Newsletter #23 – Final goodbye?!

It’s close to midnight, and something evil’s lurking in the dark… 👀 Just kidding, it’s us, here to report we’re still alive!

If you’re reading this post, you’re probably well aware that Mineplex as a (Java) server continues its decline, from a solid 30 thousand players back in 2014 down to double digits now. With that, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that this Wiki also has been losing steam over the years: In just the last two years, page views have gone down by 70%, and we’re seeing a massive decrease in edits.

As there are no efforts from the server’s ownership to combat this, it’s reasonable to assume Mineplex will continue on this path until the server loses the entirety of its playerbase. While the Bedrock server may still have some years to go, things aren’t looking too bright for the Java community — the “heart” of Mineplex (statistically speaking!), and the source of almost all activity on the Wiki.

Before it comes to that though, the Wiki team wanted to share one more announcement for everyone who’s still out there, and those who might find this post some months or years down the road. Let’s dive into it!

The current state of the Wiki

While the Fandom Terms of Use prevent us from sharing specific data and analytics about the Wiki’s performance, it’s obvious that the recent number of edits has been insufficient for creating and maintaining articles, as server changes come and go.

Some keen-eyed readers may have noticed the lack of anonymous edits, that is, IP users without an account. This is the unfortunate result of COPPA restrictions, applied to this Wiki about one year ago. Fandom now requires everyone to create an account before editing a page here, to “protect” underage users from… well, uh… something evil that’s lurking in the dark, I guess? This may not sound like a huge deal, but as the majority of minor edits (those that keep a community alive) used to be made by anonymous users, cutting away all of those had a huge impact on the Wiki’s activity.

To make matters worse, none of us were informed about this change, as is tradition with Fandom’s level of transparency. Truthfully, Fandom as a whole has been rather challenging to deal with, their excellent support team aside, with heavily limited customisation options and a user experience plagued with ads (some of which showing questionable or even inappropriate content for kids).

It’s no surprise that other Minecraft servers have started to move on to custom Wiki implementations, with prominent servers like Hypixel (here) but also smaller communities like Potterworld (here) creating, hosting and taking care of their own Wiki instances. As Mineplex is unwilling to consider this, let alone paying a website developer, this is unfortunately not an idea worth pursuing for us.

Well, we’re off to a positive start, huh? This wasn’t meant to be a rant though, I promise! All of these are simply contributing factors as to why activity on the wiki team’s part has been low, real-life commitments aside. As Mineplex is likely nearing its closure, we don’t believe wiki activity will change in the near future, either.

With the status quo out of the way, let’s get to the main point of this post: What does the future hold for the Mineplex Wiki?

Our to-do list

As always, our public idea board is filled with amazing ideas we’d love to work on at some point, if we do get the opportunity. You can comment on any one of them and make suggestions, of course. If you’d like, you can contribute to any of the tasks too!

Here are just a few more things we’ve got in mind for the future:

• Finishing our in-progress design overhaul
  • Adapt layout changes in templates
  • Better consistency
  • Work on dark mode
• Release an archive of all resources available to us
  • Including announcements, update changelogs and more from:
    • Enjin
    • The new forums
    • Discord
    • Newsletters
    • Other media (images, videos) relevant for archival purposes
  • Save them on web.archive.org while we’re at it
  • This is to preserve information and enables everyone to look up data even a decade from now
• Finalise Manual of Style
• Update game pages and keep them updated (the big but perhaps unrealistic goal)

Like before, there is no ETA for any of these projects, as the entirety of the staff team is occupied with more important matters. Still, everyone is invited to contribute, of course.

The CoM project

After years of secrecy, we’d finally like to unveil the mysterious ”CoM project” — except, not in the way you might expect. For the reasons mentioned above and a lack of interest from both sides, we’ve decided to abandon our plans. Still, we’d like to shed some light on the idea behind it all!

As some of you might know, starting in 2018, we’ve been in touch with different admins and leaders at Mineplex. This was in an effort to increase community engagement and broaden the scope of the project. After encountering a reluctant response initially, two years later, we were able to bring the community management team at Mineplex on board for a potential collaboration.

Though we were excited about the idea of creating a brand new semi-official team at Mineplex, we would soon realise that it would be high effort for little gain, owing to the fact that Mineplex had already begun to steer towards its inevitable demise at the time.

While we were originally looking for at least 10 members for a somewhat effective task distribution, the potential pool of applicants for the team had shrunk to a smaller, non-feasible size, as we anticipated applications in the lower single-digit range.

Additionally, there was little incentive for the project except for our own motivation. With sparse interest from the Mineplex staff team to begin with and no further engagement past the initial announcement, it became clear that this would become a burden resting only on the Wiki Team’s shoulders. This was a risk we could not accept, considering the Wiki team had just recently shrunk to two members enrolled in a full-time college programme.

Without further ado, here’s the partly finished document explaining it all. (Call these the Wiki Files, if you will. I’m sure Elon would be proud)

While you may not be able to join the Wiki Committee, you can continue to apply for the Wiki team through the form here. Please bear in mind applications will only be checked irregularly, as we’re not actively looking for staff members.

The way forward

So what about our goals for the future?

Preservation

This word alone sums it all up: we’d like to preserve the current status of the project for as long as possible. That is to say: Keep all articles and pages accessible for potential future readers, and everyone who’d simply like to reminisce about the good old days. Of course, your help is appreciated — most articles can be edited by all logged-in users, so if you notice a mistake, feel free to fix it! We have no intention to close the Wiki for now, even if Mineplex should shut down at some point. This project was built with the help of hundreds of editors over almost a decade — and we can be absolutely proud of how far we’ve come together.

Instead, our long-term goal is to put this project into a state of hibernation. That is to say, most things will stay the way they are right now. While articles can still be edited normally, we anticipate it won’t come to massive content changes due to a lack of activity.

Wiki Staff

As said above, the number of staff edits and interventions will likely continue to decline. For this reason, we’d like to officially suspend the staff quota for the time being.

This doesn’t mean we’re going anywhere, though! We’re happy to help with all kinds of questions, if you have any. Please also contact us if you have a problem or an emergency. Message us anytime — preferably through Discord!

Keeping up with the news

By now, you might’ve guessed this will be the final announcement post, at least for some time. While future newsletters are unlikely, we don’t want to say goodbye just yet though — feel free to interpret this as a “We’re still alive” instead ;)

You can always keep an eye on the Wiki Discord (click here to join), as this is the place where we’ll notify you about important announcements, if there are any. Until then, take care — and thank you for joining us on this adventure!