My Thoughts on the Wiki

[DavidCaruso]

I think the wiki in its current state is only useful for drama pages and forum history stuff, actually, and that's the only capacity in which I've ever used it (even back ten years ago).

There's something to be said for that, though. Past incarnations of MFGG had one of the most unique and colorful forum cultures that ever existed, before social media killed the format and the "independent" scene killed fangaming. The wiki, with all its pointless drama and bickering and random off-topic details, is merely a reflection of that. It serves as the only written record about long periods of this community (MFGG3, for example, and I think the ezBoards too), and there are many fantastic users who deeply shaped this forum's culture despite not making many fangaming contributions. LuigiFan, for instance, never finished a fangame and never won any competitions. Are we seriously suggesting to scrub that awesome dude from this community's history?

If someone actively wants their page scrubbed in any way, they should be able to request it, but otherwise I'm completely against deleting anything permanently. Archival sounds like a great option, in the worst case (especially because people are apparently using the wiki to dig up drama from 2008 and harass people? the f***? do you guys have lives?) But I have to ask: are there people today willing to put in the work to completely revamp the wiki, and write these tutorials across a variety of game engines, and all the other content that you would need to make a truly useful fangaming resource? Are there people attempting to write these resources now, who just don't have visibility because of the cluttered wiki format? We weren't able to give the wiki a proper purpose besides "drama repository", 10 to 15 years ago during the height of the planet's interest in fangaming, and right now the tutorials section has like five pages all dating from years ago, so I'm slightly skeptical that rebooting it in 2019 will lead to anything but another empty space. A reboot would fit better with the staff's current vision of the site, of course, but those are my honest thoughts.

Eventually -- this is going to sound like a joke, but it's not -- sociologists will start properly studying early-2000s forum cultures and forum history, and this place is going to be a fantastic find for them. So please keep the current wiki alive or archived in some form, or else Jack Johnson in 2030 won't get his PhD.