Lit Wookieepedia, the Star Wars wiki

I don't have a great amount of context, but those things could be for any number of reasons. I don't know what is wrong with 'slavishly interpreting the Essential Guide to Warfare' or what it means but since that was a semi-recent release, it would retcon a lot of previous work where it overlapped, if that was part of the issue. I don't know what you tried to change or why you were shot down, but it when working with others it is entirely possible to be wrong, incorrect, or not in compliance with a standard. I don't know if any of that was the case, but it is within the realm of possibility.

I'm hoping some of the unhappiness with Wookieepeida doesn't have to do with contributions not being accepted, because while I trust most folks work is quality stuff, just because you want to put it on there doesn't mean it should be. Opinions can be pain.

 

Let me put it this way. Until fairly recently, the Praetor-class article was called the Praetor-class Star Battlecruiser, but when The Essential Guide to Warfare was published and referred to the new Praetor II-class model as the Praetor Mark II-class battlecruiser, they basically only used that name for new model and eventually quit calling the original model a Star Battlecruiser too. Even though one of the FFG RPG books later identified the new model as the Praetor II-class Star Battlecruiser. When I say Wookieepedia has "slavishly interpreted The Essential Guide to Warfare," I mean they have implicitly adopted the Anaxes War College System classifications, even when the system was specifically stated to not be the end all be all and there was already an established naming convention in place for Kuati capital ships.

 

It literally took me like 20 damn minutes to translate everything on that image for everyone. So far Wookiee Jam Crew is the best.

 

Are you Wookieepedia user Thackerzod? From the talk page of that article it looks like someone tried to bring the naming convention up in late 2013 but it didn't go anywhere and said user said maybe we should wait until the FFG game was out of beta before changing. There was an edit in Dec 2013 that looks like it changed the top of the page to the following:

"The Praetor Mark II-class battlecruiser, also known as the Praetor II-class Star Battlecruiser[8], was a warship class that served in the Imperial Navy. It was a model in the Star Destroyer design family, marked by a characteristic wedge-shape."

and the original model currently is:

"The Praetor-class battlecruiser, also known as the Praetor-class Star Battlecruiser or the Praetor-class battle cruiser, was a warship produced by Kuat Drive Yards in the final years of the Galactic Republic. A four-thousand-meter battlecruiser, the Praetor-class was the successor of the Procurator-class Star Battlecruiser, though both were restricted in terms of hyperdrive capability and armament due to the Ruusan Reformation."

 

No, a longer version of Zeta1127, specifically Zeta1127,89thLegion.

 

This should be the quote on the top of the breast article.

 

It is known that autistic individuals get attracted to organizing and systemizing tasks. There's even done studies on the phenomena. I don't know where you get it from that that's an insult, in this case. It would be an asset to working on time-consuming cataloging.

But it's true. A lot of former admins either quit or were banned (ironically by the same group they once allowed in) and a less friendly and accommodating group gradually took over.

Can't be, since you complain.

No better source than anonymous contributors making articles based on their own subjective views of a third party's work?

Course it's fun to read. Only becomes less fun with the decanonizing of 90 % of it (or more) and the lax attitude towards organizing canon material. The second point is tied in with ego, I guess. Heh.

 

The tone used when talking about autism was in an insulting way. Doesn't matter what is a medical and scientific fact. I don't call people autistic for enjoying working on an encyclopedia.

Said this because clearly if people just want to be mad and don't want to try to make things better, nothing more I can do about it. People will do what they do. I tried to get people to see it another way. I'm not merely complaining about complainers but trying to get folks to make things better if they are complaining about it. But hey, it's easier to moan than do things.

This is a stupid remark/question. We all know what a wiki is. There is nothing else like the Wookieepedia. No competitor, no published book with the same depth and scope. And apparently authors have seen it fit for use. So I stand by my statement. You can fire shots at the idea of a fan wiki I guess, but I don't see the point. Disney hasn't created the super-duper-for-realsies-curated-wiki-for-fan-perusal. And if they do I'm sure it would be filled with all sorts of inconsistencies anyways.

For hopefully the last time, a 'lax attitude' towards organizing canon material means what? You can't read the entry about an episode of the Rebels show? Darth Vader's Legends page has been in work for 10 years. I don't expect the fresh Canon tab to be of equal status yet, not sure why others do. It's not like these pages emerge out of the darkness fully birthed and formed. So if you don't like it, get involved. Don't want to get involved because "they're mean" well then I guess you just have to deal with it. I dislike 90% of media is non-canon. Legends and reading legends articles are still fun though. I mean, if I were someone who spent hundreds of man hours or more crafting the Wookieepedia only to find out a lot of stuff has be de-canonized, it would definitely be an awkward time to try to get things in order. New pages, edited pages, trying to procure the new media to actually write about it. Not to mention the doubt of wanting to go through all that sort of work again except for a new canonized universe.

Seriously. Canon right now is 6 movies, one tv movie, 6 seasons of a half hour tv show, most of one season of a tv show, a handful of comics, and a few novels. This is nothing compared to the volume of media in Legends. If the people who are passionate about canon materials are upset with the lack of initiative of other editors, time to step up to bat.

 

The people who are passionate about canon may not know how to work a wiki without getting yelled at by obnoxious admins. So those that have the expertise should be the ones that do the work

 

Is that going to change come February 2016 when it's 7 movies, a game or two, maybe 20 more episodes of Rebels, and a few more comics and novels? It'll still be quite smaller than what Legends continuity is. Hell, it's going to be much smaller for quite awhile. It'll take, frankly, decades for the Canon materiel to have the breadth of content that Legends materiel is. But in February 2016 will the front page for Chewbacca still great new visitors with "Chewie died in the Vong war?" I mean, c'mon.

 

I used to contribute to Wookieepedia fervently between 2007 and 2010, when the attitude of the admins forces me away. In recent years I've tried to make a comeback after SWTOR re-sparkled my interest for [then]-canon connections, but it was not to last either, with myself being permanently banned by IP this time. Apparently, I got on their nerves so much that when I tried to make anonymous constructive edits from my friend's computer, that address quickly got perma-banned as well - apparently nobody with IPs showing up in my city will be allowed to edit Wookieepedia from now on - go figure.

In fact, all of my problems weren't even with the "clique of admins", but one particular admin - "the one from where the original Death Star plans were stolen", and I think you all know whom I'm talking about. While I used to receive praise from him for my contributions, every time I tried to point out the stupidity of some rules or their applications, I would be ridiculed by that person at first and then got banned for increasingly longer periods of time later.

In fact, I decided to check back on my original account, and the reasons for blocks were truly hilarious - hilarious in a way that every freaking time I turned up a Doomed Moral Victor and the absurdity that I was pointing out got eventually overturned.

1) Trying to delete Fan Fiction page, in particular calling it "garbage" and other bad words - it really was that bad, being nothing more than a place for people to post links to their FanFic sites. Blocked for rude language, article kept - then deleted 2 years later anyway.

2) Trying to edit article on Tao from SW Manga after it was firmly established as Infinities and not "Ambigiously Canon Appearance". Blocked for trying to make legitimate corrections and told that it was still a subject for discussion back then. Articles was rewritten as completely non-canon shortly after.

3) Trying to point out that Satele Shan was Revan's descendant - it was back before SWTOR was released, when the Threat of Peace comics dropped the revelation of her having "blood of Revan" in her veins. My repeated attempts to reflect that in articles were repeatedly reverted and when I attempted to vent off the frustration on that stupid policy that was cited, I was blocked for rude language. This was the final straw that stopped me from wasting hours of my time every day on that cite.

4) But truly the most ridiculous case of blocking was not from that "most serious offender" listed above, but from another person, who started as a fellow contributor but evidently embraced the elitism after being allowed into adminship group. I was adding information from The Star Wars comic (the one with Kane and Annikin Starkiller) that nobody else would add (even to this day, in fact) and was blocked for the fact that one image I uploaded was a duplicate of an existing one (which was not on the page I was working one so I had no way of knowing that) and another had a gibberish filename I forgot to change instead of a proper one reflecting the content of an image. Things like that would never be an issue at all on another wikis I was active on - people only care that the image is appropriate to the page it's put on, not whether it has a perfectly correct name and is not a copy of one of 50,000+ images already uploaded. What should be a simple admin fix to delete a redundant image and change the filename of another one, resulted in a 2 week-long block because apparently I was sloppy enough to require an admin to fix such a horrendous mess. I was also told to check things better before I commit them and that there was no hurry to rush to add new content - that comic's brand new content stopped being covered at all once they prevented me from doing it.

After that last one I tried to make some constructive edits anonymously, but got blocked for the whole IP range of my region for vandalizing the Wookeepedia by making constructive edits while an admin decided I was not allowed to. That was the last straw, after which it became clear I was not welcome on the site in any form - obeying the rules is clearly more important to those people than actually working on content.

 

If you are arguing the Canon tabs should the default, I won't argue with you. I think at some point a cut-over should happen, and I even think it is planned. Even if it doesn't though, I have a little faith int his supposed user that when they look and find the Chewie article, they will be able to make some sense of what they are reading. And maybe as a bi-product, they become interested in the old EU, which has plenty of additional cool stories. I don't think fans are dumb, they will understand within a short time of browsing.

 

It's easy to suggest getting more involved as a solution, but when the culture is toxic, the most toxic people have manipulated the system to grab a stranglehold on the levers of power, they are unafraid to use that power arbitrarily to suppress dissent without any fear of consequences, and they actively run off any new contributor who doesn't tow their line, what exactly is trying to get involved supposed to accomplish?

Unfortunately, the system has been broken in such a way as to be effectively impossible to fix, unless Wikia were to somehow swoop in and depose the administration. I tried for years to fix the system from inside. I got nowhere. I gave up because it wasn't worth the headache to keep attempting the impossible. I still regret that things went that way.

 

One of the things that bugs me about the tabs policy is the implication that they're doing that on purpose, though.

 

I am very, very, VERY protective of the single major article I am editing; but apparently, somebody wants me to edit faster and more often. The only reason I undid the edits to put the article back in the "undergoing a major edit" state is because I truly believe that nobody else would do a good job on it; as before me, it was in a laughable state. The internet archive showed me that the state of the page in 2006 was pretty much the same as it was when I took it over in May 2014.

Not a good idea to force drills on topic-specific contributors, people; whether this is some crazy-pedantic behaviour or hostility.

Reminds me of how some random strangers welcomed me on StackExchange.

My crime? I replied to a whole question thread because I was not an established user and I couldn't reply to a comment.

 

Another thing that I find puzzling is the amount of articles that are created. I once saw an article written about a random Rodian in the Clone Wars that has one line (him ordering a drink if I recall right) and no other information whatsoever. It was then that I realized that a large part of the wiki was just trying to grow with completely unnecessary entries.


After spending a few minutes I was able to find it. Here it is.

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Unidentified_Rodian_(Chalmun's_Spaceport_Cantina)

It appears I was mistaken. He's does more than order a drink. But my original point still stands. He's an obscure character for one scene that has no background information.

 

That kind of things is actually frowned upon, and articles like that one are deleted on a regular basis.

 

Interesting. The admin defended it pretty hard.

 

I am going to contribute some actual, proper research to an article. Let's see what happens.

 

In fairness, the comment on that Rodian's talk page is from before Cade was an admin, and also from before community consensus began to swing in favor of deleting those kinds of articles. I think a lot of random background TCW characters were culled in either '013 or '014. Background cantina aliens from A New Hope and from the Holiday Special usually got a pass, and most of them ended up being named in canon a few years after having their Wook articles created, anyway, like this guy and this guy.

 

Forgive me for playing Devil's Advocate for just a second, but I want to suss this out a little more--it seems like a lot of the complaints have revolved around FAs, which, valid or otherwise, are just an official way of saying "hey, this is a neat article!" and eventually highlighting it on the main page for a couple days. As much of a cluster**** as that process might be, is it really that big of a problem in the grand scheme of things? Not having one's hard work reviewed for FA status is unfortunate, sure, but it could be construed by a layman (hi) as kind of petty--the work is still there to be appreciated by the readership, the author just isn't getting patted on the back for it. Am I missing something?

 

The author isn't really getting patted on the back for it at all, their name is not recorded anywhere other than the page history, and there is no official commemoration of the work. Rightly so as there is no true author of any article.

Why it is significant is that it is basically a stamp where the encyclopedia is saying "As of this date, this article is comprehensive and well-written", or in effect a "complete" entry up to that point. It is an authoritative catalogue of material on that subject. You can do the work, sure, but the point of FA is to put those pages on the main page and say "Here's where you can trust us" which is really critical to a site where anyone can edit the material, and there will always be the complaint that "Well, you can't trust Wookieepedia" but this alleviates that. We were able to do enough work to get it to 1 per day, which was a byproduct of streamlining the process with a review board. It was significant because only Wikipedia could manage the same stock of high-level material to feature on a daily basis. That fell apart when people started to misunderstand what the point of that process was and instead they feature smaller articles for reasons quite beyond me.

It sounds trivial but in the grander scheme of a team working together to build a comprehensive encyclopedia that would leave anything official in the dust it was the true way of saying "That one's done, move onto the next one". It was critical to the project overall from that perspective.

 

Another quick question: when it started, was the Inq inherently a group of existing admins, or were regular users part of it as well?