Announcements:Issue 5 - You Ever Create an Internet Fandom Wiki So Hard That You Fall Asleep?

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Today's wiki announcement will be bittersweet for me. I've written a lot of these blog posts, addressing everything from tweaks to wiki policy to major community concerns, across two websites and two eras of Blaseball. I've helped design features that have made the Blaseball Wiki a unique hub of fan fiction writing for internet fandoms and hosted one of the most exhaustive sources of information about Blaseball history. And now… I (Steven Wiki) am writing my final post. Season 17 will be my final season volunteering as an admin of this wiki. This has been the most creatively fulfilling project of my adult life, but it is time for me to move on from this project and Blaseball. There's more to cover in this post besides my retirement, which I cover in greater detail at the very bottom if you just want the relevant news.

Summary

  • Slight changes in wiki moderation. Moderators will take the forefront on managing public requests while the admins are around for emergencies and big picture guidance.
  • We've been getting a great deal of requests to update the wiki at a pace that we simply cannot keep up with. We are asking people to cool it with the requests to update the wiki, or at least to contribute to updating the wiki.
  • New wiki crime! Introducing Template:RandomPronoun, in which you can set any pronouns used in an article to randomly select. This is an advanced template and requires reading and understanding the documentation to use it without causing yourself pain.
  • As players who have been Redacted and reappear with Attractor begin to play active games again, we want to set some guidelines about what lore topics are acceptable or forbidden to cover.
  • Steven is retiring! Season 17 will be his last season as an admin of the Blaseball Wiki, and will attempt to fade into obscurity.

Wiki Team Changes

You may have noticed lately that on Discord, the wiki admins have been less active in public channels. Since The Return in March, we've noticed a significant increase in requests for our time, and so we've started to hide away a bit to figure out how we can best serve the community and the increase in requests.

Foremost, we're structuring things a little differently so that our team of moderators are the first point of contact. You can see our current list here. Admins will still be around for general help, but don't expect us to be the only people or first people to get there. I, Steven, have traditionally been Terminally Online, but as I leave this project, you will not see me in the wiki channels and should not expect the other admins to fill my absence.

General wiki help requests can continue to be posted in the wiki-talk channel on the Blaseball Discord where they will be addressed by experienced members of the community, moderators, or admins. More serious requests can be passed on through your team Wiki Liaisons or ask for a moderator DM in the wiki-talk channel. Admin level action will be available for serious issues, but mostly we intend to stay back, help guide and organize the big picture operations of the wiki, and offer community guidance on emergent lore writing issues.

You will also notice that on team discord servers, wiki admins are no longer available to be pinged directly. This was something we offered to people during the Grand Siesta while the main Blaseball Discord server was on deep freeze, but again, due to the increased demands on our time and availability, it is no longer sustainable for us to be present in this way. Any wiki admin or moderator present on a team server is there because they want to be, and not in any wiki support capacity.

It’s worth recognizing that, as of writing this post, we have a very limited moderation team, all of whom have multiple obligations competing for their attention (and typically prioritized above the wiki). We’re hoping to expand the moderation team soon, but are reluctant to open applications to members of the general public as our most frequent requests require no small amount of wiki editing experience to address. As such, if you’re interested in becoming a wiki moderator, we recommend applying to become a Recordkeeper or Team Liaison. We can always use more hands! You can find information about this in the pins of the #wiki-talk channel (or whatever meme name that has the word “wiki” in it) on the Blaseball Discord server.

Ongoing Wiki Maintenance Updates

As a supplement to this, we'd like people to consider their own place in keeping the wiki up to date. We have more resources than ever before to describe the sorts of things we do to keep the wiki correct and up to date, and we'd like everyone to feel free to take part in keeping the wiki up to date and make edits on your own. Wikis are not meant to be perfect on the first try, and so if you are feeling intimidated, know that you are in good company and there will always be others to help you take the first steps to editing the wiki and offer advice and fixes for anything that doesn't go as planned.

A great deal of the requests we've seen lately are of this nature. In the Discipline Era, my life was different, not to even begin speaking for those lives of the rest of the people who contribute to the wiki. It took many months of nearly constant effort to build this wiki, of which I am very proud, but it's an unfortunate side effect of having ebbs and flows of IRL commitments that have meant keeping the wiki up to date has been slower lately.

Folks who are not used to this slower pace or who are new to Blaseball mean well when they ask for things to be updated, but we find it frustrating when people don't take action for themselves. If you are someone who likes to see things up to date, consider being someone who contributes to the wiki in this manner rather than just waiting for someone else to update a page for you. This project has always been a group effort, and you will always be received better if you join the group rather than standing on the sidelines, asking for things to change. We have editing guides, recordkeeping guides, and very soon, there will be a guide to writing articles about canonical events. And if we don't have a guide for what you are looking for, please ask for help!

Speaking of guides, Style Guide 2.0 isn’t dead but is in deep hybernation. Similar to how moderation needs on the wiki take a back seat to real life commitments, the Style Guide is taking a back seat to the moderation concerns brought to us.

If you are unwilling or unable to help, we are asking you to hold off on requesting updates to the wiki for events that have occurred in the last 24 hours. In the case of human-generated content, such as election results or writeups of canonical events, upwards of a week of real time should be expected to get the wiki updated. We are keenly aware of what needs updating on the wiki, and we do not have the resources to get everything accomplished immediately. Please remember that before asking for something.

As a note to this, we are still working on automating various things about the wiki, and we are running into technical roadblocks left and right, in addition to the humans that need to actually do the work to make the wiki updates smoother. Wikis are slow and not necessarily designed to import as much data as we would like, in the way we like it. For now, logs of major events like incinerations and feedbacks will be slow to trigger, as those logs are managed via a script that was both built for the Fandom wiki and is reliant on the structure of Blaseball event logging in the Discipline Era. Scattered names are giving us some trouble too, so you may see a lot of deadlinks to names that are scattered. Additionally, player modifications and infoboxes are now being updated via an API, and it will take time for those jobs to run their way through all the relevant parts of the wiki. Any requests to update this information within the 24 hours might get you a short and sharp response because waiting is quite literally all we can do.

Gender Crimes

As my final wiki crime for everyone, I present to you a new template, Template:RandomPronoun. RandomPronoun is a template that, when used in line on a page, can randomly select a pronoun in the correct capitalization and case from a predefined set of pronouns. The template can accept custom sets of pronouns, and it can also lock the randomization in place so that all uses of the pronoun on the page match (the default behavior of wiki randomization is to pick something new at every possible instance). This template can be used for goofy crimes, also used to enhance the page of a genderfluid character, or any other use the community finds suitable.

This is an advanced template! Whoever attempts to install this will need operational knowledge of English grammar and pronoun mechanics, as well as functional knowledge of the wiki source editor. Trying to use this template without reading the documentation (available on the template page) in full and fully understanding it will experience pain and more than a little side eye.

Lore for Redacted and Attractors

As Season 16 Elections hit tomorrow, we expect that at least one player with Attractor will be pulled out of the shadows. We'd like to set some general rules about how to approach lore writing for players who have been Redacted, players who have entered a Secret Base, or who have Attractor now. This will be very similar to how we handled lore for players who were on THE SHELLED ONE'S PODS, where we ruled that certain areas are off limits and for The Game Band to flesh out at their leisure.

Lore describing someone becoming Observed is acceptable. However, once a player enters the Secret Base or disappears after Coffee weather and becomes Redacted, that lore cuts off and is off limits. Once a player reemerges with Attractor, writers may pick up their story. Writers can specifically name that a player was Redacted and in the Secret Base, but writers will not be permitted to describe the sensations, environments, experiences, potential beings and interactions, or anything else about the Secret Base or being Redacted. Similarly to the PODS, we suggest allowing your characters to change due to their unexplained absences, then in the future if there is more clarity about these events, filling in the gaps.

Attractor players are also on new teams, so lore collaboration between teams is encouraged, as usual.

Steven's Retirement

As for me, I am retiring from the Blaseball Wiki after founding it in Season 2 of Blaseball. This has been a whirlwind of a project, and I have felt every emotion from elation to exhaustion to anger to pride and everything in between. My reasons for retiring now are complex and personal, and while I want to share those reasons, I will do so on my personal social accounts, not here on the wiki. Suffice it to say, I am experiencing a form of deep and unsolvable burnout. It's not enough for me to step away for a month and come back. Just before Blaseball returned, I experienced an anxiety attack that, from what I can tell, lasted for about a week and ended with an emotional breakdown. It sucked a ton, but it was the signal that I was too invested, over-extended, and just plain tired. I made the decision to retire before Blaseball even returned, and I set this date of Season 17 a few weeks into the new era.

I would have liked to make it to August, which would have made a year of wiki admin'ing. But I just could not hold out that long. I am taking my leave in the middle of this new era, while things are more complex than ever before. I have every expectation that Blaseball will continue to be exciting, but I will be watching from my preferred, smaller channels. I hear about people who enjoy Blaseball in small groups with their friends, and I'd like to give that a try.

I am extremely grateful for the opportunity to be so involved in Blaseball, and to create a wiki that I think is one of the greatest wikis you can find on the internet, with some of the most creative minds of our generation. I am grateful for the friendships I have made, and I hope to stay in touch with a great deal of you.

My greatest thanks to my fellow wiki admins, Nesbitt and Risky, for their support and specialized knowledge that keeps this wiki afloat. Their knowledge and skills improved the wiki nearly constantly from the start, and the wiki you are looking at today would not exist, quite literally, without them both.

Thank you to my moderation team -- Keeper Dax, Inumo, Sav, and Ian -- for their insight into the community and helping manage some truly wild events on the Blaseball Wiki. Each of you have shown a deep care for the community at large, and I am so thankful I’ve been able to rely on you when working to keep the community safe and healthy.

Thank you to the Recordkeepers and Team Liaisons and Hackers for improving the wiki with every single edit you make. Whether you have been working on the wiki since we called everyone a “historian” or only joined up recently, you are the lifeblood that keeps the wiki going, and we couldn’t do it without you.

Thank you to SIBR! Our relationship really blossomed during the Grand Siesta when you gave us a slice of the bare metal beefy boi to move the Blaseball Wiki too, in our flight from Fandom. You didn’t have to let us install a Discourse Generator on your server, but the community has appreciated all the benefits and improvements that have come from aiding us in building a better wiki.

Thank you to the Team Representatives for trusting me and working with me to keep in touch with your communities and express your unique cultures in this messy world of Blaseball. And for allowing me to subject you to my cursed memes, and to show me your cursed memes.

Thank you to the Keepers on Discord for their incredible support, logistical and emotional, across all the ways that the community flows between our domains. You’ve been there with us when things have been spiciest, and sorry that I bullied you into creating several Carlbot commands. The ass will always be free.

Thank you to the entire Blaseball community for your continual trust in me and this wiki with all the things you could ever imagine Blaseball being about. May your exciting and weird lore continue to find a home here.

And most of all, thank you to The Game Band for building such a captivating game and for trusting this project. Your words of support early in the life of the wiki kept me going through a lot of events that got me down. Thank you for encouraging a vibrant, diverse, and profoundly radical approach to fan interaction and canon in media. Our ability to reflect that in this wiki is one of my proudest achievements.

And with that, my farewell. I will continue working on the wiki as an admin for the entirety of Season 17, and my final day is May 5th, where I will relinquish my admin access rights on the wiki.

I have two personal blog posts that I am still finalizing that I hope to post to my personal accounts. You can follow me on twitter @stevenwiki_ to see those posts, and where I will be tweeting about Mass Effect for the rest of 2021 (I promise I'm not trying to steal Elena's brand here!) and also tweeting about Blaseball. I still like Blaseball! I wish you all the very best. Now I gotta figure out how to end this post--

"UH GOTTA GO" - Ump Sun2man