User blog:Glflegolas/Roleplaying and this wiki

Good day folks,

As you probably know, I closed the wiki's RP forum two days ago. This may have come as a surprise to you, but it was in fact something that Mevans and I had been thinking about for a long time now. The issue of excessive roleplaying on the wiki first came up in this blog post, written back in May. This was essentially a wake-up call for all roleplayers that they should be more focused on the wiki and less focused on their RP's.

Following that blog post, and reading many comments stating that "I want to work on the wiki, but I don't know how" I took steps to help people work on the wiki. These included writing the articles on wiki coding and making templates. However, even after doing this, there was little, if any, decrease in the roleplaying.

Exactly two months after Mevans' first RP-related blog post, a second one came up. It essentially stated that roleplaying did not belong on this wiki at all, and that they should be moved somewhere else. At first, I was a bit skeptical of Mevans' RP complaints, but when I actually looked at most of the roleplays, they seemed to be quite similar. In fact, I would go out and say that most of the RP's were the same except for minor differences on the surface. And, there were so many RP's that they filled up most of the forum activity. So I figured that it was time for the roleplays to go, and created the official RP forum, although roleplayers were also welcome to use the unoffical Middle-Earth RP wiki.

What you may or may not know, however, is that I was the creator of the wiki's RP forum way back in July, 2014. The main reason why I did this is because there was a small roleplay going on in the Fun and Games forum, and I felt that it really didn't belong there. So, I decided to create a separate forum for roleplaying. For the longest time (through all of the fall of 2014), there were only two roleplays on the entire wiki -- a Star Wars roleplay, and a Middle-Earth roleplay, and they didn't clutter up the forum activity. Sure, you might have seen one RP in the window from time to time, but it wasn't the way it was this July, when 4/5 of the forum activity is roleplays.

I am not writing this to be negative towards any roleplayers, as I know at least some of them are decent wiki editors. I'm essentially saying that everything should be taken in moderation. 2-3 RP's on this wiki is fine -- there's nothing wrong with that at all. It was the volume that was problematic, not the actual roleplaying itself.

Glflegolas (admin) Send a Messenger  09:25, July 29, 2015 (UTC)