Don't get involved with Wookieepedia
We all know Wookieepedia — it’s the Star Wars wiki, and an invaluable resource for fic writers everywhere. I’m not telling you not to look at Wookieepedia, but I do need to warn you not to get involved with the community. If you do want to edit it, then never join the discord or get involved with the forums (Senate Hall). It’s a cesspit of bigotry, and you cannot change it.
I tried. Along with a very well-known and vocal user named Immi Thrax, we tried to push back against misogyny and queerphobia. We thought we succeeded. You might have seen supposed “progress” on Wook: the addition of pronouns in the infobox, the addition of an anti-discrimination policy and an apology from the male wook admins for historical abuse towards marginalised editors. We did this. We, along with a small group of queer women and nonbinary editors, badgered the admins to write that apology for months, spoon-feeding them the things they needed to address and telling them that the early piss-weak drafts were unacceptable. We demanded infobox pronouns. We demanded an anti-discrimination policy and worked with them to add a glossary.
And then they ran us off the website.
We had a side server specifically for women and nonbinary people, with a few channels that also contained men we trusted. A woman (who was voted in as an admin after Immi) took screenshots from this private server and then posted them publicly. The screenshots were taken completely out of context and misrepresented their contents. The woman who took the screenshots deleted messages in them to make us look worse. They slandered us and put us in danger, because Immi has been targeted by dangerous corners of the internet before (which they were well aware of), and we were terrified we would be doxxed. All of the men approved of this, forced Immi to resign, and spread blatant lies about us. Wook users attacked us, and it was deemed perfectly acceptable to do so.
When I wrote the initial forum post about sexism and misogyny on the website, Master Fredcerique, one of the admins, told me that he was in fear of losing his job during 2021 because of discord screenshot leaks, and that "Safety for everyone was of utmost importance" to him, hence requesting I not provide usernames for my examples of bigotry. It is clear that Immi, myself and others in those screenshots do not count in this 'everyone'. I wonder why he wanted to protect the perpetrators of misogyny but was happy to endanger women!
As a result of this horrific breach of trust and privacy, every single queer woman and almost every nonbinary wook editor has left the site. We were too radical, and they had to destroy us. Sure, a woman did this, but I don’t think it’s an accident that a cishet woman who self-describes as a Republican in Florida forced the two loud leftist lesbians off the site. And the men approved of everything she’s done and contributed to it. One (1) man (notably not an admin) stood up for us, and he was banned for doing it.
So don’t join wook. If you do edit, don't trust anyone. Have every single conversation about wook in public, where people can never take your words out of context. Do not participate in DMs, group chats or any wook-related servers, including the official one. Marginalised editors' very existence is a disruption to the status quo of Wookieepedia, and there is every possibility you will be seen as a threat, even if you are not initially treated as one.
i've now been permabanned for "offsite doxxing and harassment campaigns against the community" which is a fascinating description of using a quote from Master Fredcerique that I already asked if I could post publicly (he said yes) and also a warning to [checks notes] not edit the website, which is definitely a harassment campaign against the community. because not editing = harassment, obviously.
I have been informed by staff that my ban was for the information I shared about the woman mentioned in the above post. The info that the woman is a Republican in Florida is info that was shared in the side server, the same place she took the screenshots from. When she posted the out of context screenshots and slandered us, she did it allegedly to bring to light information about Immi that made her unfit to be an admin and a danger to the community (but mysteriously, there were screenshots that only contained me!). It is significant for the safety of marginalised people that she identifies as a Republican, a political party whose mainstream members enact policies that directly endanger the lives of minorities. It is also significant that she does so in the context of florida, a place with a governor who holds particularly heinous views. She defended her sharing of screenshots from the server by saying that the rules of the side server state that information from the server may be shared with mods' permission; as a moderator, I gave myself permission and sought permission from one other moderator, just as she did. She got rewarded for what she did. I got permabanned.
"Cishet Republican woman in Florida" is an incredibly broad category and is not doxxing! I genuinely thought the doxxing claim was about quoting Fred because wookieepedia sees talking about wook business anywhere outside of wook as Terrible And Wrong even though wook is a public website, and because wook uses "doxx" in a way that is totally divorced from the accepted meaning of the term.
Anyway, my advice stands: don't get involved on Wookieepedia. Don't engage with Wookieepedians, don't engage with the Wook social media accounts. If you do want to edit, don't disclose literally anything about yourself. Don't rock the boat. Keep your head down. Also, love yourself and find a different thing to do on the internet.
I previously un-reblogged this post series because, as my tags presciently noted:
I was also permanently banned because I reblogged this warning. My appeal to have the block removed or reduced in duration failed.
This wasn't done carelessly or maliciously. I put a lot of thought into exactly what the risks were of boosting the signal, the nature of the information it shared, and whether that risk was worth the likely cost. I decided it was. I reblogged this because I experienced the very personal consequences of Wookieepedia's community, including its administration, deciding their rules about privacy and conduct no longer applied to private conversations used to frame me and someone close to me as something we aren't.
I thought about who could potentially be harmed by not being able to evaluate that specific information about one of the people who poisoned others' perceptions of us by violating our trust and lying about us. I thought about being served up as a scapegoat in the name of "accountability", how it was applauded and deemed an act worthy of "Wookieepedian of the Month", how people were so willing to believe I was secretly expressing violent intentions and secretly keeping others from speaking or gaining power and secretly controlling the community. I thought about how completely wrong I was about what Wookieepedia really is and has always been.
I previously advised multiple Wookieepedians on protecting themselves against doxxing when they were terrified of it back in 2021. I berated a journalist into changing an article to remove Wookieepedia Discord screenshots that were being used to harass people, regardless of how Wookieepedia's rules technically allowed sharing those--unlike the sharing of screenshots from private conversations that were used to harass us. While that specific information is personal to the person it regards and the information was learned in a private context, it is not personally identifiable information that can identify a specific individual's real-life identity. I wouldn't do that and these people I thought I knew should know that I wouldn't. It turns out we really, really didn't know each other after all.
I'm the one who stood up as a shield and became the face of LGBTQIA+ pride on Wookieepedia while enduring ongoing homophobia and transphobia in multiple venues, including through Wookieepedia itself. I'm the one who supported other people as they pushed for further safety and inclusivity--actually actively supported, listening to them and working with them on what they asked for, not just passively giving a thumbs up and waving flags and trolling the 'phobes. I'm the reason people believe Wookieepedia had become welcoming and safe for LGBTQIA+ fans but I was so wrong.
