December was a quiet month for the wiki, but I don’t think that was just because of the holidays. Instead, I think a lot of people had entered a bit of a holding pattern with their updates to canon and character stories and backgrounds (As I have been for while now) due to the impending release of The Force Awakens. Now, living in a post-TFA world, activity for the month of January has picked up once more as people make update to their characters to reflect the new realities. I had been holding off on filing a report last month pending some announcements from the Powers That Be, but as they ended up taking longer than planned it got to the point where it was almost February and I pushed the report until now. There are still a few things to impact the wiki that should be coming down the pipe, so expect announcements from this office soon after any new policies hit.

Staff Appointments

While it wasn’t announced at the time (since I was waiting on some DJB announcements that were delayed to file this report last month), I did fill the vacancies on my staff. And, suffice it to say, I ended up getting a trio of excellent applications that really went above and beyond in giving me a good idea of what kind of staffers they might be. So please join me in offering a belated welcome to Rrogon Skar Agrona, Bentre Stahoes, and Kalon Tsucyra Entar now that they’re members of the Wiki Staff.

To Legends or not to Legends, that is the question.

The determination has been made for the Brotherhood moving forward that we don’t want our wiki to become the tangled mass of legends and canon information that Wookieepedia is going to become. That reality works for them as they are a repository for all Star Wars information, old and new. The DJB wiki, however, is supposed to be a resource for the current Dark Brotherhood (and the currently accepted history of that current Dark Brotherhood), so we won’t be preserving legends versions of every article on the wiki that does get updated (either by the staff, Clan summits, or members) outside of the possibility of a very few DJB-wide events. There will, however, be a maintenance-type tag that will most likely be deployed soon to serve as a label for articles that aren’t updated (and probably won’t be given their age) warning members moving forward that it’s outdated Legends-based info and to take it with a grain of salt.

As to what this means, however, for your characters and their backgrounds, as most of you are aware the Grand Master has already grandfathered in pre-existing characters and species. As an extension of that, anything such as homeworlds and basic backgrounds are also going to be grandfathered in and won’t get you slapped with the maintenance tag and will instead be considered as legends-based fanon for your character (just like most of the events of your character’s life). For example, if your character was born and grew up on Thyferra, you can still be born there and have grown up there. I would highly suggest, though, that you update your character’s background to reflect the new reality of the galaxy and the intervening periods (For example: the New Jedi Order didn’t happen, the Vong incursion, Thrawn, etc). There’s already some good information out there on Wookieepedia that gives a general feel of what’s been going on in the galaxy, and there’s a lot of room there to have your character occupy. Which brings us, again, to the next point...

Featured Articles & Wikipedian of the Month

Unlike in previous months, this month’s featured article(s) won’t be highlighting anything on our wiki. Instead, I’d like to draw everyone’s attention to a pair of articles on Wookieepedia that offer fairly promising glimpses into the new Star Wars galaxy as a whole.

Galactic Concordance: This one is a great resource that really gives some excellent information on the conclusion of the conflict between the Rebel Alliance/New Republic and the Empire. It really hammers home some of the parallels that Star Wars has always had with prior historical events as inspiration, as the treaty here seems to have some real commonalities with the Treaty of Versailles at the end of World War One.

Galactic Empire: An article that offers some more information in keeping in what’s outlined in the article on the Galactic Concordance treaty, this one goes into a bit more detail about the fate of the post-war Empire. It sounds like some parts of the Empire outside of the First Order successor state did indeed continue in some capacity for a while after the cessation of hostilities. Additionally, the term “Old Empire” is now a thing, so now you know. (And knowing is, of course, half the battle.)

As for our WOTM, I’m always a fan of people stepping up to perform the more maintinency edits on our wiki. The real beauty of a wiki system is that it’s user driven, so anyone can go out there and make updates or fix errors they see, staff or not. It’s actually how I got my start wiki’ing in the DJB. The person that stood out in taking up some of that slack in January was Keirdagh Taldrya Cantor. So feel free to congratulate Yacks on another award. I’m sure he can make a little fort out of them.

Projects

• Front Page Redesign: Lead: Selika, Asst: Kalon. Much like the accessibility project that will (at some point) get around to focusing on Clan category pages, the front page of our wiki is going to be looked at in order to make it easier to navigate and make it easier to find the information that (especailly newer) folks need easy access to in order to improve their experience with the wiki system.
• Tutorial/Policy Organization: Lead: Andrelious. Right now our wiki has a lot of duplicated and, often times, contradictory data when it comes to policies for such things as character page creation. With the help of the staff, I will be looking towards taking the current information and condensing it into single articles, as well as placing all the disparate pages together into specific categories. Additionally, development of the Manual of Style document will be part of this project.
• 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.
• Competition Cleanup Lead: Bentre Stahoes. The are a lot of old competition-generated articles out there. Many of them are categorized like canon version of articles, for example, and don’t have enough of a shining neon sign denoting their non-canon status. Bentre’s will be properly sorting out this particular mess.
• Accessibility: Lead: V’yr. 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.

Wiki Tip of the Month

This month I want to highlight a little-used and almost hidden gem on the wiki: the Wiki Resources drop down menu.

This menu will point you in the direction of a lot of helpful things that I end up directing people to more than half the time I’m asked questions about how to do this and that. The tutorial section covers things like how to create links both to articles on our wiki as well as Wookieepedia. The character page template shows you how to put your character page together, and also includes the checklist used to approve “quality wiki articles” for all you Journeymen out there. It’s easy to miss, and you might not know what’s to be found in there until you look, but there’s gold in them thar hills (or at least good info in those links).

Final Words

The new year is a new world for Star Wars, and therefore a new world for our wiki. So, while it’s somewhat related to wiki page development, I’m going to make a bit of a “more than the wiki” plug. I’d encourage everyone out there to get their hands on as much information about the new fictional reality that is the Star Wars universe and embrace it. I’m as die hard a lover of a lot of the old EU as the next guy, but don’t let the old EU distract you from the really cool Star Wars stuff that’s out there now. Welcome the chance to revamp your character into one whose recent history doesn’t have to be defined by the galaxy-wide scourge of the Yuuzhan Vong (as, realistically, pretty much every character in the “current” Legends timeframe would be). There’s a new galaxy out there that’s very much akin to Star Wars boiled down to its core, tossing away extraneous things that were less like what we all signed up for when we saw the films. Sure, we’ve lost some cool stuff along the way (RIP, X-wing novels), but we’ve lost some less great stuff, too (The Vong, most of what KJA wrote, the list goes on). And, reading Wookieepedia, there’s some really interesting stuff filling in the blanks. Make the new setting work for you, I know I am and, given what I’ve seen out there, I’m glad for the opportunity.</end pitch>