The drumming, can’t you hear it? It’s everywhere. It’s everywhere. Listen. Listen. LISTEN! Here come the drums…

Well alright, not the drums. But the long awaited Possessions system is now waiting just below the horizon. There will of course be a few changes coming to how the wiki in preparation for that reality. In addition, we’re also going to be starting the process of dealing with older articles that are now more Legends continuity than Canon. So, let’s get into it.

DJB Ship Emporium

So, if you’re one of the obsessive compulsives that camp the recent changes page on the wiki (Heya, Alishu!), you might have noticed something around 500+ edits in the last couple of days. This was the result of step one of the new Wiki handling of ship articles. In the past, all capital ship articles have used a CMD (or command) prefix code. These codes were originally sourced from the X-wing computer games, which meant the last time anyone actually made any new ones (or the last time people actually had materials that let them know what they meant) was 1999. At this point the X-wing series is pretty outdated, and I'm sure that most people don't actually know the place from which those codes are even from. I've seen plenty of members that think those are just part of the name, or they're something akin to the USS or HMS prefixes in the real world. I know it can also make searching the wiki slightly harder if you don't know what prefix the ship has you're looking for, as the wiki search doesn't fill in the ship name as you type unless you start with the prefix command code. Another big issue is that the sheer number of codes we would have to make up is going to increase since none of the new ships created moving forward will have them. All that being said, all of the ship command codes have been removed from the Wiki. All the ship articles have also been altered to support italic ship titles (Shout out to Terran Koul for the work on that one). By next month there should be a formalized policy about naming conflicts and name supremacy.

I’m also going to be engaging in a census of all the old, unused starship articles on the wiki in order to clean out the personal starships category anticipating the launch of possessions. Most of these ship articles date back to 2007-2009, so they’re waaaaaaay old. Those that aren’t in use any longer are going to be removed. However, if those members come back or get a bee in their bonnet to return the ships to active use, any deleted content from the wiki can be restored by any of the staff members. Articles are sorta like photos on Facebook. You can “delete” them, but they’re never really gone.

Legends Dungeon

With the change in DJB canon to better reflect the canon status of the Star Wars universe, there’s going to be some things that can’t quite make the transition. As we’re loathe to get rid of most content, especially old character articles, the Wiki will now be tagging articles that are Legends content with a big, red tag at the top of those articles. This will be reserved for either really, really old stuff that doesn’t really need an update or things that are just so closely intertwined with the old continuity so as to make disentangling them virtually impossible. These articles, however, will be banished to a category for Legends articles and removed from their existing categories. (There will be some exceptions to this, for example any clan title holders will still have their articles categorized along with the other title holders, Legends or not.) The staff and I will be looking at articles as we move forward, and will be making sure to err on the side of caution when it comes to marking articles with this tag. At the end of the day, we want to make sure the content is still there for members to use, but not presented in such a prominent manner to cause confusion when newer members stumble across them.

There should be more updates on this as the policy develops.

Featured Articles & Wikipedian of the Month

This month’s featured article is Kiast. This article still might have a construction tag on it, but there’s been so much great work done on the new fictional reality for Clan Odan-Urr that I felt the need to (maybe) jump the gun and feature their new homeworld now. Honestly, I could pick out nearly any of the new Odan-Urr articles, but I decided to go with their capital planet as a good centerpiece. I’d suggest that everyone should just take a stroll through the rest of the new content for Odan-Urr.

As for our Wikipedian of the Month, I want to highlight the work done by Laren Uscot on the Clan Plagueis History article. I might be accused of being a hit of a homer for singling out somebody working on a Plagueis project and article, but trust me this one is worth it. The DJB Wiki is, at it’s heart, a repository of the history of the Brotherhood in both real life and the Star Wars universe. Sadly, a lot of our history over the last few years, the stories of the Dark Crusade, Fading Light, Great Jedi War XI, hasn’t made it onto the wiki. Laren took it upon himself to go back through years of history and fill in all the gaps and empty headings. It’s the kind of work that I hope everyone sees the value of, and I’d encourage every unit to follow his lead and put that history down on “paper”, so to speak. We’ve told some great stories, don’t let them fade away.

Projects

• Wiki Competition: Lead: Selika & Entire Staff. The staff and I are looking at running a major, wiki focused competitions this summer. We’re currently in the early stages of competition drafting, but expect more announcements on this as time goes on.
• Legends Dungeon: Lead: Selika. Sorting, sorting, and more sorting. There’s a lot of work here, so this is probably a long term project more than any other we’ve worked on.
• Archivist: Lead: Rrogon Skar. Even with the new canon changes, the stories of the Brotherhood still need to be updated. Depending on how far we go with old events in the area of bringing them in line with new canon, this project’s responsibilities are somewhat in flux.
• Accessibility: Lead: Selika. The first phase of this project which will consist of developing the magazine style table of contents system for our Clan category pages. Once a tentative plan is in place for a standardized system, we’ll be working with the Clans to make sure their specific concerns aren’t steamrolled by the march of progress. A mockup of how the Clan page table of contents may be formatted can be seen here.