User:Toomai/SmashWiki career

I would wager that 98% of the current userbase has very little idea of my history around here aside from "he's the buearucrat". So let's do this.

Probably incomplete in some way.

Pre-history: Before SmashWiki
Super Smash Bros. (64) was the last N64 game the Glittershine family obtained, for I believe Christmas 2002. It was bought because Mario was on the cover, basically; the only other games we had were of the Mario series (plus Banjo-Kazooie/Tooie and DKR). As a result we had literally no clue who 75% of the roster was, aside from Pikachu being a Pokémon. Being three kids, we spammed special moves and died off the bottom more than the sides or top.

Memory is nebulous as to how exactly we found out Melee existed. We rented a GameCube for it once (who here actually remembers renting games and consoles?), and after getting one in I believe 2003, once again after that. Eventually it was bought. (Maybe I'll root through the notices to get the exact first power-on date.) We had the Zelda collector's edition disc by then so we somewhat understood Link and such, and the Pokémon all seemed familiar to an extent, though the rest of the characters remained purely mysteries. It didn't matter of course; it remained the most-played game by a fairly wide margin.

It begins
SmashWiki's main page was created at 16:11, 15 July 2006 (all times in this page in EDT). My SmashBoards account was created on August 17, 2006, which at the time meant I also gained the SmashWiki account at the same time (the two were interlinked). This wasn't known at the time though; there was memorable annoyance at not knowing how the username was already taken. But after that, the first edit was made at 21:58, 28 December 2006. Presumably, I had read the wiki before editing it, but without any way to prove it we can only say that the wiki lasted 166 days before I touched it.

I didn't make many edits to begin with. It took 22 months (Dec 2006 - Oct 2008) to collect 100 edits, with only 17 edits through all of 2007. Once Brawl was released, things picked up a fair bit. I wasn't afraid of editing templates but mostly stayed away from talk pages.

Rolling
For reasons I can't recall (and have no idea what could have been), I thought it would be a good idea to apply for adminship before getting rollback. That lasted for about five hours before I wised up. Everyone makes mistakes.

It didn't take long after that to apply for rollback; it was clearly the more appropriate position at the time. It went through pretty quickly.

Reading those two RfXs gives you a general idea of my wiki status at the time: good at actual content and technical stuff, not so much at dealing with users. By now I'd been starting big stuff like SSE enemy health and moveset tables (trying to measure angles manually and guess at whether attacks were Leg or Spin).

Staffed
It took less than a year for things to turn around in the adminship department. My second RfA went through smoothly, and pretty much every regular user saw me as a data expert and perpetually-online cleanup guy.

My admin style quickly resolved as "good cop". Whereas many of the cowboy admins of the time blocked first and asked questions maybe later if at all, I gave the most leeway and opportunities for users to turn themselves around. I did provide humour in block reasons for obvious vandals though; my first block was labelled "You hold a dubious honour, thing."

Of course, I wasn't admin for long before SmashWiki vacated Wikia...

The Guy
The move to independent hosting happened sometime on or around 28 September 2010. All admins were grandfathered in, if for no other reason than to have admins around for the initial mayhem. At the time, the sole bureaucrat was Shadowcrest, aka Emmett.

Slightly less than a month later, Emmett resigned and made me the lone bureaucrat. No RfB, no community consensus, just instant promotion from the only guy to the new only guy. The king is dead; long live the king.

Emmett talked with me beforehand (probably on IRC sicne I can't find evidence anywhere) ensuring that I felt like I was capable of the job, but I don't remember what exactly my attitude was like at the time. Probably something like "yeah I could do it, but there's probably a better choice". I suspect his response was "there's no better choice". I guess in the end he was right - I'd say I've done a pretty good job, given that there's never really been mass riots on one of my b-crat decisions.

eXceL
I may have had almost infinite free time as a university student, but uploading 700 images wasn't in my list of fun things to do. There had to be a better way to get Brawl sticker images on the wiki than clicking "upload" seven hundred times. I needed a bot.

I knew from the start that writing a bot myself would be a waste of time - there had got to be something already in existence. Indeed there was, a Python bot used for editing Wikipedia and configurable for any other MediaWiki. By creating a new bulk upload script for it, eXemplary Logic was born, and the images went up. XL continued to be used for bot tasks like replacing text and moving categories.

XL soon because a feature of the wiki's chatrooms - a custom bot sitting on top of existing APIs that filled the air with silly comments and even a few useful features. Arguably it's as much a user as anyone else, just with a bit less decision-making on-wiki than the average user.