Board Thread:Support Requests - Community Management/@comment-253018-20141104030559

Hi, I'm an admin at the Ace Attorney Wiki and the community there has gotten rather toxic with users who refuse to budge on their positions and reject every attempt at compromise. Some users are also somewhat vicious with their edit comments, reverting edits and treating them like trolling when the edits could easily have been well-intentioned or even warranted.

The wiki has over 1500 pages now, but that figure is somewhat bloated and I'd still consider the wiki rather small. It's nearly impossible to get dialogue going on any policy that I or others propose, so I usually end up pushing the policy through because almost no one seems to care enough to oppose it. If there is opposition, though, I do try to reach a compromise, even if the opposing views seem unreasonable to me. But for the most part, I'm not used to having to make a decision that will upset someone no matter what I do.

One particular issue has brought me to the breaking point because I just can't deal with it anymore. It concerns the timeline, a very minor aspect of the series that serves little purpose other than as fun trivia. As anyone who's attempted a timeline with character birth dates knows (and this turns out to be very few people... like I said, trivia), the writers of the series screwed up the birth dates; in particular, the vast majority of characters don't have birthdays during the course of a game. This leads to ambiguities and a situation where it's impossible for some of the main characters to have birthdays if we take the in-game data at face value. Even if this were ignored and we deduced possible birthday ranges for every character, we'd end up with a bunch of characters happening to have birthdays in the spring, and we'd have to maintain these deduced ranges every time a game came out, which I doubt that we'd ever actually get around to doing (because again, TRIVIA). So what we ended up doing at first was to just give birth years, assuming only that the given ages were how old a character was going to be by New Years' Eve. It wasn't a perfect solution, and it was not always possible to deduce a character's intended age throughout the timeline without listing every age given in court records.

Okay, so enough background because this post isn't supposed to be about discussing nerd trivia. It began on the timeline talk page a few months ago. I contemplated aloud splitting the timeline in two, before deciding on something much cleaner and less violent. Note that this all happened between April and May of this year, and it was barely implemented at all because, again, it's trivia and there are more important things. Come the end of June, however, another discussion on the timeline occurred, almost as if my proposal had never happened. This thread is very long and very repetitive, and hopefully helps illustrate what I said at the beginning.

The thread eventually petered out in July, at which point I got kind of desperate to try to establish consensus and made this. Not much was said on the timeline front, so in September I made this monstrosity to settle the dispute by trying to interpret what little consensus there was. No one voiced any dispute to the document, and so I felt that it was finally over. I was wrong: Talk:Godot, User talk:Capefeather#My thoughts

Like, I don't know what to do about this anymore. If you want to point out some questionable actions on my part, that's fine; I want to improve as a wiki admin and I make errors in judgment sometimes. I think the biggest frustration for me is that these people didn't complain about the proposal until it was actually put into action, and that these complaints are repeats of complaints from earlier discussion, complaints that were already talked about and were already a part of my attempt to convert the discussion into a policy so that we could all move on. And then they act like I'm going to ban them just for opposing me. All this over fucking trivia.

This isn't the only controversy that has arisen lately, only the biggest one. This also sticks out to me. I can feel myself getting snarkier and more cynical every time I have to deal with this. It seems like anything I do will just rock the boat more. Quite frankly, I'm not having fun participating in the wiki anymore. I still want to, because this is one of my favourite series in video games and the wiki still needs a lot of work just in the realm of fixing inaccurate information. But I just don't know what to do about this without making matters even worse in the long run. 