Topic on Talk:Religions Based on Blaseball

The article talks about religions that are not really discussed in team lore, mention players who were not talk paged (Rivers Rosa and Son Scotch) and has numerous sensitivity issues due to the similarities/parodying of real world religions. Can we have this deleted? @Inumo @Pokeylope @Nesblitt

This is an article from the early days of Blaseball, as you can note in the edit history. As such, the lack of Talk page proposals & rough edges to the lore are to be expected. Additionally, many articles link to this page, so we are disinclined to outright delete it. That said, rough edges can be sanded, and this is not a Player page (and thus is not subject to our usual Contribution Policies). Without reading the article too closely, I cannot see the sensitivity issues you see, but I trust they are there all the same; as such, I also trust you to be able to find a solution that mitigates or eliminates those issues without requiring a complete removal of the work of early wiki editors, and keeping coherently within the context of the pages that reference this article.

Hi Inumo! After checking the links that lead here, a majority, if not all, appear to only link here due to the TDE navbox. Co

Hi Inumo! After checking the links that lead here, a majority, if not all, appear to only link here due to the TDE navbox. Subsequently, given that it does not tie in to any ingame mechanics/events (like the Partytime Papers) or futher player/team lore (eg The Glolf War), would it be alright to remove it from the Discipline Era Navbox?

1) This is not the place to be asking about the Discipline Era navbox; that would be Template_talk:DisciplineEraNav (which regrettably is an old-school Talk page, not one of these fancy threaded Talk pages). 2) Items need not be relevant to specific teams or in-game events to be put into the navbox; this is an article relevant to the Discipline Era as a cultural event, in the same way the Blaseball-Glolf War was originally a Discipline Era cultural event article that other editors then tied to their player & team lore. Given that these navboxes are also intended to highlight lesser-known articles on the wiki, if you want to replace this article, I'd like to see you also propose an article of similar or better quality to replace it.

To be more direct, it feels like rather than engage with the content on this page to decide "this is good, this is bad, this is how I'm going to fix these problems" (recognizing that again, you have full license to do that, I'm not going to intervene unless someone asks me to), you are trying to instead circumvent or isolate this page such that you can then re-argue that it should be deleted entirely. Whether this is actually your intent or not is besides the point; this is the vibe you are giving off. To give you historical context, though, this was one of the most well-written articles from the Discipline Era. We, the wiki team, have featured it before. Given that history, I at least would rather see this page revised to meet current community expectations than isolated & deleted.

I've continued this discussion in the TDE Navbox talk page, though currently the page is not set up for threads

Devilouscurious I would like to repeat: you seem to be working very hard to completely disengage with this page. I'm beginning to doubt that you are trying to engage with this content in good faith, so understand that the rest of this post has a healthy dose of mistrust of your motivations. Keep in mind: Blaseball is an openly political game, and the community is no stranger to using lore as a method of critiquing the experiences they grew up with or have been harmed by. I won't be an arbiter on harm you experience, but neither can you be the arbiter on what's harmful to others, especially with such vague statements as "sensitivity issues due to the similarities/parodying of real world religions" and "questionable allegories to real world politics, events and religions." We are not making a sanitized, advertiser-friendly wiki; we are making a wiki for the community. Sometimes that means mess.

I don't think having a non-sanitized advertiser friendly wiki can be equated to someone pointing out actual sensitivity issues regarding religions. This page could have actual potential to discuss how actual religions are discussed and utilized in blaseball, especially considering how abysmal the blaseball community is respectful of actual religions when creating lore. I really dislike how this is being treated in bad faith, given that concerns with the way religion is written in lore has been expressed heavily in the community in the wake of discussing racism, xenophobia, and antisemitism in the community. The fact that this page has faced no engagement in present conversations up to this point, along with the way there is insistence this current engagement is in bad faith, has made me question whether there will be a willingness to have conversations like this in the wake of The Game Band and Blaseball's own reevaluation of sensitivity issues going forward.

People keep talking a big and vague game about "sensitivity issues surrounding ..." without actually naming any, which is why this is pointless criticism that cannot make any headway but just annoys pinged wiki mods. Bring specifics out so they can be individually discussed.

This latest post is also a reversed step away from "this isn't linked anywhere," so it's curious why the goalposts have moved back again from "ok can I just unlink it" to "can we just delete it already".

It's relevant because the links are not actually linked to the page (e.g. the body of Ruby Tuesday Memorial Tim Hortons wiki page links to the Hades Tigers and not jsut the navbox) but are only linked because it is included in the navigation box- it is not mentioned, referenced or hotlinked to anywhere in the actual content of the pages.

Right, no, I understand your argument (and the solution IMO would be to go backlink from those player pages to here).

So I'm just going to straight up reply to the last part first. But like, you're acting as if I don't want to engage in it because I'm not religious or I think it's like, messy. I don't really have a problem with messy and I have complained to my own friends many times about the sanitized nature of Blaseball. You know what else I've complained about?

I've complained about the racist way Malik Destiny's page talks about Malik's home country. The frankly colonial and orientalist way the Coffee Cult page is written, the ambiguously brown nature of many characters' pages such as Dunlap Figueroa, the transmisogynistic, ableist, racist and fetishistic reading baked into Ortiz Lopez's previous wiki pages and even the current one, the colonialist and whitewashed nature of Luis Acevado's page. Honestly, I don't even want to check the wiki but there's been multiple conversations about the way religions, especially Islam but extending to others, is written so poorly in the fandom and how that lore is also posted on the wiki. I'm sure I can keep digging and asking my friends for more examples because multiple people across different teams are working on fixing it right now, and as we speak I'm working on edits to Dunlap and Ortiz's page with the help of my teammates. I'm not trying to say I'm better than you or whatever, I want to just make a point of my priorities on this wiki. To be explicit, I think this page is problematic because the community and fans have been widely laissez-faire regarding real world religions, cultures and countries and such content has been hosted and platformed on the wiki, and I think putting it at the forefront in the Navbox is silly when a) it is not relevant ("closely connected or appropriate to what is being done or considered." I can not possibly understand how a page made by a person who is no longer in maincord, never mentioned in maincord and not linked to any pages is any more relevant to TDE than Ruby Tuesday Memorial Tim Hortons) b) really seems to encourage weird readings of religions in a way that is...really heavily influenced by Christianity in America.

In addition to be frank, I have no idea how on earth this is supposed to an especially good critique of like, Christianity? In a way that so stridently needs to be protected? Like I'm not saying bad content can't live on the wiki, I'm saying I don't really understand how this is so great and relevant to Discipline Era lore and players that it must stay.

Like, I get that I'm in your bad books but to be absolutely fair, even though it is not strictly the wiki staff team's fault, it is not as if the Blaseball wiki is great when it comes to the experiences of those who aren't white Christian Americans. Like, fine we can disagree on point B. But to be fair, I really don't understand this page as we come up with increasingly specific and odd ways to define "relevant".

I want to respond to one specific point before I go to bed: the Wiki is not the Official Blaseball Discord (aka Maincord), and someone being absent on Maincord is not equivalent to being irrelevant. Discipline Era culture did not happen solely on Maincord, nor did it solely involve players and events; sometimes, Discipline Era culture happened solely on the Wiki, by editors who were only ever active on the Wiki, on random pages people were making to scribble out some lore for fun. Case in point: this same editor who has never interacted with Maincord also originated the Charleston Shoe Thieves' mascot, Sneaker Pete.

It took me a while to understand this aspect of the Wiki as I was becoming a moderator. I hope you can internalize it faster than I did.

This is an incredibly disappointing response to see from someone with your level of authority in this community. It's one thing to acknowledge that you need to take some time to consider this comment with depth. However, to respond without even mentioning the body of the argument (the historical and ongoing issues in the blaseball fandom around religion) is not a respectful or good faith response. As a woc in this community, I'm used to seeing my peers talked over and ignored when they try to bring up the overwhelming white and Christian perspectives in fan lore, but given your leadership position it is still very frustrating to see this same immediate dismissal here. I hope that the wiki team will take some time to actually engage with the issues raised about this article going forward.

I'm not entirely sure where to start with any of what's been going on on this talk page, so I'm going to start by responding to this message, as well as your prior message linked here (https://www.blaseball.wiki/index.php?title=Topic:Wvvkigof7qsfy1kf&topic_showPostId=wx3nytz6htszz2pb#flow-post-wx3nytz6htszz2pb)

Inumo- you're correct in that the Wiki is not the Official Blaseball Discord. However, what you can't ignore is that the Wiki is irrevocably connected to Maincord. I bring this up to say that your comment- that you are "not making a wiki for advertisers, [you] are making a wiki for the community" is not only an abject dismissal of a genuine concern being brought up but also an argument that completely undermines the point you are trying to make here. People of color and religious minorities are as much a 'part of the community' as anyone else, and their concerns can and should be listened to, not brushed off. The moderation team of Maincord has been working to change the ways they handle issues regarding racism in the Blaseball community. During this process, people reported that they experienced racism 'everywhere' in the Blaseball community- on Discord, Twitter, and most notably here, on the Wiki as well. I am beginning to see why.

I do not understand why you are so attached to this Wiki page. I do not understand why you are so attached to Season 2 Era Wiki pages in general, especially ones that have not been touched in years. I have been a member of this community for as long as you have, and the first action I ever took on the Wiki was to singlehandedly delete the majority of a Wiki page because of issues related to sensitivity that were not noticed on the initial publishing of the article. The caliber of lore being published at the time meant that people were absolutely not precious about lore, and this trend of obliterating pieces of older lore that was later found to have issues, intentional or otherwise, continued even through Grand Siesta, where teams would massively readjust or even delete entire pages worth of lore. Why should now, two years later, this policy be any different? Why does your personal attachment to a Wiki page that I have never seen referenced anywhere in the community (unlike Sneaker Pete, for instance, whom I have seen the occasional content for both on and off Discord) necessitate its historical importance? Why is it in the Expansion Era navigation box as well if it's an "important piece of Discipline Era history"?

You've either ignored or brushed off the majority of the concerns brought up with this page specifically. Allow me to enumerate them, from what I can understand from both the discussion on this Talk page and the article itself.

Let's begin with the first segment of this article. It in itself seems confused as to what this article is trying to be- in its first paragraph, it claims that these 'blaseball religions' are some of the most influential organizations in the Blaseball world- in the second, it seems to relegate them to 'cults, social clubs, and restaurants'. There's a conflict there that is deeply jarring, even while putting aside the fact that equating religions to cults is not exactly the best way to start off a page that claims it's about "Religion in Blaseball' as a whole.

We'll continue on assuming that the religions mentioned by name in this wiki page are of the former- the grand "influential organizations", that is. The religions mentioned here are very clearly three separate religions rather than three sects of the same religion- denoted by the fact that despite having many of the same aspects, these three religions have fundamentally different beliefs. The closest parallel in real life to what is described in this article is the divide between the three largest Abrahamic religions- Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. (Notably, Christianity and Islam are the two largest religions in the world by number of adherents, and as such could be considered "influential organizations", but I digress- I'm not sure if the parallel here was intentional on that level or not.)

In that context, there are certain parts of this article that are very clearly of concern- multiple times, the article references periods of sectarian violence, especially between members of this primary religion. In real life, this is known as "religious violence", or the phenomena where religion is either the subject of or object of violence. At its core, this article is an article about a fictionalized depiction of religious violence, veiled by the sort of mundane humor that lets people gloss over the fact that in real life, religious violence is something that is felt on a daily basis by religious and cultural minorities, both directly and by proxy. I don't think I need to tell you why that's a problem. I don't think I need to tell you why people, especially people of color and religious minorities, would look at this article and feel wary about its contents. This article utilizes real world bigotry and violence as nothing more than a prop in its worldbuilding, without any form of consideration towards its real life counterpart.

The Blaseball community as a whole has an extensive history of poorly handling real-world religion in its lore. The Blaseball community as a whole has an extensive history of brushing off the concerns of people of color when they bring these issues up. You're right when you say that Blaseball is an openly political game- but you're wrong when you say that issues like referencing real-world bigotry with no sensitivity is just a "part of the mess"- the truth is entirely the opposite. Handling sensitive topics with the sensitivity they require is not making this wiki more "sanitized". Acknowledging the concerns of people of color is not making this wiki more "advertiser-friendly". It's called "making a wiki for and by the community", something that you have stated in this very talk page to be one of your goals with moderating this wiki.

To say that I'm disappointed in the way you've refused to acknowledge the concerns brought up about this wiki page is an understatement. Your responses have been consistently dismissive, regularly assuming bad faith, and on multiple occasions straight up condescending. ("It took me a while to understand this aspect of the Wiki... I hope you can internalize it faster than I did"? Seriously?) You seem more interested in defending your position on this page than actually acknowledging points brought up about its issues, and as a user of this wiki and a member of the community that you claim to be working for, that concerns me a great deal. Please take a minute to consider your actions today and the ways that they reflect both on you and on the wiki as a whole. Please listen to the concerns of your userbase regarding insensitive aspects of lore when it comes up, regardless of your own personal attachment to the lore itself.

I apologize for the length of my response- it turns out I had a lot to say regarding my thoughts on this whole debacle. I hope you take the time to contemplate what I'm trying to tell you here, and I hope you reconsider your stance on this entire situation. Thank you.

I do not find your attempts to establish "authority" by citing your time spent playing the game, conversations outside the Wiki, or berating admins for their need to sleep are compelling. I am interested in actual harms perpetuated by the article: does it contain hurtful stereotypes? does it target a specific religion, especially one which continues to be marginalized? etc. Repeatedly stating "Some people think the Wiki is racist" is not carte blanche to label things as Problematic and trigger a deletion. People put effort into their contributions, and IMO any real harms resolved by deletion should be weighed against the chilling effects of people having their work dropped entirely. This isn't a theoretical: A lot of people have, in fact, given up contributing entirely due to these sort of gatekeeping and sanitization efforts.

That said, to be blunt: I do not think your list of concerns are valid.

I think you are reaching quite a bit by saying things like "there are three religions mentioned. there are also three Abrahamic religions. let's look at it through that lens." This is a very combative reading of the article that is not supported by the details of the three silly religions mentioned. "The Ecclesiastic Order of the Invisible Puce Unicorn" is clearly NOT an intended parody of any of the three real-world counterpart religions. Heck, one way to "resolve" this would be to add a FOURTH joke religion to the list, simultaneously expanding the article AND dispelling any notions of real-world religious comparisons. Would that solve your concerns?

The other main point made seems to be "this mentions religious violence in an unserious manner". I think we all recognize that religious violence is bad, but that should not preclude invoking the very *concept* of it in a work. Again, actual harms: does this article make light of a *specific instance* of religious violence? Is it parodying, say, the Crusades? No, it simply hand-waves at the existence of past conflict. This is not an inherently bad thing.

Reading between the lines, the core of the argument here seems to be "this page is unserious about religion, and I think that is Bad, which is why I and other 'sensitive' friends should simply be allowed to run it instead". I disagree: think this is not the way the "community" Wiki should be run.

That reads as a.. frankly rude and dismissive way to summarize Sandcat's response especially when Inumo has, multiple times, talked to me the same way? But worse? Like some of it are the exact same points Inumo has cited as their points of authority, and I think Clio has summarized pretty well why Inumo's 'need to sleep' response doesn't feel like Inumo needs to sleep and can't be here but wholesale dismissing my comment. I haven't complained about it here because to be honest, I don't to deal with navigating through another complaint but it feels like you're holding some of us to a different standard.

I also like. I'm struggling to balance between keeping this conversation on topic to the wiki and your actions here, but it's also ignoring that I already know, for a fact, that talking to you is like a brick wall because you just do not believe people of color and minorities when we say things unless we do a ridiculous amount of labor. Like, I don't know what to say. It feels almost ridiculous that I need to explain and cite how "[Ballmageddon] will herald Blazibaal's final victory over his hated enemy the sun, that it will mark the mass ascension of all mortal beings to a higher plane of existence, and that it will trigger a recurrence of the fabled Ten Cent Beer Fortnight." uses vocabulary from the Bible and is literally just a summary of what happens according to the Last Judgement in all major Abrahamic Religions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Judgment). Coupled with that is Blaz Bombing.. the entire paragraph is an extremely uncomfortable joke that obviously draws from real life religious bombings. Blaseicism being the perfect form of Blaseball and causing friction is word for word a fundamental part of Judaism regarding the Torah and part of the main points of divergence from other Abrahamic beliefs (https://www.hebrew4christians.com/Scripture/Shloshah-Asar_Ikkarim/Immutability/immutability.html). Blazibaal and the mortal Tertullian feel like a straight parallel to Allah and the Prophet Muhammad (https://www.metmuseum.org/learn/educators/curriculum-resources/art-of-the-islamic-world/unit-one/the-prophet-muhammad-and-the-origins-of-islam). The Puceys just straight up opens as the Crusaders.

I think this kinda reinforces all my misgivings about the page. It's true that I don't expect everyone and anyone to be intimately familiar with all three major Abrahamic religions but combined, we've covered 56% of the global population and 80% of North America's. So this page should be pinging on your radar if you have even some familiarity or real world experience with any religion. I am seriously questioning the appropriateness of having such a serious topic at the Navigation Box and wiki, as MOS has shown that such clear parallels to modern religions are completely missed by average wiki readers. Fictional and real world religions can be fantastic tools for writing fiction and adding depth to characters. But they are not toys to be given out for anyone to play with if you can not understand and respect these faiths or their followers enough to have either basic knowledge of them or be willing to listen to those who do.

Honestly, it is difficult enough to fully understand and write real world religions, especially those not your own. But like writing fantasy races, fantasy religions have even greater concerns in regards to fully understanding what you are using as metaphor, parallels with real world politics and the question of wether to use real world groups or fictional ones. If the reader is unfamiliar with this debate, I strongly urge you to research writing Fictional Races, Religions and Nations with regards to People of Color to understand the debate. It is not difficult to find as numerous published, bestselling authors of color have weighed in on this debate. I think that the Blaseball community has kinda showed that, as a whole, it is not capable of writing or conceptualizing abstract but serious literary devices in this page with the necessary degree of care and expertise (with context of the inital comment regarding players such as Malik Destiny and Dunlap Figueroa) and the issue is compounded by the lack of clear, direct relevance of this page to any other content on the wiki. I strongly urge the moderation team to consider their influence and ability to platform content on their website.

1. Thank you for providing specific examples. This gives a good starting point to refactor the article, if anyone cares to do so at this point. Specifically, I think changing "bombing" to something else is a good move. It may be wise to edit out "religious violence" as a general trimming / editing just because the article itself is also rather unfocused. Someone earlier mentioned the contrast between "dominating world forces" and "mainly social clubs" that could be resolved, etc. I think there are ways forward here.

2. I do not think it is a "ridiculous amount of labor" to ask for what the specific problems are in a Wiki page. This is standard procedure for the Wiki: a look at Help:Contribution_Policies and especially Help:Critiquing_Proposals. If you are going to participate here, these are the rules we are all bound by. "Fix, don't delete" and so on.

3. I disagree with some of your conclusions. For example, "Blaseicism" being a stand-in for Torah immutability is not the only possible read: orthodoxy is common in many religions, e.g. the Christian Bible has passages in Proverbs, Deuteronomy and Revelations which all warn against the dangers of altering the Word of God. I imagine it's actually a play on "asceticism" which is a lifestyle common in many religions.

4. Even those issues which ARE a direct parody - "Ballmaggedon", for example - do not strike me as particularly troubling? Joking about religion is probably as old as the concept of religion itself. As people regularly point out, Christianity is also often a very "white" institution, and I do not see harm in punching upwards at some of the sillier aspects of it. Atheists would have a field day with this whole conversation, but I guess there are none to speak up.

I think we are all in agreement that no amount of trimming is going to satisfy people who simply do not want Religion in Blaseball to be an "un-serious" page, and it must be thrown out wholesale. At this point I'm bowing out. I believe any further engagement will just be construed as me "talking over POC voices" or similar, when I'm just asking for clarity and a less hostile read on the whole thing. Maybe someone else can implement these changes, or just delete the article, whatever.

To be (more?) explicit- I believe the pages makes light of real world religions. While the page tries to make it in a very jokey way, I think that is, in fact, part of the problem- the way it uses the word religions when it better denotes fun activities and social clubs and encourages the notion that religions are like that. I don't think it is an abstract harm because that is the way real world religions such as Judaism, Hinduism and Islam are often treated by the community, even when they are especially relevant to the character's origins (e.g. from places where religion remains a major sociopolitical force). I think that, as a result, at the very least this page should be deplatformed because it reads as disrespectful given the treatment of religions by the wider community and because it remains irrelevant to the actual culture and experience of the Displine Era.

So the follow-up questions: are any of those real-world religions being mocked Judaism, Hinduism, or Islam? In what specific ways?

My reading of this article's content is more akin to (somewhat ham-fisted) mocking of cults, or evangelical Christianity, than it is to actually attempting to poke at "real" religions. Simply making up a silly fake religion does not rise to the level of harms that I think would necessitate "de-platforming".

I'm also pinging @Sav as another member of the mod team, I just want to know that if these actions are made with the support of the Wiki's entire mod team. I also have some apprehensions about continuing this conversation with Inumo and just want to be sure other admins/mods are aware this is happening.

Hi Devilouscurious, the mod team is working on separating a number of the issues raised here so that they can be approached individually and discussed inclusively of the many facets of critique brought up in this thread. I appreciate your patience.

I understand, thanks for the update! I just wanted to be aware of where the discussion currently stands with regards to the admin team. I look forward to seeing any forthcoming updates.

Given the way this conflict has escalated over the past 24 hours, the wikiteam will be locking this Talk page until we can figure out our final statement on this matter, as Sav alluded to. That said, I, personally, want to apologize for the harm I've caused to people who have joined this conversation and their trust in the wikiteam's decisions. I recognize that I was being dismissive, and it seems that my late-night decision to single out a well-worn issue without addressing the other arguments that had been made since my last post led many to believe I didn't care about those concerns. This wasn't aided by my negligence in investigating how this page was made accessible on the wiki, nor my continued silence. I'm sorry. I do not expect forgiveness.

To @Devilouscurious and others who have voiced their concerns in this thread - thanks for your patience. The wiki mod team are still in discussions regarding this issue, and will update folks further as we get closer to resolutions on:

-potential edits to this specific page

-potential edits to DE and EE navbars

-wikiteam policy on facilitating change proposals, when concerns/critiques are raised about fanlore

-clarifying the ethics, goals, and values of the wiki

Naturally, not all of these topics will be addressed specifically on this talk page, but these are all topics the wiki team does want to tackle as a result of concerns raised here, so we ask for your understanding that a resolution for this page will take a while longer.

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.

1. We have moved this page to one more aptly suited for its content.
2. We are maintaining this page in the Discipline Era navbox for historical reasons.
3. 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.
4. We added linkbacks on appropriate pages to provide predictable page networking.
5. @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.