D&D Wiki is forking.
Posted: Tue Aug 11, 2009 7:37 am
Just letting everyone know, there's a new Dungeons & Dragons wiki. It can be found at http://dungeons.wikia.com
We're still working on getting all the formatting set up, after which it should be fully functional. For anyone too lazy to click on the link, note that this wiki is built around aggressive quality control for shit that's actually usable. That's one of the reasons for the fork. We've saved all the old pages from the old wiki and will go through aggressively deleting them until we have a signal to noise ratio of close to 1.
This is what I wrote to explain the incident that caused the fork, in case anyone was wondering:
I'll try to explain this as neutrally as I can. To anyone reading this who wasn't aware, I am (was) an admin on dandwiki.
Virtually every actively contributing member of the wiki was fed up with the rating system. To this end, Dragon_Child created a new rating concept -- the rating committee. It was posted on Green Dragon's talk page and discussed. The discussion, after seemingly being concluded, went idle for about three weeks. We (or TK rather, because he had the technical know-how) set up the new rating system templates and got everything ready to be changed over. When the finishing touches were being put on, Green Dragon decided to slap delete templates on the new rating stuff. Despite the fact that he had three weeks to respond on his talk page and chose not to.
I posted a message on Green Dragon's talk page wondering what the hell was going on and why he decided to wait now to do anything instead of the three weeks that the project sat idle to speak up. He responded by threatening to ban me. I responded saying that we had a right to be upset about this, as the decision to create a new rating system was virtually unanimous and we had all put a significant amount of work into it. He responded to this by banning me. Sulacu replied echoing my sentiments, and he responding by banning Sulacu. There were a few more bannings before Aarnott stepped up and, in an attempt to send a message, banned Green Dragon (a useless gesture except for sending a message, obviously) saying (paraphrasing here because I lost the exact quote) that he was acting completely out of line and if he kept this up, he was going to lose his entire userbase. Aarnott said, and I agree with him, that admins (which I am) are supposed to be trusted equal partners, something that Green Dragon is totally ignoring. Green Dragon responded to this by banning all of his admins (even the ones that weren't online) and shutting the site down.
The next part is where we get into my opinion and I'm no longer attempting neutrality. This has probably been a long time coming. For the past while (not sure of an exact time), Green Dragon has been a completely inactive site owner who has not listened to his users in any way, shape, or form. Every couple of weeks like clockwork he would show up, do something without consulting his active users or admins that would completely piss everyone off (such as this incident), and then leave again. He has not actually discussed any of his actions with his users in recent memory, and examples of such actions have been to put a balance template on a popular, well-liked class saying "this is unbalanced" and not give any reason. We revert the change because he's wrong and didn't give any reasoning, he gets annoyed, brief edit war ensues, he vanishes for two weeks, comes back two weeks later and does something similar to another page.
Even if the wiki comes back up, I will not return to do any more work on it after this latest incident. Green Dragon has completely destroyed all the trust I and, I daresay, all the users had for him and his ability to be the administrator of anything. He told us before he banned us if we didn't like what he was doing, we could start our own wiki. That's exactly what I plan on doing.
His action of shutting the site down is one of the most douchebag moves I can recall in recent memory. There are many users who were not at all involved in any of this and had many, many pages they worked very hard on on the wiki, and now all that work seems to be lost.
We're still working on getting all the formatting set up, after which it should be fully functional. For anyone too lazy to click on the link, note that this wiki is built around aggressive quality control for shit that's actually usable. That's one of the reasons for the fork. We've saved all the old pages from the old wiki and will go through aggressively deleting them until we have a signal to noise ratio of close to 1.
This is what I wrote to explain the incident that caused the fork, in case anyone was wondering:
I'll try to explain this as neutrally as I can. To anyone reading this who wasn't aware, I am (was) an admin on dandwiki.
Virtually every actively contributing member of the wiki was fed up with the rating system. To this end, Dragon_Child created a new rating concept -- the rating committee. It was posted on Green Dragon's talk page and discussed. The discussion, after seemingly being concluded, went idle for about three weeks. We (or TK rather, because he had the technical know-how) set up the new rating system templates and got everything ready to be changed over. When the finishing touches were being put on, Green Dragon decided to slap delete templates on the new rating stuff. Despite the fact that he had three weeks to respond on his talk page and chose not to.
I posted a message on Green Dragon's talk page wondering what the hell was going on and why he decided to wait now to do anything instead of the three weeks that the project sat idle to speak up. He responded by threatening to ban me. I responded saying that we had a right to be upset about this, as the decision to create a new rating system was virtually unanimous and we had all put a significant amount of work into it. He responded to this by banning me. Sulacu replied echoing my sentiments, and he responding by banning Sulacu. There were a few more bannings before Aarnott stepped up and, in an attempt to send a message, banned Green Dragon (a useless gesture except for sending a message, obviously) saying (paraphrasing here because I lost the exact quote) that he was acting completely out of line and if he kept this up, he was going to lose his entire userbase. Aarnott said, and I agree with him, that admins (which I am) are supposed to be trusted equal partners, something that Green Dragon is totally ignoring. Green Dragon responded to this by banning all of his admins (even the ones that weren't online) and shutting the site down.
The next part is where we get into my opinion and I'm no longer attempting neutrality. This has probably been a long time coming. For the past while (not sure of an exact time), Green Dragon has been a completely inactive site owner who has not listened to his users in any way, shape, or form. Every couple of weeks like clockwork he would show up, do something without consulting his active users or admins that would completely piss everyone off (such as this incident), and then leave again. He has not actually discussed any of his actions with his users in recent memory, and examples of such actions have been to put a balance template on a popular, well-liked class saying "this is unbalanced" and not give any reason. We revert the change because he's wrong and didn't give any reasoning, he gets annoyed, brief edit war ensues, he vanishes for two weeks, comes back two weeks later and does something similar to another page.
Even if the wiki comes back up, I will not return to do any more work on it after this latest incident. Green Dragon has completely destroyed all the trust I and, I daresay, all the users had for him and his ability to be the administrator of anything. He told us before he banned us if we didn't like what he was doing, we could start our own wiki. That's exactly what I plan on doing.
His action of shutting the site down is one of the most douchebag moves I can recall in recent memory. There are many users who were not at all involved in any of this and had many, many pages they worked very hard on on the wiki, and now all that work seems to be lost.