User blog:Banarama/An abridged history of the Diep.io Wiki(a)

This wiki has gone through a unique history and level of development unusual for its size. Though most source material has been deleted or otherwise lost to time, itʼs worth writing down the crazy times weʼve had and the amazing things weʼve built over the past four years. What follows is a summary to the best of my ability of the Diep.io Wikiʼs history.

The halcyon dawn, & the failure of bureaucracy [Birth, Dawn, & Democratic Eras]

In May 2016, a random guy made the wiki. He left forever. Then Zathus and some other people came but weren’t able to ban any vandals and it was a complete mess, until finally one or two months later Zathus got admin, and then bureaucrat. Everything was great in those halcyon days, and we kinda just vibed and no one gave a shit about running the wiki. But then, in October, a new guy came along. Their name was Ursuul, and they talked their way into becoming Content Mod and Admin, bypassing every staff rank requirement. He set up a profile tag system with sophisticated JavaScript, but more importantly created a democratic council with one representative from every staff rank to govern the wiki. For some reason, this was decided to not be delegated to top administrators, the staff at large, or the community at large. (Possible reasons for the latter two include everyone being a 10-year-old dumb bitch.) In addition, meetings were held only once per month, requiring a live chat session, making any change through this process difficult to pass. After a month of trying to run the so-called Senior Council, laden with excess bureaucracy and procedure that no one except Ursuul really understood, and filled with generally incompetent 12-year-olds, he got tired of the farce government. With only one meeting occurred (where most members couldn't even attend and simply designated proxies to vote for them) Ursuul disbanded everything, fired most of the incompetent staff (including me because I was very cringe and also not allowed on Fandom), and quit.

The terror of anarchy, & the peace of autocracy [Dark & Reformation Eras]

Complete chaos followed. For some reason, Ursuul did more sneaky stuff despite ostensibly being gone, stuff like using his bot which still had bureaucrat powers and promoting his sister (Krov) to bureaucrat. Most people thought that was just an alt, and so they rioted. Other possible reasons for rioting included little entitled bitches (i.e. me) losing their prized staff roles, some guy called Smgamermat being on the wiki and doing sneaky shit for Ursuul, including a very obvious alt, and this Shadowman guy called SomeoneFedUp attacking everyone in charge, mainly Ursuul & Sm, appropriate to his name. Meanwhile, Zathus tried to be neutral so he couldn’t really do much about this drama. After a few weeks of this insanity ruining my fun vacation in Taiwan, Ursuul came back and restored order. He was welcomed largely with open arms, with everyone tired of this shit show. Somehow, he purged all of the staff again but did it gradually and no one really got upset. SFU didn’t get banned but he kind of just faded away. Gradually, the wiki rebuilt with new projects, although by this point a lot of the old staff members had gotten frustrated and quit, and there were few new updates to keep people interested. Still, the wiki soldiered on.

The dying days, & a new hope (not a star wars ref) [Unification Era]

As Ursuul put it, “the phoenix didn’t fly far.” Soon after this early hope under Ursuul’s restored autocratic rule, people started to go inactive and everyone got bored with the lack of updates. Desperate, the leaders in charge, now including me (somehow I became an admin again by being the only sane person during the drama era and giving some good speeches defending (usually) Ursuul and general reason, and formed a close relationship with Ursuul as his sort-of protégé), mainly Ursuul, concocted a seemingly crazy idea. The dying Diep.io Wiki would absorb its Fanon counterpart, a wiki with 3000 articles, and live on with the transfusion of new people and new things to spend time doing. And it worked! Through an arduous summer in 2017, the long project was completed. Thousands of pages had to be categorized and reviewed, with the majority being moved into user pages due to low quality. New templates and namespaces were created to accommodate the influx of Fanon pages, connecting them with the advanced infrastructure of DW. At last, around August, the project was complete. Most folks on the wiki finally returned to school, but the Great Merge was complete, and with it, a new era began.

Meanwhile, constant & ambitious developments [Reorganization Era]

Although the focus was on the big merge happening, there was no shortage of developments in this era including a new Discord server in September (that eventually replaced the once-torrential Chat, either in spite or thanks to an advanced bot bridge set up to post Chat messages in the Discord and vice-versa), a redesigned main page by Ursuul and me over the summer, and a header graphic contest (that I won). One of the most unprecedented changes around this time, really setting us apart from those other girls, was a complete change to the staff ranks. Most notably, the admin rights were split into separate roles for “community administrator” and “code administrator”. This radical reorganization was passed with almost no objection, though I protested the reservation of rights like editing the mobile main page for Bureaucrats. Despite a steady decline in views, 2017 was perhaps the most productive year in the wiki’s history.

(Sidenote: SFU returned in May and kept attacking Ursuul about a Shadow Editor tag he wanted to fit his goth aesthetic that was removed by the admins. He caused a mess that no one really wanted, so we banned him. Then he started going to the Fanon wiki (DCoW) and manipulating people to support and unban him, so we banned him there and extended his DW ban. And that was the end, though he found a new wiki and put all of his shit there.)

Wiser in old age, themes and improvements [Rejuvenation Era]

As more hope for the new era, a new fan-made sequel to Diep.io, Diiep (soon renamed Arras) got popular and the wiki started to cover it. Despite this, the wiki faced an inexorable decline in activity and views, and the growing irregularity of the “Weekly” Updates that were consistent just a year ago was a hallmark of this sunset era. Nevertheless, the people on the wiki, now wiser and better, did more than ever to improve the wiki by setting up new organization for Arras, creating templates, and biggest of all, designing a new theme for the wiki. That last one was my proudest project, because I basically did it by myself across early 2018, with “almost very little outside help (i.e. Ursuul)”. Another major focus of the new year was the bureaucrat election to replace the retiring Zathus (or actually it was Zathsu now after a confusing story and gender swap), where I beat Patrik partially because my changes to the wiki were very visible to the general people on the wiki, while his were more under-the-hood with bot edits, categories, and templates. Also, I’d known everyone on the wiki for years, so that must’ve helped too. Other changes included a new wordmark I designed (the big DW + trapper dominator icon) and reformed Discussions Guidelines, which both made the wiki look a bit nicer and not as spam-filled. Pretty much the only trace of the original design of the wiki is the background, designed by Adasba four whole years ago and never changed since, mainly because it was burned into everyone’s eyeballs and nothing else seemed to stick.

The summit is reached, we ride off into the sunset [Summit Era]

However, the big highlight of this year came right at the end. In mid and late December 2018, with Christmas fast approaching, the unthinkable happened. Fandom acquired its main rival, Gamepedia! Thanks to a half-joking suggestion by Ursuul, the wiki got a real Christmas miracle. The Official Diep.io Gamepedia, long the bane of our existence because of its exclusive recognition (despite our content outpacing theirs years ago to the point where they copied our articles wholesale, and the only active users left on the Gamepedia were, in fact, Ursuul and I), would be merged into our wiki as a show of goodwill, and as an experiment, by the two parties. WE ATE OUR RIVAL!!! (With this merge, we also dropped the ‘a’ from Wikia in our name to coincide with Fandom’s rebranding.) And with that, it felt like our whole two and a half years of work, countless hours spent writing CSS, creating articles, organizing projects, and more, had finally been recognized. Our efforts were not in vain! With the summit achieved, our work paid off, Ursuul decided to retire at last. It was the close of not just an era, but a whole eon for our wiki. Though I led the wiki for another year and a few months of 2020, with accomplishments like the creation and expansion of Arras:Tiers, I finally rid off into the sunset with Ursuul. The history of this wiki is like perhaps no other: it is a story of passion, of friendships and enemies, of noble and sinister actions, of successes and failures, and through it all, the incredible things that a diverse and ambitious group of people did against the odds.

tl;dr we’re an empire in wiki form and we’re fucking awesome if we do say so ourselves