LGBTQIA:About

From LGBTQIA

The LGBTQIA Wiki was created by author Jeb_CC. Hosted by MyWikis.

Version Information here. Currently using MediaWiki version 1.39.5. Extension wishlist:

This wiki acts as the polished variation of https://www.lgbtqia.wiki/wiki/LGBTA_Wiki.

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This page covers topics that some readers might find sensitive or contentious. It is the responsibility of the reader to use their own judgment and discretion when interpreting and applying the information provided.

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Wiki History

Author's Note: For simplicity...

Wiki hosts will be bolded for clearer distinction.

My name is Jeb, the current owner of the WikiTide and MyWikis Wiki. To start with, the Legacy Wiki community was hosted on FANDOM. I myself was not there to moderate it at the time, and was only a bystander for the time being. ChaoticCylinder owned the wiki initially, then Cryptocrew, then Contie, then me as of 2022.

The Legacy Wiki History

2019 to 2022

This entry is paraphrased from https://www.lgbtqia.wiki/wiki/User:VoxelDraqon, as I myself was not there to witness this part of the history. This however is still written from my perspective.

At the time, the Legacy Wiki wasn't just a wiki. It was a community, with threads, comments, blogs, and a large variety of discussions. The associated Discord was quite large though did split off from the wiki at one point. Though I'm unsure why, it may be due to the fact it was more of the Wiki's community than a relation to the Wiki content itself. I believe this split off Discord still exists to this day. But it was taken over by the official LGBTA+ Wiki Central Discord.

The community itself was.. perhaps a bit of a mess. Understandably minors ruled the scene, those who were questioning, trying to figure out their identities, but then also help one another at the time. Many were traumatised individuals, others were plural. The space must have been inviting enough to include these minorities. This is more of an extra detail but it did impact the wiki contents and others' impressions of the wiki. The wiki took micro labels to the next step, with minors coining various identities with no resources or proof of creation. This has pros and cons but at the time the main con was having terms being redefined and edited, which was technically okay to do since the pages had no resources to reference its original definition.

After various ownership changes, Contie enforced a new policy where wiki pages required resources. Other owners left, most likely due to stress. The redefining of terms was a prominent controversy with the wiki, with the addition of being overly inclusive. There were and still are to this day many complaints about pages such as bi lesbianism being present. Though I'd like to stress that regardless of whether one supports an article or not, it's a wiki. It is for educational purposes, and not all pages are immediately regarded as 'supported'.

The 'Merge'

January 2022

For some background information, it's important to note the management hierarchy of wikis. Each wiki has its own set of 'local' admins and moderators. But the wiki, site, and content falls under its host, and the admins that manage said host. The hosts (such as FANDOM, or Miraheze) generally do not collaborate or moderate wikis unless something is reported. Knowing this, it was a very sudden shock when FANDOM admins suddenly announced that they would be merging the Legacy wiki.


At the time, it wasn't just the LGBTQIA wiki present on FANDOM. A few other smaller wikis based on queer subjects existed as well, and all managed by separate communities. FANDOM's idea was to combine them to create a centralised location for all LGBT related terminology and history. This in theory is fine, but the execution was extremely poor. Below are a few quotes from their official statement, titled: "A new combined wiki".

1. "We worked closely with a number of LGBTQIA+ individuals and allies as we developed this wiki..."

2. "Only official terms that are recognised by people working on LGBTQIA+ issues will be approved."

Sources:

https://lgbtqia.fandom.com/wiki/User_blog:Sannse/A_new_combined_wiki

https://twitter.com/ez_gender/status/1483938454446747650?


This immediately sparked several issues. To refute each point...

1. We are unsure of who exactly these 'individuals and allies' are. But it is a fact that nobody from the wikis at the time were contacted. Not from the Legacy Wiki, not from the MOGAI (EZGender) wiki, or any other smaller queer wikis.

2. FANDOM claiming that identities have to be "official" was especially troubling for many, especially minorities that did not fit into the larger labels like gay or lesbian.


But beyond the article itself, the biggest issues...

Firstly, it was done without consent of the Legacy Wiki and other smaller wikis. Yes, the FANDOM legally have the right to do whatever they want with the content they host. But ultimately it was immoral, rude, and inconsiderate to the thousands of individuals that helped contribute to the wikis. Secondly, it was not a merge at all. A merge implies two entities combining into a single form. The actual result was the complete deletion of the Legacy Wiki, and a new wiki domain taking its place. This is not a merge. The Legacy Wiki was deleted, and any links to said wiki now redirect to the FANDOM's own version.


The FANDOM Wiki had completely submerged the Legacy Wiki, with its own set of local admins and moderators, completely wiping away a massive amount of information that had helped thousands of queer members across the internet. The content that took its place was rough, inaccurate, or harmful. One of its more controversial rules was the exclusion of "Articles outside the scope of LGBTQIA+ Wiki (i.e. fictional gender identities)." Whilst in theory this appears to be terms from fictional sources, it actually encapsulated mostly any coined term on sites such as Tumblr or Twitter. A document was also written critiquing the FANDOM wiki's article on Intersex. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Nbv62d_AxOMaRwj_0ndHJSpQN24BsgjjkTnaGjZeCxI/edit

Sources:

https://twitter.com/IntersexGoose/status/1484537809482358786

https://ezgender-wiki.tumblr.com/

https://64.media.tumblr.com/52656de83340bed4f6839b0567c4c0b3/0955494c31958c7a-41/s500x750/fcbc4b0655e3aa0e725a60ab8f5cac7f29f3c508.png


The only wiki they did not 'merge' (delete) was the MOGAI (EZGender) wiki. Thinking it was a favor to allow at least one wiki on FANDOM to host obscure micro-labels, it would cause a massive influx of attention towards a very small wiki with very limited staff members. This created a surge of stress for the MOGAI wiki and its staff. Understandably... MOGAI swiftly announced they would be disbanding from FANDOM, and moving to Miraheze instead. It is believed that a request for the deletion of the MOGAI wiki on FANDOM was made by the wiki owner. However after this request, FANDOM staff only gave the wiki a single day before deletion, which goes against their 2 week window (citation needed). Thankfully a lot of terms were already archived once the merger announcement was made by FANDOM, so the 1 day window (whilst being informal) wasn't detrimental. MOGAI Wiki's official stance is to boycott FANDOM.

Sources:

https://ezgender-wiki.tumblr.com/

https://ezgender-wiki.tumblr.com/post/676801806082441216/the-ezgendermicrolabel-wiki-on-fandom-will-be

https://mogai.miraheze.org/wiki/MOGAI_Wiki


Going back to the Legacy Wiki though, the Legacy wiki staff only had less than a month to archive every single page and resource on the wiki. During the whole event, this caused a great deal of stress for the Legacy staff. There were threats of suicide and emotional distress prevalent for staff and members. https://www.lgbtqia.wiki/wiki/User:VoxelDraqon had suggested the use of Miraheze as a new platform, and helped greatly in the process of archiving. Other smaller organizations helped including an archival team, and the dating app Taimi. Taimi was offered as a potential alternative to Miraheze but it never came to action. Though many pages were successfully archived and imported to Miraheze, many were lost, including discussions that hosted a large portion of coining resources.

The Staff Change

2022

This was about the time I hopped into the equation. Witnessing the hellfire that was the FANDOM takeover fiasco, the Legacy Wiki officially moved to Miraheze. Whilst the wiki formats are relatively similar, the editors and structure was unfamiliar to many staff members. It was a harsh change, and staff were put under a lot of stress due to the drama that was taking place. I offered a hand in moderation, fixing little errors here and there.


I had quickly found out that nearly every staff member from the Legacy Wiki were actually minors. This surprised me greatly, how they had been managing something like this, and dealing with the FANDOM giant, I was impressed but also concerned. The stress on the staff was very apparent, most moderators were unable to be contacted due to school pressures, home life, and more. They simply didn't have the availability to manage the wiki's sudden move and influx of attention. One by one, moderators seemed to leave swiftly. Each stress induced moderator walked out, passing their position to someone else. The ownership of the wiki itself was tossed to two other members (one for just a mere day), before it suddenly landed with me.


Now it wasn't just a host change, but an almost completely new set of staff. This is when it more officially became the Miraheze Wiki. Since then, I have done my best to kickstart various housekeeping projects, but also retain various wiki standards such as resourcing requirements. Since then, any traces of the Legacy Wiki has been wiped from social media, including Tumblr and Twitter accounts.

Source:

https://www.tumblr.com/blog/view/official-lgbta-wiki

The NEW Wiki

2023

At one point, whilst going through the Miraheze' wiki as I usually do on any normal day, and as my experiences grew in regards to wiki editing - it struck me hard that our information was more wrong than I thought. Misinformation is rife throughout the wiki, which is absolutely grating for me considering external websites often source our wiki. I find fabricated quotes, biased resourcing, no resourcing at all, and a constant battle of edits between disagreeing parties, probably because no resources were provided. This is horrifying to me, as the entire point of a wiki is to be a source of information. And if we can't do that part right, then what are we.

So I decided to create a new host, one separate from Miraheze, and not meant to supersede it but to be a superior version in terms of wiki standards. This wiki is the MyWikis host. This host carries far stricter rules and formatting, and does not allow imports from Miraheze as it serves to be an entire rework.

Progress with it is slow at the moment mainly due to my own personal and work commitments, but I am hopeful it will be later recognised as not just a helpful resource but an accurate one!

Also at some point amongst this we started hosting a new Tumblr blog + a custom domain email address to provide another avenue for feedback and requests.

The Host Move

2023

In June, Miraheze as a host had announced their closure as they did not have enough volunteers to continue their operations. I didn't want to take any immediate action yet at that point as Miraheze was being offered various volunteers as a way of saving the platform. But as a base plan, I had decided that we would archive the wiki, and move to MyWikis as a sole platform. I didn't even create a backup in the meantime due to the influx of backups Miraheze had to do for the other wikis that were scared out of their mind.

A week later though Miraheze cancelled their closure as they'd found new volunteers. However, whilst many celebrated, I knew it was an extremely unstable position. I figured most of the volunteers, if not all, were probably not all that experienced with MediaWiki and only joined out of desperation to keep the platform alive (I don't fully know this, this is just my speculation). And whilst Miraheze still operates today, its staff dwindles yet again and getting any support when something goes wrong was an arduous task.

At two different points our Miraheze wiki had gone down. At one point it went down due to an expiry of its certificate, to which Miraheze explained in the ticket that "All certificates are automatically updated so this does not need to stay open". Which I found very confusing considering the certificate had already expired, meaning either the auto-renewal wasn't working, or for some reason it's set to renew AFTER it's expired. Both are terrible.

Having had about enough of Miraheze's platform, I decided to pursue WikiTide as an alternative option. They have stricter rules on what wikis they allow creation of, have better funding, and have more than 2 admins. All of which point to a healthier and more reliable host. They'd also done recent works to improve the performance of their host, and it showed! So I was happy to begin the import to WikiTide, change of domain, and now it is our current host, alongside the MyWikis new wiki.

Source:

https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Board/Policies/20230615-Statement

https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Miraheze_is_Not_Shutting_Down

The Host UnMove

Because the universe has a sense of humor, Miraheze and WikiTide decided to merge around the start of year 2024. The Wikitide host is now back under Miraheze but the infrastructute and staff have merged so I don't expect to see the same performance issues I was seeing last year!

Source:

https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/WikiTide_Foundation/Merger_FAQ

I hope this helps shed some light on the history of this wiki and its community. And a reminder to everyone, I want to hear any feedback you have - good or bad. I've noticed some blog posts on social media commenting about the wiki, indirect thoughts and complaints. I can hear you better if you talk to me. :)


Special thanks to the following individuals for helping me summarise these thoughts:

Regards,

Jeb_CC, Bureaucrat | (xe/xem/xir) (talk) 22:13, 12 October 2023 (UTC)

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