Blog:TigerBlazer's Critique of the Current State of Qualitipedia

Back in June 2021 Qualitipedia was in a pretty bad spot, with many people going up and leaving entirely due to drama. At this point me and a few other users couldn't take it anymore and the first wiki improvement blog was created. Some others popped up and such changes were usually acted on and led to big changes, and led to some users coming back. It all came crashing down with the Duchess drama back in August, but we are steadily coming back up bit by bit to where it was before then. About 7+ months have passed since June and a lot of aspects of QP have changed.

This blog is essentially one in three parts. The first section is to list what has changed for the better overall, the second is to address criticisms and/or rants people have made about Qualitipedia in the past and for myself to address them personally, and the third is to provide my own criticisms on QP today and how they could be improved. This is purely to express how I feel about the subject and I encourage others to give their own suggestions on how to improve QP, and maybe point out something I might have missed. With that out of the way, on with the blog.

Also apologies if this blog seems a bit disorganized, I was mostly dumping my overall thoughts here.

What has improved

 * Probably the one thing that I cannot express enough is joining the wikis and gaining bureaucrat position. He has been in my opinion the most helpful user here for the past few months and has helped make things for the better in general with his suggestions and improvements and I hope this remains for a long time.
 * Removing people and users entirely from the negative wikis has probably been one of the biggest changes to network. With these gone chances of unsourced pages are much smaller and making hate pages and similar things is much more difficult. It also helped drama decrease a significant bit. This also led to the deletion of the celebdumb and celebsmart pages, which in my opinion were probably the worst pages on the wikis as a whole, and their removal was most definitely a good thing.
 * Removal of the music and character wikis from the network. Both were equally problematic, one was heavily plagiarized and the other was heavily drama-filled and really didn't fit with the network. One was closed entirely while the other is on its way (More on that later) to true independence.
 * The Rotten Websites Wiki has been given a massive overhaul, being completely political based, full of unsourced pages, and basically being very off-topic, and has now had most of that largely removed, though the political stuff is going to be much harder to clear up and is a fundamental problem mostly, but the wiki has certainly improved massively for the better, even if me and a few others question whether it should stay at all anymore.
 * The admin lists have been cleaned up and now only the most active of them have rights. There is now a leader system where the leaders are the only ones with bureaucrat rights, and the network leaders themselves I can't think of to many negative things to say about them.
 * Quality control has been a lot better, and biased and reception-inaccurate pages are becoming less common.

Addressing the DA Rants & Other Criticisms on QP
For example, I honestly want to thank the people who made Qualitipedia rants that were genuinely helpful, oobidash's critique in particular is likely the most well written of the bunch. The better critiques such as the aforementioned one won't be mentioned, as this will focus on the more common and frankly more problematic ones that should be put in more detail.
 * They treat opinions as facts: Frankly this is probably the most common one and likely the most misunderstood as well. That was never the point of Qualitipedia even back in the FANDOM era, never is now, and never will be. The point is to describe why critics and audiences liked or didn't like a piece of media, it is not about enforcing opinions in any way. In fact most of us here (excluding any toxic users I might come across) respect user opinions. Heck, these are wikis after all, so community additions to the pointers are what keep the pages up to date with what people think. This has been the common complaint that frankly bothers me the most due to a lack of research being done on what the point actually is. Think of it as a much extended version of Wikipedia's "Reception" section on their pages about media. That's essentially what we are going for, and anyone on QP who does go out treating opinions as facts and enforcing opinions will be blocked.
 * Neutral wikis should be made instead of having only two for each kind of media: This is a pointer I will discuss late in my personal critique below, but the main issue with this is that such a thing would be impractical and overly complicated to do. It would give me and the other admins 6 more wikis to manage, which makes spotting vandalism harder and giving us more than what can really be handled. In addition to that what would most likely happen is that such a thing would be requested a lot but will end up ignored by the community anyway. A good example is the recent blog to close the music and book wikis, which ended in most opposing but still with little usage of them in general. Finally this was done before with Okay Movies Wiki and Neutral Games Wiki and both met with immense backlash and a failed experiment respectively. However, I have a solution for such a thing below if you are inclined to read farther beyond this point.
 * They treat more innocent media as the worst thing ever and praise others like they are the second coming of Christ: I will admit, this is a problem, but it is not an issue related to Qualitipedia itself. Rather, it is a problem with the users, and I will address this issue later.

My personal critique of Qualitipedia
Given the two above, I will now address the main point of this blog, to share my thoughts about Qualitipedia at this very moment and how we can try to improve it.
 * 1) Even after some progress has been made, not enough has really been done on the biggest fundamental flaw of QP: their SJW bias. Many want QP to remain completely neutral on these things and avoid them altogether to avoid controversy, yet there are still a lot of pages that follow by these kinds of bias and frankly make the wikis sound like an echo chamber. While deleting and reworking pages related to politics and SJ related issues is the easy part, it's frankly something that has been burned into the userbase as a whole, so even if these were removed, someone is bound to do it again. I find this to be a larger issue on CGW and RWW, as those have it really fundamentally deep in their structure.
 * 2) Even though neutral wikis have been decided against for a good majority of the community, Qualitipedia still has a problem with determining what has exactly been considered good or bad by critics and audiences, and often the more controversial ones get immediately shipped the the negative wiki and slapped with the "Average" template as compensation, which can look and seem lazy especially if you consider you don't look into it enough.
 * 3) Even after being quote "disbanded" from Qualitipedia, the reality of the situation is that really barely anything has been done other than removing them from the "Partnered Wikis" list. The staff remains mostly the same, and pages to those wikis still link to the QP wikis. Frankly this is a big issue since new admins to lead those wikis were announced a long time ago but they still haven't been given those rights as far as I know.
 * 4) I have been very vocal about this before, but the TV show wikis absolutely need to have a sort of organized initiative over the next few months to get them into a tolerable state. My issues of the network stem mostly from the immaturity of the userbase such as the incessant page moving, constant edit wars, lots of low quality articles, and more inaccurate and non-reception based pages than there are stars in the sky (There also seems to be a bit less moderation there compared to the other wikis but that's probably just me :P). The gist of it is that these are probably the worst of the wikis in the network right now, and something really has to be done with them like what happened with the RWW, except this will be a bit more time consuming. 's new rule of asking an admin before moving a page was a great start but the rest so far seems like a shot in the dark.
 * 5) Quite honestly if anything else I'm more concerned about the userbase of Qualitipedia than anything else, and I feel a lot of people don't like the wikis mainly because of the people there. I have been to the comments sections a lot and back during the summer and fall months of my time here, I have seen a good amount toxicity in the comments sections, especially when it came to a controversial movie being on a wiki, such as the case with The Rise of Skywalker on Awful Movies Wiki. Edit wars, especially on the TV show wikis, are prone to happen a lot. Sometimes a page gets removed and a whole bunch of people yell and complain about it, and then it gets restored and the yelling and complaining continues. I have to agree with Raidarr when I say some of the userbase will have to grow up to make these wikis seem less problematic, even if the "grow up" statement is literal for some. I am unsure of what kind of solution is needed to help fix this other than the comments section solution I will explain later. Really it's something that time will have to wait out for the most part if it's mild enough, and if it's any worse, putting them on timeout.

Possible Solutions for Each Pointer

 * 1) Really this one we'll just have to wait out once these pages are gone, and it could possibly remain a consistent problem with the userbase that we'll just have to put up with. The message of not allowing such pages has been made clear enough by now, so the same thing with pointers is the next best step. Unless an aspect directly contributed to a product's positive or negative reception, these pointers won't be allowed.
 * 2) This solution may seem a bit overly complicated but at this point I think it's worth a shot since we're pretty much out of options on this issue. Similar to what was done with Fortnite on Awesome & Crappy Games Wiki, divisive movies could have their good qualities as a page on the positive wiki and their bad qualities as another separate page on the negative wiki. This can definitely help with the movie wikis in particular, as controversial films such as The Force Awakens and the recent The Matrix: Resurrections can now be placed a bit better, as those wikis have a bit of history with these kinds of things.
 * 3) This solution is more simple, just finish it up now and not later, but who knows if the people who were announced are even still active anymore (I am aware Kingjorbs was locked a while back, dunno about the others). For all I know we may need to have a sort of election for this.
 * 4) This will be a bit lengthier than the other solutions because there really are a bunch of different angles to approach the issue. For now I'll list two possible options for improvement, and I might expand on these greatly in a future blog.
 * 5) * The first option is what I would consider to be a last resort and should only be done if there seems to be no other option, but I'll list it first since it's the simplest to explain. This option is essentially a hard reset of these wikis, removing all of the content and rebuilding it from the ground up. This would be the most time consuming option as it would take months to rebuild, but by the time it's finished we would likely end up with a much cleaner and less drama-filled place.
 * 6) * My second option is a bit different from the previous one, but this one will take a lot more work. Essentially it will be divided into three parts. The first part is to have an admin look over of every pages on these wikis and delete ones that seem to be not accurate to their reception and remove them. This isn't much of a problem on the other wikis and is mostly for the TV show wikis so starting with deleting pages from there is a good start in my opinion, and this can lead to similar initiatives shortly after on the other wikis. Another thing that could work is disabling comments sections for a bit, as a lot of the toxicity I see on those wikis come from opinion disrespecting and drama there, more so than the other wikis once again. When the time comes we can bring it back and monitor the comment logs heavily before the time comes where we feel like that isn't needed much anymore. I kinda skipped a lot here, but the point I'm trying to make is that we can get them back on track, but we will pretty much need to whole admin team on those wikis to do so and need to cooperate with each other as a sort of "battle plan" rather than everyone doing their own thing like with the RWW improvement. The #staff-meeting-room section on the Discord would be the best place for this if we have most of the team on the QP Discord, and if we are missing a few, just PM them directly on Miraheze.

Conclusion
If you got through this blog completely, I commend you. This has been something I wanted to get off my chest for a while now and I hope this leads to some major changes that are frankly needed right now to make Quaitipedia the best it can be. I truly want these wikis to be enjoyed by a lot more people and I want the drama to end for the most part. Is this something that can be feasible? I don't know, maybe not, but maybe there's a chance. I expect to make another one of these in a few months to address any new changes and criticisms when that times comes. For now, I wish you all the best, and comment below for any suggestions or criticisms of your own :)