Announcements:Issue 4 - Hellections and the First Offseason

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Welcome to the Offseason, Blaseball fans! After a long three Seasons, the teams can once again take a break. These past weeks have also brought a harsh reality check to much of the wiki team, as the community has grown larger than we ever expected. With that in mind, we have some news to share.

Wiki Engagement Survey

With the heightened attention the wiki has been receiving, the new Feed on the main website, and more, we are reevaluating what the community expects from us and how best to serve those expectations, and we need your help! We have put together a 10-15 minute survey to collect information about how you interact with this wiki, and we would greatly appreciate you taking some time to fill it out. The survey is anonymous - you don’t even need a wiki account to fill it out! Find it here.

Hellections and Making Them Less So

The elections for Season 12 and Season 13 were… stressful, to say the least. Players were zipping back and forth across the league, Sutton Picklestein’s 9 Second Necromancy shook up multiple rosters, and we felt the pressure to have everything updated and accurate as quickly as possible, so that we could ensure the wiki met our exacting standards at all times across all pages. Our Recordkeepers did an admirable job making it happen, but with as many as 52 roster changes each Election, the fact of the matter is this is unsustainable. As such, we are trying something a bit different with the Season 14 elections.

Rather than attempt to force ourselves and our Recordkeepers to update everything day-of, we are instead going to try and resolve all of the necessary edits over the course of a few days. “But Wiki Team,” I hear you ask. “What about my favorite player, █████ ███████? I simply can’t STAND the thought of their page saying that they play for the ███████ when they play for the ███████ now!” Firstly, I would like to ask how you are doing that with your mouth. Secondly, while we have previously asked contributors to hold off on editing during much of Election Day, we want to (re)introduce you to the most valuable resource in our Recordkeepers’ toolkit: Help:Example Player. If you want to update the Official League Records for a player, Example Player likely has the exact language to do so, and can at least provide suitable inspiration if not. We ask that any contributors updating player pages not be too overzealous - statistical records, for example, are perfectly acceptable within the Official League Records, so no need to go deleting anything that doesn’t match Example Player exactly. Additionally, no need to worry about getting everything perfect the first time - we have an independent spreadsheet to track Election items on our end, and we will be proofreading every page we need to update for accuracy. In the long-term, we hope to make much of this process automated, and only provide personal touches to the complicated situations, but until then we rely on our Recordkeepers to help keep this wiki up to our standard. Speaking of which, if you’re interested in being a Recordkeeper…

Recruiting Additional Wiki Roles

We recruited a number of helpful individuals to support this wiki, but the new pace of Blaseball has demonstrated that we could use more assistance. As such, we are reopening our application for wiki support staff! You can read more about the available roles here and apply here. Due to the pace and primary social context of much of Blaseball’s active community, we require support staff to use Discord and join our wiki server, and we expect any Team Liaisons to be active within their respective Discord communities. We are particularly looking for Recordkeepers, alongside Team Liaisons for the Jazz Hands, Spies, Worms, Mechanics, and Georgias.

If you are a team representative (i.e. a captain or ambassador) on the Official Blaseball Discord already, we ask that you do NOT apply to be a Recordkeeper; our peak activity levels are during Elections, and you should be focusing on being with your team during that time! That being said, Representatives are welcome to apply as a Liaison. Your proximity to your teams is helpful to us in mediating conversations and getting temperature checks on difficult situations.

The Second Wyatt Masoning

We were all excited when Wyatt Masons were drawn forth by Blaseball fans everywhere building PsychoAcoustics in their stadium, but as with anything clearly connected to the larger plot of Blaseball, we initially advised caution and patience when writing any lore. Though you are free to be as canon non-compliant as you’d like in your fanfictions, here on the wiki we strive to be at least approximately consistent with events on blaseball.com. By now, however, we are reasonably confident that the important plot points of these new Wyatt Masons (and the echoing Wyatt Quitter) have been revealed, and we trust you to be cognizant of these facts as you develop lore. Though we briefly entertained some unusual structures of lore, we have ultimately decided that these characters can be developed according to our normal collaboration policy. We look forward to seeing what you come up with!

The (Short-Term) Future of the Wiki

You may soon discover a new namespace appearing on this wiki: SIBR (pronounced SIBR). Our friends at the Society for Internet Blaseball Research have shown interest in recording more mechanical information on the wiki, such as the Player Attributes page. Some pages that are under this general topic will be under the SIBR namespace, some will be a regular article and easy to search for. But we need help getting organized to put relevant information on the wiki. If you are a part of SIBR and are interested in initiating or participating in these efforts, we encourage you to find your local #sibr-x-wiki channel and speaking up there.

You may have also noticed that multiple issues have cropped up over the past three Seasons - pages missing information, delays in updating records, and so on. Put simply, we did not expect Blaseball to move at quite this pace, and in spite of all our preparations we have fallen behind. While onboarding more Recordkeepers will help with this, we would like to remind you: this wiki is maintained by humans, and in particular humans with standards of writing that are (unfortunately) poorly organized at present. Going forward we are investigating avenues of automating this wiki such that the majority of updates don’t require a human touch, but many of our current tools need updating after changes to Blaseball’s backend. We encourage all readers and contributors to have patience whenever information is lacking or incorrectly recorded. We are also working towards finishing our Style Guide 2.0 (promise), after which we hope we can open the formal records pages to more editors. Until then, Blaseball.com remains the sole 100% factual source of information, though we also recommend Blaseball-Reference and Reblase for all your statistical and splorts history needs.

That does it for us this time. You can find our contact information here or reach out through the Official Blaseball Discord’s #wiki-talk channel if you have any questions. Until next time!