I had thoughts on the Moon Guard Wiki, but I didn’t want them getting lost. I like it a lot, and was excited years ago when it started coming up and I still have my own character’s page there. When I came back in DF, I resumed updating it and catching it up to where I felt my character was… but I had an incident happen.
My thought is: Defacement of articles is really a killer of the wiki. Its always been a problem, and eventually people stop using it. Sometimes its malicious and targeted, sometimes people are just being twits and trying to gatekeep things they have no business even gatekeeping.
My personal experience came a year ago when I was heading a Cult of the Forgotten Shadow community and used the wiki page - I filled out the page utilizing what was known from the RPG books as well as added some advertisement about my project. This was defaced and let to a days long back and forth between some literal random who? who had no interest or hand in the project themselves and came out of the woodwork to simply dictate to me that the information was fanon and not acceptable on Moon Guard Wiki. Even when moderation finally got involved, they simply defied them openly. I gave up because I couldn’t see a way I could win in this fight. Since then I’ve stopped using the wiki entirely, even for my own character’s page.
The back and forth is still there for those who want to see it in the edit history, but I cannot supply a link. Back in April 2023 is when it happened. I know exactly who it was in game, and it sounds like they were someone who was a known pest but allowed to run free. It’s disheartening. It’s very hard to use the platform when you need to contend with that even for subjects that aren’t controversial. I was literally supplementing information from the RPG books in this case.
But those are my thoughts. Apologies for the new topic, but I feel this is an issue I wanted to bring up and I didn’t want it getting mixed up among something I don’t really want to be associated with.
6 Likes
Given the other topic, I believe this is the right thing to do.
I’m with you, during Shadow of Lordaeron’s admittedly brief time, we had a few storylines going that I had documented within our discord, none affected canon spaces to crazy amounts of degrees (besides being located within Caer Darrow/Scholoamnce since it is the Cult of the Damned’s still-active bastion). I had wanted to put pictures up, explain events that transpired, etc. But then I realized: the wiki isn’t really monitored as much now (or so it seems), people aren’t going to care, and more than likely it would either be deleted or messed with in some capacity.
The fact the RPG is considered extremely controversial is crazy to me because of how much of it… still exists in lore and game. Lore, canon, Fanon, all of it is going to collide now and then after all, but it’s crazy how some act.
5 Likes
I mean by and large, with the Forgotten Shadow, it is the -only- source of actual workable lore, and it’s like that unfortunately for a lot of things.
But it just pissed me off that this person who has no horse in the race decided to come in and dictate what should be seen on a website where people, including themselves, load up pages of personal ‘fanon’ that is their characters and their stories. I’d say they weren’t welcome in the community while I had hosted it, but they weren’t even remotely associated.
Just frustrating. Very frustrating. Seeing that they had the ‘last laugh’ and their last edit remains up just hardens me more against returning.
5 Likes
Good Afternoon,
I’m sorry to hear that happened, please feel free to join the Wiki Discord and get in touch with any of us on the admin/moderation team so we can support and ensure defacement like that doesn’t happen in the future. We’re not always checking the wiki every day so there may be a bit of a time before we see an edit war happening, but please feel free to reach out so we can help.
8 Likes
No one should be able to take down someone else’s wikia content on the basis of disagreeing on canon or fanon or what have you. That’s awful.
I wish these wiki’s had better ways of controlling authorized users to edit articles that could be dictated by the person who created the article that admins have the ability to override if the article they claimed is too vague or open source to be so controlled.
I also feel you on the people who so easily dismiss the RPG when it’s a great supplement when it isn’t contradicted by the games or novels. It has so many cool concepts in it that feed the void of my hunger for the world being better fleshed out.
5 Likes
Honestly, with the edit history receipts you have in my opinion, I’d name and shame. Unsure if it’s against community ToS or not, but I’m on the hill of identifying people who like to grief work people likely spent hours or days collecting and formatting together on a page they themselves authored in its entirety.
Your own work shouldn’t be altered without the express permission/authorization from yourself, period.
2 Likes
Felt your pain on a personal level.