Wiki news - 26 Sep 2019

*Cough* *cough* is this bard working?

Bad fantasy microphones jokes aside, welcome to the first news post on Divinity Wiki since *checks* 2015! Whew, its been a long time since anyone made one of these.

I imagine most readers who come here have no idea who I am. As my user name goes, I am Sakaratte, also known as the (King) Catmin, or if you ever visit our Discord, I also go by Arhu, because he polymorphs into a cat. I'm sure you can see a pattern emerging here. My first game in the series was Divine Divinity, which I first played back in 2003/2004. I discovered this wiki back in 2017, when looking at the RPG games footer on the Fallout wiki back as a patroller there. That was when I realised there is a whole freaking series of games and promptly acquired the whole lot on Steam and played them to varying degrees.

A wiki history from my arrival[]

Back in my first days of being on Divinity, I had big ideas and little resource. Weas-El, the long standing bureaucrat at the wiki got "fed up" of me making bot requests and page deletions that he promptly moved me to Content Moderator that very first day. Next came infoboxes and the need to setup the styling for them, so another rights change to Admin was made 16 days later. Come August 2017, Weas-El made the decision to stand down and appointed myself and Heartbeat-Sensei as the new Bureaucrats. Weas-El didn't get away so easily and was promoted to Content Moderator, just so if he ever felt the itch to work he could.

Since then the wiki has gone through periods of activity and inactivity, even at one point was forked due to Fandom's featured video. As fun and interesting setting up and trying to make things fit in an independent wiki was, I made the decision to merge it back into Fandom following the Fandom/Gamepedia merger and being satisfied the companies new direction a a nudge from Atvelonis of the new Wiki Manager system and his appointment here.

The present and some thank yous[]

The brings us to where we are now, some of our readers may have noticed the wiki has had a fresh scheme and overhaul of the Main Page, the first major change since at least 2017 (the Special:ThemeDesigner only keeps the last 10 revision, if I remember correctly it is closer to 2010). This change brings the wiki up to date, away from the Divinity II theme we had (and I still miss a little) and into the future with Divinity: Fallen Heroes. I would like to pass on a special thanks to Natalya-ru, a Fandom helper and administrator of the Russian language wiki for taking her time out from her role in RU to support us with this overhaul. Both the theme and the main page are her design and I cannot stress enough how grateful I am for these two things.

From here there is still a lot of merging to do and content bringing up to date. Much of the existing content, particularly for Divinity II and Original Sin is here and intact, but largely bulked into paragraphs with no infoboxes, titles, headers or consistency in format. This is all work that is going to need to be done manually and will take time, any and all help will be appreciated. Original Sin 2 content is more lack lustre, many key articles and smaller ones are missing and there are issues with duplicates due to article naming conventions being changed several times during the early years. We are working on this and my second thank you goes out to Weas-El who has had to endure my constant bot requests yet again (does it feel like 2017 much? ;-)) and has helped make a serious dent in the article naming issues. I would also like to say welcome back him as bureaucrat again, he's a sucker for punishment and I feel sorry for him, but he is invaluable.

Another focus we are going to take is lore. Fextra has the basics and the strategy down to a T in their various Divinity wikis, but unless you pop to the Larian forums or the divinity sub reddits, there isn't much in the way of a central online lore repository. Our newest editor Aethernea has been a great help to starting to move in this direction, with lore and game knowledge going back to Divinity II.

A few more thank yous and reader request[]

I have already mentioned the help we have had from Natalya-ru at ru, but I would also like to thank Lavlike and YellowShu, who have left messages around the wiki or on my talk page to let us know of issues that need fixing. Also I want to say thank you to Magehands for correcting me on the article regarding the Eternals, Noblaum for their work on the Dragon Commander characters and the various anonymous editors who have made a contribution over the last couple of months (honestly guys, you are the most underrated contributors to wikis). I would also like to make a quick thanks to Raze at Larian forums for correcting my assumptions on Ruben Ferol based on The Prophecy (I think that is the first thing to do after finishing this news feed off. Finally, thank you to Atvelonis for keeping me sane these last couple of months.

On that note: if you see something that needs correcting, or there is an article that needs redoing or creating, please get stuck in and help us. my talk page is always open and we have a Discord if you want to ask questions, or just chill out with the editors and other readers.

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