I could never understand why people described Star Trek as hostile, aggressive, or toxic. I was raised on the TOS movies and TNG, I know that's not what this franchise is. This franchise gave me so much, and I never had the ability to connect with anyone about it until I was in college - and not for a lack of cultural knowledge. Consistently, I learned that a surprising amount of people had negative connotations about Star Trek, without ever having seen it. I never pried, and eventually the franchise fell out of the public collective consciousness, after Nemesis. I found other interests, and in the modern era, enthusiast communities live and die by collaborative community projects - be that community GitHub repositories, YouTube creator communities, large forums, or - especially - wikis. The thing that makes these sort of communities such fantastic resources is that everyone can see, use, and access them, but three is no *obligation* to take part. A significant amount of the community can exist only referring to these things as a resource, without having to create the community content themselves.
Memory Alpha is the biggest, most well SEO’d Star Trek fan site on the entire internet. It meets essentially all the standards of a high-quality wiki. However, by having such a limited scope - only Memory Beta is the second-most well SEO’d Star Trek fan site on the entire internet, and the one with the most obvious potential, as many people enjoy a franchise having multiple aspects, and many would argue, that’s the entire point. It was only natural I would wind up there eventually. The STO wiki is fun, but there’s so much more to this franchise than just one game.
I could never understand why people described Star Trek as hostile, aggressive, or toxic… until I spent some time on Memory Beta, and got to know captainmike. At first I thought he was a child who somehow got admin rights, with the way he acted, but the account was too old for that. Or perhaps he was from one of the non-english wikis, with his wild disregard for English syntax, but one of his recent temper tantrums threw that theory out the window. Over the last several years, I have watched him create rules and never follow them, create rules that violated most of his entire edit history, create policies that went against how wikitext works, actively break aspects of the wiki when new features rolled out for no discernable reason other than wanting to avoid something new, harass users for using built-in editing and formatting tools, harass users for not finishing things quickly enough when sometimes leaving projects in-progress for weeks himself, drive off helpful community member after helpful community member who was just trying to help clean up the mess - I could go on, but frankly, I don’t want to. He has turned the wiki into his own personal little kingdom, and is singlehandedly responsible for Memory Beta being a third-rate wiki. To this day, I still don’t think ‘fans’ like captainmike actually enjoy Star Trek - they more seem to enjoy hating it. Or hating… at it? It truly is hard to say, and it *really* doesn’t matter. I keep reminding myself, these are people like this in every community, and they’re always a tiny minority. Still, knowing THIS is what people thought I was when I said I like Star Trek stings like hell.
So yeah, that’s what happened to Memory Beta, as far as I can tell.
My only question is, why hasn’t anyone revoked his privileges yet, or just flat-out banned him? Other high-privilege admins still exist, even if they’ve largely been scared away - and once he’s gone the community can actually grow enough for other people to step up. This is a massive franchise, with a massive fanbase behind it. The second-most well SEO’d Star Trek fan site is not going to fade into obscurity or disrepair because of the loss of a single lousy admin. If the currently-terrible user retention of the wiki is anything to go off of, it seems to be just *waiting* to really flourish, and is actively being prevented from doing so.
The site's tagline literally reads "The Non-Canon Star Trek Wiki."
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