Lit Wookieepedia, the Star Wars wiki

Well, it went pretty much how I expected. A small handful of genuinely helpful responses from people like Ayrehead, overshadowed by a lot of knee-jerk defensiveness and point-missing "No one is stopping you from signing up for Discord" and "If you think the Senate Hall is so important, you're more than welcome to start the threads yourself" comments. But hey, who needs introspection at a time like this?

 

Come on, that's not fair! They only had an open white supremacist and his best friend shape the site's policy for a decade and a half by writing rules, setting up procedures and banning scores on undesireable users while promoting those willing to follow in their wake. Surely that's not going to leave a long-lasting mark on the site now that they're gone, right?

Meanwhile, "banned users are welcome to reach out to the administration and request that their bans be looked into and potentially overturned" pretty much excludes the possibility of a mass pardon of Toprawa's victims, putting the blame on the blocked users for not "reaching out" to the same admins who either stood by or participated in Toprawa's hijinks in the first place. And in context of NaruHina they only thing they will "look into" is restoring his user page - FANDOM will not undo any more blocks, delegating that issue back to the Wook admins, and they want each and every one to come begging for it first. All this of course will take place on a private Discord server which banned users cannot access because verification process is involved.

 

TBH, Jeff, as someone who's no longer used to those kind of discussions I see what they mean about that thread being broad and hard to follow.

These are all good questions, but why not just make one thread for each of them, or at least boil them down into two or three topics? If it shuts that criticism down without requiring much more effort on your part, why not do it? Immi's Discord CT got similarly inundated with procedural criticisms and rather than say "welp, I tried!" she withdrew it and tried a new path. Knowing as well as you do how much still needs to change should also mean recognizing that it's not going to flip on a dime because you asked once.

 

Jesus Christ, what is the stubborn objection to having important discussions on publically accessible pages? "But Discord is easy to access". If I have to click through several different links and programs, and memorise the correct time to be in the chatroom then I have news for you: It's not easy.

 

I'll admit that the thread was overly-broad, but to be fair I (perhaps naively) didn't expect everyone to jump on the Discord stuff and turn it into the discussion's primary focus. I won't make a series of further Senate Hall threads for several reasons --- it's going to take a concerted group effort to make necessary changes to the site rather than just one user continually pestering everyone, and also the responses to my initial thread seem to indicate a preference for complacency and a disinclination to use the Senate Hall at all.

My goal with that thread was really just to try to give an initial push that I hadn't seen happen yet but felt was necessary, not so much to barge in and demand immediate change. And at the very least, it did get people talking, even if it was primarily in a stubbornly defensive way. Honestly I'm not personally inclined to lead the charge myself every step of the way --- the little time and effort I do dedicate to that site I'd rather concentrate on Rogue Squadron --- but I'm more than happy to give pushes when they're necessary and call people out on their laziness and tendencies to fall back on a broken system that ought to be fixed. I may pursue the admin supermajority thing further, but I'm not expecting much from the people who are still there.

 

Another objection I had with IRC and Discord chat rooms. I live in Australia which is basically on the other side of the planet to other Wookieepedia users. As a result, it was pretty much impossible for me to ever meet anyone in the chatroom unless I enjoyed getting up at 3 am to talk to people about wiki business. If instead, you have it open as a discussion on the Senate Hall or Consensus Track I can come in, read others comments and leave my 2 cents when everyone else is asleep so I can still participate without jeopardising my sleep, my job or my sanity. Wookieepedia has been strangling itself for years by turning into a place ruled by obsessive individuals who spend every waking hour indulging in the petty politics of the place.

 

I'm in Australia as well so I never bothered with that sort of stuff. I just hoped that someone would reply to my inquiries in the Talk Pages while I slept like a normal human. As I recall, being in this part of the world led me to being forced to drop out of a trivia thing on the boards after I was nominated sometime ago.

 

The Discord debate, at least, is moving forward.

 

Does this leadership drama have anything to do with the fact that the article title for the Death Star is "DS-1 Orbital Battle Station" instead of simply "Death Star"?

 

No, that is simply the long-standing preference for the most "complete" version amongs all official names.

 

But it has something to do with the manual of style, right? Which I assume the leadership has a large say over?

 

This also Always makes me laugh

 

Has there ever been anything posted on Wookieepedia that wasn't actually from any official source, that somehow other editors overlooked and didn't remove, that was made canon/legends from a Star Wars writer reading and seeing it on the Wiki?

It might have happened with Star Trek with Memory-Alpha. There was something about the Klingons which was there from the year the wiki was created that some how people missed for 13 years. It was finally removed after I pointed it out, a month before it became canon anyways lmao.

 

Memory-Alpha decided that first names in scripts don't count, not to mention the Rhaandarite/Vegan disaster.

As to Wookieepedia, Leland Chee pretty much says everyone on-screen in the first six films (and in Clone Wars) that had a name pre-reboot are still the same names unless they are changed at a later date. So aside from Marquand/Newland, Watts/Blanaid and ?/Elnick Pye, pretty much everyone is still canon in my book.

 

That's not what I asked lmao.

I was asking if there was ever something on the wiki that wasn't official, (fanon or just pulled out of a persons arse), that editors/readers just overlooked, that got turned canon/legends because of someone reading the wiki and thinking it was official.

 

Some people can’t accept that trans people exist. That really all it comes down to. And Wookieepidia had a bad policy. And they wanted to keep it “cause tradition”. It’s sad that this had to be an issue.

 

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Padawan_Massacre

After the release of the first Knights of the Old Republic issue, Wookieepedia dubbed the event the "Padawan Massacre of Taris"—Miller alluded to this name in his notes for Knights of the Old Republic 6: Commencement, Part 6 and later canonized the name "Padawan Massacre" in Knights of the Old Republic 11: Reunion, Part 1.
​

EDIT: Though I should clarify - this was a conjectural title, not something overlooked, but it nonetheless made its way into Legends canon.

 

There's actually a whole bunch of these, though they're usually pretty minor.

 

I think the classic example is Sian Jeisel. Jan Duursema's daughter Sian wore a Jeisel costume to Celebration III, and a picture of Sian with the filename "SIAN_JEISEL.jpg" was uploaded to Duursema's website. Without the public being aware of Duursema's daughter's name, that looked to a lot of folks like she had leaked the character's full name, and it got added it to her article in September of 2005. This was still the early days of Wookieepedia, while it was still a little bit of a Wild West and quite a bit before in-line citations were required, so it stayed pretty much unquestioned for months. Someone asked about the name on these boards the following June, and Jan Duursema replied, explaining the confusion. Discussion of the canonicity of this name cropped up on the talk page shortly thereafter, followed by removal of the information from the article in September of 2006, over a year after it was added. However, it was too late; in the interim, the authors of the The New Essential Guide to Alien Species had picked up the Sian name from Wookieepedia and included it in their book, released a few short months later in November. As a result, back into the article "Sian" went, this time canonically.

 

Although I was wrong about Jaina.

 

A great example of fanon on Wookieepedia is "Winter Celchu" which has never been Winter's name in any official source.

 

According to the Talk page, it's used in the book 'Exile' on Page 88. Guess another example of fanon making canon?

I don't own the book, maybe someone here who does can confirm.

 

Yep - can confirm. The line is part of a conversation between Han and Leia about Wedge Antilles. It goes 'Their best friends are on the other side,' Leia said. 'Tycho and Winter Celchu.'

 

Wow! I don't read this thread for a few Months and in that time so real drama and changes happened at the Wook?

Anyway, is there really going to be a new Wook, ideally one that will be completely outside of fandom and wikia? Or if not, have the really bad admins, in particular Cade Calrayne and ToprawaRalltiir, been forced out?

I will say that I'm far from the only potential contributor who won't even bother sharing all my knowledge, sources, and time with the (current?) regime in place.