Topic on Talk:Religions Based on Blaseball
This message comes in two parts. The part above the line is information discussed as a Wiki moderation team, and the decisions we came to about our final resolutions for this page. The part below the line is my informal voice and my words alone, reflecting some of the factors informing these decisions.
- We have moved this page to one more aptly suited for its content.
- We are maintaining this page in the Discipline Era navbox for historical reasons.
- We are removing this page from the Expansion Era navbox. Should future authors recreate & improve Religion in Blaseball, they may propose the edit to Template:ExpansionEraNav and we will restore the link.
- We added linkbacks on appropriate pages to provide predictable page networking.
- @MOSTech6502 you are being formally reprimanded for your behavior. Your commentary on this issue went beyond "I do not understand the specific problems you are having" and into "your problems are not problems" territory. While we may argue about whether emotional distress can/should be addressed, that is not the same thing as declaring someone's distress unworthy of consideration. Should we be made aware of this behavior happening elsewhere on the Wiki, we will escalate to temporary suspensions, and if necessary a complete ban.
These decisions are final, and made with the consensus of all moderators and admins on the Wiki team.
Well, over 6 months since this started, and over 4 months since the Wiki team decided on the above course of action, and I'm here to bring you the news finally. I wasn't supposed to be the one writing this, as the person who arguably started it all, but with the Official Blaseball Discord banning lore discussions starting in 2023, this needed to be resolved. At this point, whatever damage I could do as a responder pales in comparison to the damage already done by this delay. As you can imagine by this overly long silence, there is not much energy among any Wiki team members to write these posts. I am knowingly neglecting many posts in this thread, because I do not have the energy to read multiple essays to refresh myself on the arguments held herein. I will try to be concise, but I apologize in advance if these thoughts are disorganized, disconnected, or do not address specific arguments you made.
This conversation got out of hand. I feel like that's an important starting point. I accept full responsibility for not intervening sooner. While MOSTech was a "useful antagonist" to ask harsher, more direct questions that I did not feel comfortable asking, I should have stepped in when I saw he was crossing lines. Instead, I waited to see how things shook out, which resulted in this conversation expanding rapidly out of scope for a page ostensibly about religion in Blaseball (and more accurately about religions based on Blaseball, thus the page rename). For that, I apologize.
Racism is present and a problem in the Blaseball fandom. The issues presented about this page are not (directly) tied to racism. That this conversation became about racism in the fandom is further demonstration that this conversation got out of hand.
Many -phobias are present in the fandom along with racism. The Wiki cannot solve that. As I suspect the large team of paid & volunteer moderators of the Official Blaseball Discord discovered, moderating conversations about lore is extremely difficult, especially when it involves such high-tension topics as racism. The Wiki team is a significantly smaller team, 100% volunteer, mostly burnt out, and officially cut off from any community management support the Official Blaseball Discord moderators could provide. The Wiki team does not have the resources to perfectly & actively moderate the Wiki's conversations and contents. Knowing this, if you do not feel safe participating in the Wiki, I understand and wish you well on your journey.
Credentials do not make you the final authority on a matter. This is even assuming that all credentials claimed are 100% true (which is obviously not a safe assumption). To give a very obvious example, just because Candace Owens is a Black woman doesn't mean we should believe her when she says racism is over. On a less dramatic scale, different people in the same community will need different solutions to their problems. Some trans people need to hear that they are attractive, some trans people need to stop hearing comments on their appearance. Some Black people need White strangers in their community to try and build relationships with them, some Black people need White strangers in their community to stop invading their personal time and space with unwanted overtures of friendship. Solutions are both highly contextual and highly specific to the people involved, both currently and historically. We account for different necessary solutions through the IRM, different pages, etc.
Anti-religious sentiment is present and a problem in the Blaseball fandom. For the sake of brevity I will only gesture at the religious traumas many people have experienced that could result in anti-religious sentiment, and refer back to my earlier point about different people needing different solutions within the same community. This page is, in my view, not about religion as a general concept. To me, the Blaseic Ball Church for Good Old-Fashioned Boys is a parody of a particular kind of sports fan, who believes that things were always better before X, Y, or Z changes. The Temple of Blaz is the obligatory cult found in so many genres of eldritch horror; while the word choice of "Blaz bombing" may be dubious, it is being used with the same tone as "yarn bombing" while drawing inspiration from flash mobs and stories of Quakers. The Ecclesiastic Order of the Invisible Puce Unicorn completes the common "rule of threes" by imagining a unification sect founded through an absurd version of many real-world cults and religious sects. These are imagined religions that are rooted in a totalizing version of Blaseball, not commentaries on the role of religion in a metaphysically-complex death sport. Just because there are three "biggest" things does not mean it parallels to Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. I believe the initial conflict arose because "religion in Blaseball" equally means "how world religions interact with Blaseball" as "religions contained within Blaseball," thus there was a misread of the page's content. We moved this page to "Religions Based on Blaseball" to try and alleviate this assumed misunderstanding.
Finally, page deletion is an extreme and irreversible decision. When a page is deleted, it is as though the page never existed, including every contributor's edits in producing the current version of the wiki. As a result, I find that Wikis, including the Blaseball Wiki, tend to be preservationist about pages with content. While deleting a page is an appropriate decision under many circumstances, deleting this page would imply that it is wholly unsalvageable and actively offensive. This is clearly a contested statement, and one that I, as you can probably tell, believe to be inaccurate.
Thus ends my attempted contextualization of the Wiki team's moderation decisions. Again, if you do not feel like the Wiki is a safe place for you to write & participate after this post, I understand and wish you well on your journey. Otherwise, remember that as Wiki editors, you have the power to fix problems, especially on non-Player pages like this one. Just expect that if someone doesn't like your solution, they will revert it.
