Policy to Remove LRP Jokes from the Wiki

[Coalf]

Yesterday a complaint was brought up by a user named Kaed which raised a concern over the amount of articles on the wiki, which feature rule-breaking jokes or jokes that suggest rule-breaking behaviour and mindsets.

Many of these jokes feature rule breaking behaviour, general low-RP play and other unacceptable forms of conduct for a player, such as dropping rods onto the AI, stealing the captains ID and others.
The Job Guides page was brought up as the main example which can be viewed here: https://wiki.aurorastation.org/index.php?title=Job_Guides

The main concern by the player was as thus:
 

Quote

I suppose I can understand that, but from my viewpoint as someone who joined well after all these jokes and memes were old news, and plays on this server because it's one of the few servers where I can reasonably expect people to act like they are roleplaying instead of being SPESSMENS, I place a higher value on my immersion than what is, to me, a frustrating fixation on old jokes and memes that aren't relevant to me

While I argued that being a Wiki Developer is a boring experience, and these jokes are the few times staff gets to relax and unwind in their own work and further, that it has never been raised as an issue or contributed to any rule-breaking behaviour as far as I know.

Ultimately, while the decision to keep them is up to me I am frankly impartial and don't really care which way it goes.
However, one must remember that it would set the precedent for any future wiki writers and would impact the style of the wiki, perhaps forever.

Thus I proposed to make this thread in the players stead to gauge more public opinion and see how interested, uninterested the community is on this issue.

[Chada1]

So long as it's made clear they're jokes and that this behavior won't be tolerated by Staff I don't see any problem with it. The actual pages they link to almost all encourage you in the opposite direction. Maybe a decent middle ground would be to change the strike throughs to be more exclusive to the jokes and in general make the synopsis more information and true outside of those?

[Carver]

Someone has to be awful thick in the head to not realize the entirety of those role descriptions are joking.

[geeves]

I am all for jokes remaining in the wiki. It has charm, and makes the otherwise soul-less job of being a Wiki Maintainer slightly brighter.

[Pratepresidenten]

2 hours ago, Carver said:

Someone has to be awful thick in the head to not realize the entirety of those role descriptions are joking.

You are bold to assume common sense is common at all!

[Coalf]

42 minutes ago, Pratepresidenten said:

You are bold to assume common sense is common at all!

 

3 hours ago, Carver said:

Someone has to be awful thick in the head to not realize the entirety of those role descriptions are joking.

To clarify, the complaint has not been that people might THINK it's correct information or something they can do. But that it does not match the tone of the wiki and the server as a whole as it has a sort of LRP/MRP feel to it and thus does not fit our server.
 

[UnknownMurder]

3 hours ago, Coalf said:

To clarify, the complaint has not been that people might THINK it's correct information or something they can do. But that it does not match the tone of the wiki and the server as a whole as it has a sort of LRP/MRP feel to it and thus does not fit our server.

I agree with Geeves. I saw these LRP jokes as a way to appeal to people to clicking on a link to read more about the topic or to give the reader a chuckle and say something like "Like, who would ever do that.". These LRP jokes could also help you be conscious about what you're doing. I don't know if someone has actually listened to the LRP jokes and took it seriously in-game. It is my opinion that LRP jokes are not a big issue. 

[Scheveningen]

The actual pages have more salient advice than what a single text box can go over. The point is to click on them to learn more about them, like any page on Wikipedia or any entry in an encyclopedia.

I say this isn't a problem.

Edited June 11, 2020 by Scheveningen

[Coalf]

7 hours ago, Scheveningen said:

The actual pages have more salient advice than what a single text box can go over. The point is to click on them to learn more about them, like any page on Wikipedia or any entry in an encyclopedia.

I say this isn't a problem.

The Job Guide was brought up as the main example as it's the most saturated with those jokes, but the jokes themselves are present in full articles as well.

[Kaed]

Now that I can finally post again, I would like to elaborate on my viewpoint here. It was never my intention to imply that the Job Guide page was somehow confusing or that it would encourage people to break rules, but rather that the style of it is simply not appropriate to our current standards of the wiki.

Shockingly, I took some time to research for once before posting here, and here are some bits of information I found.

The wiki as we know it now was started in 2016, around the time Aurora was rebased to the version we currently have it in now.  It was primarily written by two people, 'Frances' and 'Burrito Justice' over the course of two years (most of which was simple inactivity followed by surges of content). I know neither of these people, and likely the only person in this thread who might remember them is @Chada1, who seems to have been active in the wiki that far back too. The wiki page in question actually predates our current map by a significant margin.

Being that I know neither of these people, I can only speculate as to their motives for writing this page this way.  But I will note that the style of the Job Guide page matches exactly the tone, if not the exact wording of other Job Guide pages on several other servers, such as:

Goon

Spoiler

and /tg/station

Spoiler

 

 

Perhaps at the time they wrote this, it was in vogue to make Job Guide pages like this. But we are neither of these places, and we should not be emulating their style wholesale simply because of a sense of nostalgia or passive apathy towards change.  Certainly, some humor is okay even for wiki maintainer, but no one active on the wiki today made any of these jokes.  Frankly, neither Frances nor Burrito Justice did either, they just sort of aped what other wikis were doing - the detective entry for both /tg/station and us even both use the same opening line about chain smoking, for chrissake. Nowhere else on the wiki looks like this. We should make this page more us instead of just getting by with the same as everyone else.

Even if we ignore the stylistic dissonance, this page is painfully out of date in a number of small ways, because unless there is a big gameplay change that affects the existence of a job and someone jabs a person to change it, no one looks at it. Some examples of this:

-The Chief Engineer references the 'pet' we had before Ginny

-The CMO references virology, which was removed (by me)

-The Biochemist still exists

-The wizard can no longer 'warp around' as someone took away their transport abilities last I checked

-We don't have revolutionaries or loyalists anymore.

So please, fix this page, and while you're at it, please rewrite the dang thing to be less a pale shaky clone of every other server's Job Guide - we got rid of clones, remember? I'm happy to help do it myself, but I asked Chada1 for permission first, which started this thread.

Edited June 11, 2020 by Kaed

[Carver]

Having gone through this and this page, I don't really see any influence of jokiness within full job articles (of importance). I haven't scoured every single one, but everything so far has seemed within reason past a couple of outdated mechanical references such as loyalty implants.

The tone seems perfectly fine, as noted the only issue would seem to be that the wiki understandably doesn't keep up with every PR ever made. There's nothing wrong with sharing in the good humour of other servers, especially if it'll make newer players feel more welcome.

[Kaed]

7 minutes ago, Carver said:

Having gone through this and this page, I don't really see any influence of jokiness within full job articles (of importance). I haven't scoured every single one, but everything so far has seemed within reason past a couple of outdated mechanical references such as loyalty implants.

The tone seems perfectly fine, as noted the only issue would seem to be that the wiki understandably doesn't keep up with every PR ever made. There's nothing wrong with sharing in the good humour of other servers, especially if it'll make newer players feel more welcome.

But we don't practice the culture we are aping, it's misleading.

New players won't even understand the source most of these jokes.  These are specifically tailored towards amusing the 'old guard' players.  It is 100% possible to make new players feel welcome using our own work instead of copying others.

Edited June 11, 2020 by Kaed

[Carver]

There's nothing wrong with new players getting to learn a bit of the old funnies. A culture of humour is universal, and as noted, none of the educational/important articles such as the ones I linked contained anything out of place or encouraging poor behaviour. They just need a touch-up to no longer reference a few old mechanics.

One absolutely shouldn't raise new players in a culture of humourless no-fun - even at it's most 'heavy', the RP in this game has never been excruciatingly serious throughout itself.

[Kaed]

6 minutes ago, Carver said:

There's nothing wrong with new players getting to learn a bit of the old funnies. A culture of humour is universal, and as noted, none of the educational/important articles such as the ones I linked contained anything out of place or encouraging poor behaviour. They just need a touch-up to no longer reference a few old mechanics.

One absolutely shouldn't raise new players in a culture of humourless no-fun - even at it's most 'heavy', the RP in this game has never been excruciatingly serious throughout itself.

We can still raise the standard higher than regurgitated meme humor and countless crossed out text.

It is difficult to express how frustrating it is to want to improve something but be met with a stubborn wall of nostalgic apathy.  Why do things have to stay 'fine as they are'.  We could easily try changing something, then revert it if we don't like the new concept.  Never trying to do something fresh or new because what you have right now is 'sufficient' is an awful mindset to fall into.

That's all I'm asking, here. Try something new that uses our own work, instead of copying the other servers. 

Edited June 11, 2020 by Kaed

[Carver]

I agreed on a need to improve the articles having outdated mentions of mechanics. For the humour, I don't see a reason to remove it unless it's replaced with more relevant Aurora humour like everyone making IRs because the Janitor looked at them funny or the Bartender didn't refill their drink. Most of Aurora's cultural humour is variations of 'man people bitch a lot in OOC channels', 'Miners keep falling into pits and dying 5 minutes into the round', 'Cargo Techs are either violent Taj terrorists or alcoholic human jailbait'.

To regurgitate another meme of the server; 'Replace, don't remove'.

[Kaed]

6 minutes ago, Carver said:

I agreed on a need to improve the articles having outdated mentions of mechanics. For the humour, I don't see a reason to remove it unless it's replaced with more relevant Aurora humour like everyone making IRs because the Janitor looked at them funny or the Bartender didn't refill their drink. Most of Aurora's cultural humour is variations of 'man people bitch a lot in OOC channels', 'Miners keep falling into pits and dying 5 minutes into the round', 'Cargo Techs are either violent Taj terrorists or alcoholic human jailbait'.

To regurgitate another meme of the server; 'Replace, don't remove'.

I'm perfectly happy with the stale jokes being replaced with topical ones.  As I said, we have our own culture and wiki maintainers like to make jokes.  But we should use our own stuff, and less of crossout humor and ancient SS13 memes.  

Edited June 11, 2020 by Kaed

[Carver]

So long as there's some form of humour, and it's actually funny and not some shitty in-joke of 3 medical mains (i.e., it has to be a joke that a player from another server can readily understand) then I don't see an issue in updating the jokes.

[Kaed]

Maybe compiling a general list of non in-joke humor would be useful.  Some stuff I can think of off the top of my head

Doctors: Marvel at how your bedside manner mostly consists of running up to wounded people and wordlessly injecting them before running off to the next person. Try to understand the values on the new health monitor system.

Detectives: If you are playing this role, you are probably a robot. (is it just me or is almost every detective an IPC?)

Janitor: Realize you have more access than some command roles.

[Chada1]

BurritoJustice was a v. good wiki maintainer and mostly played on other HRP servers @Kaed So I can vouch that they had good intentions in mind, I think they (and Synnono who also had a part) were just trying to have some fun with that section of the wiki.