WIDEVERSE Wiki:Blog

A short collection of Taylors thoughts on the history of The WIDEVERSE and decisions made in documenting its storied 20+ year history

09/06/24: The Day The Wiki Died

Now listen, I never claimed to be a professional. Every bit of computertouching knowledge I have comes from having a cool idea but nobody that will do it for me for free and having to figure it out from hours of Google and YouTube videos from guys named Vivek.

So, last night then when I was trimming down the VPS that runs this site (and other WIDEVERSE things), I accidentally dropped the database for the wiki. Now, that aint something you cant Ctrl+Z away (I know this because I furiously Googled to see if I could). What ensued was TWELVE HOURS of restoring a backup I JUST HAPPENED TO MAKE A FEW DAYS AGO FOR THE FIRST TIME IN THE SEVEN YEARS IVE OWNED THIS VPS, and putting out fires until I bullshitted my way into fixing it.

Everything SHOULD be fine, but if anything pops up, its probably your fault.

07/19/24: On Protecting Identities and Public Figures

In the six and change years we've been running this wiki, there's only been maybe one, two max instances of someone getting truly butthurt over information we've put here. There's been legit complaints as well that we've addressed, but nobodies really just shit themselves in anger demanding something get deleted or removed, but anytime someone has asked for something unreasonable, we always reply with the same thing: You knew what you were getting into. This site is no secret, its one of the first things you are linked to when joining any of The WIDEVERSE Discords, sites, etc. Joining WIDEVERSE is signing up to be somewhat in the public eye, its just how it is. And if you're in the public eye, you're going to be talked about.

The problem here of course with that goes back to the previous blog post, regarding Photo Frens. Photo Frens exists within The WIDEVERSE now, but because it's a solely independent entity, we aren't imposing the same rules about public figures. As such, if you read the article for it, we have made the decisions to change names to protect certain peoples identities. Keyword here is certain, because several of the people involved have made themselves of their own volition as public figures. The name that comes to mind immediately is Kiko. Kiko is a streamer, photographer and general conman. His face, name, likeness, everything is out there for anyone to see. Because of this, there is no qualms then for us to document it. After all, he put it out there, would we be at fault to catalogue it? No, of course not, because he made his choice. Want to cry about it? Sucks, hire a lawyer. WMG has more money than you.

Will this get applied evenly? No. There's a few "public figures" in Photo Frens that we will continue to protect the identity of, though any motivated actor could easily unmask them certainly, but that's true of anyone here, really. In the end, we want to protect people who have chosen to stay somewhat anonymous, especially people who are using real names. Its been tough trying to find the appropriate middle ground here, but we believe we finally have, and so regular updates can finally resume...hopefully (until someone else cries).

06/23/24: What's Going On With The Wiki?

Much unlike me, I've been avoiding updating the wiki for some months. This naturally has led to the question: What's going on?

Well, firstly I'd like to toot my own horn and say I fixed some major stuff behind the scenes, making the site run faster. No big deal, I'm the best. But to the content of the wiki, it's a little more complicated.

After The Haus Crew left the primary community that we had been building for several years, we were lost for a little bit. Tevin suggested however we join a photography community called Photo Frens. It was a refreshing change of pace, to be part of someone elses community for once, not having to tackle every issue as if it was an existential threat to us. In time naturally, we've become rather engrained and involved in this community, so much to the extent that much of the antics have begun overlapping with the WIDEVERSE. The problem though is that within this community, many people use their real names and identities, and that has made it very difficult to document the happenings here on a public site.

I decided that to finally start creating new articles, I'm going to assign aliases to most the people involved. Expect new updates to start coming from here on out.

08/11/23: Wiki Upgrades

I took the wiki down for a few weeks while I experimented with updating it to the newest version of Mediawiki. It was disastrous, and I had to start over, but the second attempt was pretty good. We now have the VisualEditor, which is great and haven't lost much, if any, functionality. There might be one issue that pops up but if it does that's a then issue.

Another outstanding issue is regarding the wikis skin. Currently, the default is set to Vector, however, an updated Vector is being worked on, and is really good. The problem is it doesn't allow defaulting to full width, and instead looks like a mobile phone page. Until there's more updates to it to let me make it fullscreen the whole time, Im keeping the default to the original Vector, because trying to design the wiki around both versions would be super annoying.

Getting VisualEditor to work natively was a big impetuous for this. It makes editing so much easier, especially for old stuff. I can't explain how much easier it is to just drag and drop pictures instead of having to go through several step processes to add them to pages.

10/30/22: Fediverse Expansion

Over the next few months the primary focus of the editors of The WIDVERSE Wiki will be expanding our articles relating to "The Fediverse". Providing a partially objective place to document the happenings, groups, and peoples of the diverse culture of the mostly Pleroma based side of Fediverse is extremely important in my opinion. We of course respect the existing "Fediverse Wiki" but it is incompletely, rarely updated, and shamefully biased.

09/22/22: The Incel Question

As the history of The 3rd COMMUNISM Civil War began to be written in late 2018, tempers were still high, anger was still fresh, and wounds still open. In that disgruntled state, much of the naming scheme of the events was invented purely for shock factor and insult, giving way to the name "Incel Uprising" and of course "The Incels" to refer to the former admins that split off of BMW during the event.

As we move forward with documenting history, however, we find that we look back and see things in a more neutral stance and understand that in context, things may have made since, but in the future as new generations of Biggers began learning about our past, these names give certain implications and connotations that may not be accurate. The name "The Incels" came from a one off statement made in private by one of the admins taking entirely out of context but was blown up for comedic affect as well as a propaganda tool.

With those things in mind, I believe now as we continue to deescalate from old rivalries and childish feuds, it's important to clarify such things. As such, I made the decision to rename The Incel Uprising and The Incels to The Wonka Uprising and The Wonkas, respectively. Some will probably call me a pussy for this, but its been almost 5 years, it's time to move on and get over it and let historical things lie in proper context, especially as we continue to see numerous returns in members from that era.