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

06/23/24: Whats'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 bene 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 idenitities, 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 doesnt 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.

9/22/22: 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.