Middle-aged gamer/creative/wiki maintainer
FFXIV, Genshin Impact, Tears of Themis, Rimworld, and more
Don’t like? Don’t read.

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  • 23 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • You said you want good faith discussions, but you preemptively dismissed one of the biggest answers because you don’t think it’s a good solution. Then you have people here disagreeing with you, explaining why, and pointing to examples of it being done successfully, and you continue to completely dismiss a donation as nothing more than a “thank you” - how is this in any way a good faith discussion if any opposing viewpoint is immediately met with this kind of “YOU’RE the problem” response?

    I do understand your frustration in those cases in which donations fail, but it seems like you’re not willing to meet us halfway and acknowledge that sometimes, donations succeed, and not by accident or luck. There’s data there - test cases we could be picking apart and seeing what critical mass needs to be reached before an instance can reliably secure donations and what we can do for admins until their instances reach that threshold. But you’re just dismissing it as nonviable even though it clearly works for a lot of places.

    That is not good faith.






  • Edit: OP downvoted everyone who disagreed with him.

    Sigh. Please OP, we’re not doing that here. Downvotes should be reserved for trolls and the counterproductive. This comment with its snappy “kick the puppy that is your opinion” is not the most productive, but there are downvotes from OP on way more innocuous things, even one comment that agrees reddit is dying but in a different way than the linked article envisions.

    Please leave that behavior on reddit.




  • While I agree that’s a super frustrating experience, I think you’re projecting an experience you had on one (larger, probably more rigid) site to every site that shares its software. Not every small wiki team is like that.

    When I get a correction on one of my pages, I welcome it. Even when it’s a grammatically incorrect mess, I do my best to incorporate the information added while smoothing out the wording. Even when the correction is outright wrong (there’s one drive-by I used to get every couple months who liked to change singular “die” to “dice” when it wasn’t appropriate) I explain my reversions in notes and offer to discuss if there are any questions, hoping to leave the door open for a future editor, because that’s someone who cared enough to hit the edit button, and I appreciate that.

    So while I get that you’re turned off from the hobby - and that’s a shame - not all of us need a “fucking dissertation” to have decent collaboration.


  • Idk, for me getting into it was just a matter of (1) use wiki as a reference (2) see thing on wiki that needs fixed (3) try to fix it myself, hitting preview and pulling from other similar pages to get formatting right (4) it works - hobby interest awakens.

    People nowadays seem too afraid to mess things up to ever consider trying step 3 on their own. I get this impression when I occasionally help other game wikis as well - sometimes one of their templates will seem especially complicated and I just drop the relevant info in their discord instead, and I get all the same pleading not to worry about messing things up before I say “actually I just had to get back to my own wiki and didn’t have time to play with it, sorry!” (Shoutout to rimworld wiki admins for being neat and taking submissions through discord like that)



  • You deride the hobby by equating it to working for free, then you deride it even harder upon finding out it’s paid. You’re not asking these questions in good faith, and no answer I give you will satisfy you, so I’m not giving you one. Suffice to say I’m very happy with my compensation.

    I enjoy the game, so it’s money I would be spending out of my own pocket that I now don’t have to. And at least half the time I enjoy the wiki editing - note the fact that I called it a hobby (hobbies are things we do for fun). I just miss the collaborative aspect of it all and have days when I feel down about being alone on it.



  • Everyone’s pointing out that this is specifically about admins (not editors) and the general difficulty of wikipedia editing specifically due to its rules and reversions, but I really feel compelled to offer a counterpoint: this applies to wiki editing in general.

    I’ve been editing mediawiki-based game sites since the mid 2000s - before Wikia became Fandom, before it was evil, before it started gobbling up smaller wikis with tempting financial offers. I took a decade+ off and only recently found myself drawn back into the hobby in the last couple of years when I found a game I loved that had a burgeoning wiki that seemed to need help.

    I was handed admin privileges within a month because an extension I wanted to use (ReplaceText) was locked behind admin. Two years later, I’m still there because I hold 85-90% of the edits on it. And I. Just. Can’t. Get. Help. Not even from the site owner that handed me admin. I’ve gotten interest from I think seven whole people in all that time, and all but two dropped off within a week or two; the remaining two have a page or two they each maintain but leave the rest of the site to me. And this is a live service game, so it’s a neverending stream of event pages and new content that I, and only I, keep going. (Worse: the live service content follows predictable formats, so most of my new pages start by copying another page. This would be so easy for anyone to learn.)

    No one wants to learn how to edit wikis anymore. It doesn’t have to do with the high position or the rules of a specific site. It’s a dying hobby viewed as too hard for content consumers to wrap their heads around.


  • Stuart Fergus, the husband of James Bulger’s mother, said that after he reached out to one creator asking them to take down their video, he received a reply saying: “We do not intend to offend anyone. We only do these videos to make sure incidents will never happen again to anyone. Please continue to support and share my page to spread ­awareness.”

    He really tried to take down his wife’s dead kid’s deepfake and got the creator responding “no offense, so like share and subscribe lel”

    Using the likeness of another person without that person’s express permission should be a jailable offense.


  • Corollary: are there really that many people who don’t know their own tastes well enough that they can avoid browsing the general pages for recs like someone who doesn’t know what to have for dinner?

    Pornhub gets maybe one visit every ~three months from me, and I jump straight to a favorite search term even then. The rest is in niche subs or more specialized sites. I have zero surprise this is happening, but no, I hadn’t seen any porn of it.