Announcements:Pre-Launch Issue 1 - The Blaseball Wiki Is Dead, Long Live The Blaseball Wiki

To see all announcements, visit the Announcements Main Page

Since the Blaseball Wiki was founded in Season 2, the Blaseball Wiki has been hosted on Fandom and received over 500,000 unique page views every month since it started. But almost since the start, we received feedback time and time again about all the weird ways that Fandom makes participating in creative writing difficult. We thought about migrating off Fandom from the very start, but the information out there about wikis that left Fandom/Wikia scared us. We feared that Fandom would retaliate against us somehow, taking the hard work of this community out of our hands and fracturing everyone into dozens of different locations.

But today, that changes.

Welcome to the Blaseball Wiki, hosted by SIBR, no longer attached to a parasitic entertainment company, but entirely operated and managed by the Blaseball community.

We’ve been planning this for a little under a month now, and we are incredibly excited to reveal the new Blaseball Wiki, which is run on an up-to-date version of MediaWiki, and includes new features that will greatly enhance the collaborative process and provide a casual place for community interaction.

Today, we are launching the wiki in a sandbox alpha state, using a snapshot from the Fandom wiki shortly after Season 10 Elections. This sandbox is free for your editing pleasure, to break and stress and even post memes in.

What you are seeing here now is a temporary sandbox because we need more time to finish building the wiki before we can open it up to the public, including a final content export from Fandom, installing and designing a new skin, and testing a mobile interface that provides as much parity with the desktop experience as possible. We will be rolling out additional features over the course of the Grand Siesta. This is an opportunity for you to deliver us feedback in our new forums and shape the design and functionality of the new wiki.

This post is my first announcement on this wiki, and it includes a sort of rough roadmap for how we will complete the migration off Fandom and open this wiki to full public editing, a high level feature list for this new wiki, and a Q&A section. You will be able to find up-to-date information about the progress of this wiki via the official Blaseball Discord server and @BlaseballWiki on Twitter.

Roadmap - Details May Change

• Alpha Launch - Today!
  • Public sandbox access to the alpha wiki, including forum posting.
    • Community members are expected to follow all the standard rules of the Blaseball Wiki and Discord guidelines on this sandbox wiki. This wiki is party time rules; if you break the rules, you will be instantly banned from this sandbox without warning or appeal and will not be granted access again until public release, closer to Season 12 at the end of the Grand Siesta. We're here to test this new platform and make improvements based on community feedback.
    • Don't be an asshole.
  • Content broadly reflects the Fandom wiki as of the Season 10 Elections, expect to find gaps or strange looking templates
  • Basic custom skin, mobile support
  • Feedback and/or feature requests are welcome in our Bug Reports and Feedback Forums
  • Users may still make contributions to Fandom; this new wiki is currently a sandbox and all changes will be lost once we enter full production. If you wish to continue to make lasting contributions to the wiki, please use the Fandom wiki until further notice.
• Beta Launch - Mid November
  • Public Sandbox access ends; wiki transitions into full production mode
  • Final mass import from Fandom; further changes to Fandom have to be manually transferred
    • At this point, users are encouraged to hold onto their edits until public release.
  • Beta access for highly active contributors to fill in gaps or make new edits at the request of their teams.
  • Continued deployment of custom skin, may not be feature complete
  • Public registry of Fandom usernames
    • If everything goes according to plan, users will be able to claim their Fandom usernames and edit histories. This in particular is subject to change.
• Public Launch - Shortly before/concurrent to the start of Season 12
  • Full access for public members
  • Custom skin largely complete
  • Use of Fandom concludes, admin and mod support directed entirely to this wiki
  • Public links switched to blaseball.wiki as best as possible

Feature List

• Actual forums!
  • By visiting Special:WikiForum, you can find forums for each team in the ILB. At this time, forum posting must remain on topic, as the forum represents an additional moderation space and are under party time rules. We will consider expanding the use of the forum based on public feedback and moderation abilities closer to Season 12.
  • We intend the forum to be used as a sort of medium speed space for the community to engage with; slower than Discord, but faster than using the antiquated Talk page system. Speaking of...
• Structured Discussions
  • On Fandom, we required that all additions to Community Lore be posted to the Talk pages for a 24 hour period before getting added to the main page. This was a stop-gap solution; Talk pages are terribly unwieldy and positively ancient. Structured Discussions replaces Talk pages with a unique page that can support individualized topics, comment threading, and a request we have received many times, actual notifications for new topics or new comments on a topic you are participating in.
  • The Collaboration Policies will be updated to reflect this new software. New Community Lore will still need to be posted to Talk pages and given 24 hours for public feedback, but it will be easier than ever to track the conversation and collaborate with people outside of the main Discord community. We hope that this also serves as a medium-speed conversation space that is easy to keep tabs on and contribute to.
• Fully custom skin, compatible with mobile
  • One of the absolute worst things about Fandom is that the mobile experience was forcibly degraded to allow for obnoxious advertisement, splitting the mobile and desktop experience in such a way that made them almost incomparable. On this wiki, we are aiming to build as much parity as possible into the skin so that it works the same way on both desktop and mobile.
  • This includes the editing experience, which has the great benefit of improving the desktop experience as well. Part of the benefits of being able to use a modern version of MediaWiki include a new Visual Editor, which loads directly on the page versus shuffling you to a new page with an outdated editor.
  • The design for the custom skin for this wiki is being spearheaded by two members of SIBR: Risky, who has been one of our moderators and coding wizards with the wiki for quite some time now, and BeeFox, the developer of Blasebot, everyone’s favorite Discord bot for Blaseball games and information. The intent is to create a custom skin experience that is readable, flexible for mobile, and most importantly, far more appealing than the very very limited options Fandom gave us.
• Working with SIBR!
  • One of the great benefits of working with SIBR is that we are able to help each other in ways that we never could before. As mentioned previously, this wiki is being graciously hosted by SIBR, and if you are able, we encourage you to check out their Patreon to support the invaluable contributions they offer to the Blaseball community.
  • We will be working with SIBR on giving them space on this wiki to document forbidden knowledge of all kinds, and even documentation of the tools they use. SIBR contributed information will be hosted in the special name spaces SIBR: (for their tools) and FK: (for Forbidden Knowledge and research).

Q&A

Q: Why is the Blaseball Wiki leaving Fandom?

A: There are so many reasons to leave Fandom. Fandom is heavily ad supported. Fandom has turned into an entertainment company, profiting off the volunteer labor of their users and pushing hackneyed clickbait articles. They force a mobile skin on their users that constantly interrupts the -- again, volunteer-created -- content with advertisements, slowing down the entire page, and making editing from mobile an exercise in frustration. Additionally, the collaborative needs of this community are ill suited by Fandom; hosting our own wiki allows us to install an actual forum for the community to use, as well as replacing the Talk pages with Structured Discussions, an extension that turns each Talk page into a collection of discussion topics and threaded comments.

Q: What will happen to the Fandom wiki?

A: We leave it alone. There are a lot of places online that have linked to the Fandom wiki, and while it would be nice to have those places update their links, that isn’t going to be possible with a 100% success rate, assuming we could find every link in every article in the first place. We are going to abandon the Fandom wiki and let it fall out of date. Importantly, we cannot direct people to this new wiki through Fandom in any capacity without risking retaliation, largely in the form of removing all the admins and moderators from our roles on the Fandom wiki. We are abandoning the wiki, but it’s important for us to maintain administrative access to it in case we need it.

Q: When people search for “blaseball wiki,” what will they find?

A: For a while, searches for Blaseball Wiki on Google will still direct users to the Fandom wiki, unfortunately. We are making use of some extensions on this wiki that will hopefully speed the process along of replacing the SEO results, although we really aren’t sure how long that will take. The best way to update the search results is to make sure that you stop visiting the Fandom wiki, link to this new wiki whenever you would link to a wiki article, and if you have any influence over links to the wiki in public articles, encouraging those links to change to this new home. Again, we cannot make reference to this new wiki on Fandom in any capacity, so it’s important that all the work we do to make this transfer happens via social media and word of mouth.

Q: What will be moved from the Fandom wiki to this new wiki?

A: At this time, every article and content page will be making the leap. Fanart should be making the transfer as well, with the note that this is harder to do because Fandom does not provide tools for mass image exporting. Articles such as Help guides will need to be adjusted to account for our new software, and templates will need to be tweaked to fit the new skin.

Q: Will my Underleagues Teams be moving to this new wiki?

A: Fan Leagues or Underleagues will continue to be hosted on fanleagues.fandom.com for the time being. As before, the administration and moderation team of this wiki does not have the resources to monitor additions of teams and players not directly associated with Blaseball teams and players. We may reconsider this in the future since moving to this new wiki offers us new technology resources that may make this work easier to maintain.

Q: When can I edit on the new Blaseball Wiki?

A: You can edit the wiki right now! You still need to make an account in order to make edits and test our new tools. This is a sandbox wiki, which means that you can make edits freely with the understanding that it will all be wiped away once we move into the full production version of this new wiki. In a few weeks, we will transition the wiki into a production version and lock down public editing for a while. We will be granting beta access to high quality editors in the community to help us close up the final holes and gaps before opening the wiki fully to the public once again, this time as the permanent home.

Q: What can I post about on the Blaseball WikiForum?

A: For now, we are asking that the WikiForum be used strictly for on-topic discussion, which includes your community lore, Blaseball games, and fan art. As time goes on, and contingent on community interest, we may expand the forum to allow for more tangential topics.

Q: Where can I keep up to date on updates and changes to this new Blaseball Wiki?

A: There are two places where updates will be frequently posted: The Blaseball Discord server, where most of the community and collaborative writing takes place, and on our twitter feed @BlaseballWiki. We expect there will be many updates to share, including unexpected ones as we adjust for strange occurrences.

Q: When should I stop adding fanon/community lore to the Fandom wiki?

A: At this time, please continue to use the Fandom wiki as you normal would, especially while this wiki is in the sandbox alpha phase. We will be making many posts about the final days of Fandom editing once we get closer to that time, but again, you will not hear about that on the Fandom wiki. Keep tuned in to the Blaseball Discord and the @BlaseballWiki twitter account for more information as this project progresses.

Q: I have a question not addressed here. Where can I ask it?

A: Send us a tweet at @BlaseballWiki! Post in the Blaseball Discord! Post on the Discussion page on this blog post (and test out the new features while you are at it)! Post on the forums! I would ask that you not DM Wiki Admins on Discord during the Grand Siesta; we will be working on this wiki, but we would like to take breaks from getting DMs as well.