I doubt most people who visit the wiki or the "community" has bothered to register to even be able to make edits/contributions.
I always see this as the base of defense against 'being the change that you want to be' in the XI Wiki community (tm) and it never makes sense. Am I to believe that the 15 second process of signing up for a BG account is a step too far? Let's call it like it is: people aren't editing these things because they either
A) Lack the knowledge to do so
B) Lack the 'time' to do so
C) Don't actually care as much as they're posturing about caring
I often wonder what the average player thinks getting all of the data and information that makes things like gear simulators and job guides possible entails, or entailed.
As a preface: I've been doing this community contribution thing for more than a decade, I've never received acclaim for it and I don't care to. When people recognize me in other games or communities it makes me uncomfortable. I am not in this for clout. But I'm still going to educate you on something: this ***is not as simple as most people seem to think.
Do you think we just logged in one day with the ability for someone to go code an all jobs gear simulator? *** no. That thing was built on the backs of people like Montenten, Kirschy, Yugl, Byrthnoth, Mojo. I myself sunk hundreds of hours hitting rabbits and colibris to help build the foundation for the knowledge that people use to this day. Not a single person on this planet is entitled to any of that information or knowledge, and I can tell you with confidence that there are things that were never shared with the public and either had to be rediscovered or redefined later as a direct result. The wiki is written and edited using information either by or from people like these. We didn't sit there making a bunch of reasons why we 'couldn't do it', especially one as simple as 'i don't feel like putting my email in on this website'.
I don't think that anyone out there needs to prove themselves by going and testing for the intricate minutia that makes XI tick just to have an opinion on wiki edits, but if you're going to condemn people and their work without having done an ounce of it yourself, or even understanding the level of effort it can take to do so, it means very little to me and comes off as nothing but whining. The principle of "a wiki is a knowledge base maintained by the community" is great on paper until you realize that the community isn't maintaining ***, it is and always has been a (mostly) silent few doing all the actual labor while you reap the benefits, and some people then have the gall to complain that it isn't good enough.
Anyway this is only tangentially related to Spicy deleting his guides, *** move whatever. The discourse surrounding wiki politics as a whole and attribution of credit/owndership/whatever is a gray area but I firmly believe that the people who have no actual stake in it besides using what other people are giving you need to be educated on what it actually takes (even for people who are just constructing the wiki pages and aren't necessarily getting all the data themselves) to make these things available for you before lauding the few actual contributors for the sin of wanting their name attached to their hundred hour dissertation on why fSTR works the way it does, and how ridiculous the notion of 'people just don't bother making an account so they can't be bothered to make edits either' actually sounds.
This is my last post on the matter, i've said what I needed to say.
