. This means that we are all still sleepy from the Siesta, and not to harp on this too much, but the Wiki Team has become busy with real life and simply can't hang on to every moment of Blaseball anymore. We're gonna work hard to keep this wiki accurate, but it will simply be slower than you may be used to in the past, all in service of maintaining mental health, life balance, and general safety. Users are still welcome to make creative contributions as they always have. Just remember…

SOME IS TRUE. SOME IS NOT. ALL IS BLASEBALL.

Thanks for reading. -- HALLSTAR Steven Wiki