Board Thread:Wiki Discussion/@comment-1073312-20140816013529/@comment-1892820-20140816015147

I've told some people how depressingly ironic it is that the Gigaquadrantic Conflicts did more to divide the community than it did to divide the Fictionverse itself.

I wholeheartedly agree that we need to seriously solve the issue of factionism on the Wiki. Over the past years, I've silently noted the emergence of user blocs that I could easily sort users into based on stylistic preferences or out-of-universe relationships. I thought that it was just the natural tendency for people to want to organize things into groups, but now I'm seeing that the groups are very real and have become very damaging to the sense of community. These groups become increasingly isolated and limited to just their own little group, and as these groups become isolated in real life, it also causes fictions to grow more insulated from each other, which goes right back towards isolating user groups from each other. It's a self-fulfilling loop of isolation that I think has peaked in this latest incident.

This is a problem that has been pointed out by many users over the past few months, but I think very few of us actually heeded it and it shows. This is the problem with communication. Some people are afraid to be honest with some users, some people criticize too harshly and other times some people take a criticism more harshly than was intended. We seriously need to step up the amount of communication between users and break down a lot of the barriers in the community's social structure that are causing users to be adverse to each other (and believe me, there are plenty).

Unless we solve this right here, right now, we are going to keep getting more incidents that will keep getting worse than this. This incident already had me extremely worried that it could be a killing blow to the Wiki, and I can't imagine what a future incident even worse than this were to occur. We've had opportunities to solve the problem before but we never took them. We're now being presented with what could be the last opportunity to save the Wiki before it passes the point of no return.