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- "Fan's flair is just "yo." Simple, but effective."
- ―RattsT
Hey, <insert name here>! Welcome to my profile! I'm Fan26, most of the time just Fan, a lifelong Star Wars nerd. I have been an active user on Wookieepedia since around 2018, though my first edit was in 2015. My primary focus on the site is Star Wars: The Old Republic, a game which I loathe greatly.Fan26 (Talk)
Who I Am and What I Do Here[]
My username on this site is Fan26, because that is the username I created when I signed up for the wider Wikia platform (and yes, when I joined, we still called it Wikia). This username has since transferred over to a number of other platforms as a result of its usage here and I am known as “Fan” by a wide range of people with no connection to this site.
My first edit was in Autumn 2015-for context, that is before the release of The Force Awakens and is a time when the bulk of NuCanon-specific lore consisted of the first season-and-a-half of Rebels, Tarkin (which practically adapts Luceno’s earlier Legends works and the “Reconquest of the Rim” section of Warfare), Lost Stars, and that Uprising game that got canned before it finished. Since that time, I have risen to membership in the EduCorps and AgriCorps, been granted rollback permissions by the assent of the community, and have promoted at present over 100 status articles. (And, of course, now Canon has much richer and fuller lore.)
I am the sort of person who takes a particular pride in belonging to things and knowing that one is doing good work and is in a good community as a result. Anyone who has had to listen to me talk about my summer job or my patriotism is most likely aware of this. This is a facet of who I am which extends to my participation on the site. I was inducted into the EduCorps in mid-2019. This was quite a different era-these were still the days when Tope basically dictated to the boards in secret IRC meetings who he wanted accepted and while nowadays he is rightly derided and scorned for the way he ran the site back then, at the time, to a sixteen-year-old who just dumbly thought “that was how it worked”, this meant quite a lot. I…ah, am very embarrassed to have cared so much about his opinion back then, but I would explain it as having been very proud that I’d “made it” at all.
Barring my deserved expulsion in November ‘22 and the effective suspension until the following Spring, I have served as an EduCorps member for four straight years, one more exactly than when I began voting on CANs in 2018. I have a small amount of selfish pride in knowing that I have reviewed a significant chunk, if not an outright slim majority, of the CANs from the past five years.
And this brings me back to the fact that I take a particular pride in being a longtime member of this site. I genuinely believe that this site does a good service by striving to completely document such a rich and vast fictional world.
Star Wars is unique compared to other large franchises in that it firmly has only two continuities (various non-canon continuities, like the vague gray area of the LEGO continuity or, say, Infinities still exist firmly based in either Canon or Legends.) There’s countless versions of Batman across countless comics, movies, and television shows and they don’t all share the same lore. But there’s only two Luke Skywalkers, and each piece of lore can at most only have happened to both of them. I’m not saying the various DC Wikis “have it easy” tracking all of Batman’s iterations over his eight decades of history, please don’t misunderstand me. My point is merely that Wookieepedia is unique in that events in its fictional universe can happen only in Canon or Legends, or both. This doesn’t make for a bigger scope than other communities, this means that instead of multiple universes of varying sizes there’s two very big ones and everything builds on everything else (how much of our lore is, even now, still built on the foundational bedrock of some WEG crap from the nineties?). That is what I think makes the Wook unique in terms of its scope. There’s all sorts of different Batmans, but only two different Luke Skywalkers and anything Luke Skywalker does in Star Wars has to have been done by one of the two.
My own contributions to the site mirror this in that one of my primary areas of focus is a notoriously large video game named Star Wars: The Old Republic. Pages on content from SWTOR are not unique in that a good many of them are often unsourced stubs with no information beyond “X was a Y that appeared and/or was mentioned in TOR” and an image if it actually appeared (credit to Cade for single-handedly documenting the entire base game himself back in the day, his work never gets near the appreciation it warrants). What is unique about SWTOR pages is that A) due to the game’s incredible size there is a disproportionate amount of these articles compared to other old stub pages and B) SWTOR’s nature as an online game means that, unlike most other media, once EA finally kills it and the servers go down, it will become much, much harder to get information on the game’s content and document it here on this wiki. Anyone can get a copy of an old 90s novel or dig up a PDF of a WEG supplement and expand all those stubs. But post-shutdown there’ll have to be an incredible amount of digging through walkthroughs and gamefiles to confirm even the smallest amounts of information.
This has happened to the Wook before-most prominently with Galaxies, whose legacy sadly amounts to a bunch of character stub articles about various NPCs that seldom expand on the role they had in-game and therefore, their canonical actions within the Star Wars universe which Wookieepedia ought to have documented. (Similar fates have befallen that Clone Wars Adventures game, Uprising, and Commander, the latter of which Vitus and I did some work on in 2017-18).
My approach to dealing with TOR content has varied over the years, though what’s remained consistent is screenshotting everything and storing it in a collection of Google Drive folders for easy access when something requires verification. As of writing this, most of my on-site WP:TOR work has been CANs based off the game’s Crew Skill function to give myself small progress as I collect screenshots in preparation for eventual big updates. I doubt I will have many large SWTOR status articles. My current plan is to just expand and complete articles like Balog here, so while not quite at status quality they do have all the relevant canonical information and are no longer unsourced stubs.
And then of course there is the fact that I take pride in the length of my time on the site. Again, I first edited in 2015 and became really active in 2018. In a way, I’ve grown up here. Wookieepedia has endured when a lot of other parts of my life have been left in the past. Being here so long means I have an intimate relationship with much of the site’s recent history.
I remember voting on a fair amount of Tommy’s old Imperial warship nominations. I remember when the CAN page could sometimes be so inactive it would be just Imp’s WP:AST CANs keeping the whole page from being empty. I remember when Spooky first began nominating from Master and Apprentice and when Braha first started working on Twilight Company. I watched Anil nominate all his articles for the first time and since then have seen each repeatedly brought back to the nomination pages for an update. I remember voting on a WP:GE nomination Fred put up the day Galaxy’s Edge opened (it was the final day of my sophomore year of high school). I remember being in Study Hall when the initial Galaxy’s Edge menu was announced and almost immediately went up onsite (still would love to try a ronto wrap someday…), and sitting there starving while looking at all these promotional stills of food. I remember being in IRC during English class when the Episode IX trailer dropped in April of 2019 and, almost a year later, ignoring a history paper due the next morning to sit on IRC to get news when The High Republic was formally announced late at night in early 2020. (I remember IRC at all, which in of itself speaks to something.) I remember how “Category:Pages with missing permanent archival links” was hopelessly bloated back in the day and how under Ecks’ direction Nano and Uber almost single-handedly fixed that in 2020.
I would roughly place my generation of Wooks as the people who became involved between the Rogue One hype and release, and the onset of the pandemic. Very roughly, this timeframe extends from at the very earliest, maybe late-ish 2016 and all the way to its latest at 2019. This isn’t exactly a hard timeframe and doesn’t necessarily reflect join dates so much as when people became more active in the community to my recollection (I, for example, joined in 2015 but only became truly active active in 2018). This roughly defined category includes a lot of veteran names who are by now site features, like Lew and Spooky and Anil and Braha and OOM and Vitus and Editor (on his original account), and even retired legends like Tommy or Zed. These are people I am proud to call peers, and even friends in quite a few cases. There are many other well-known and highly respected, competent members of the community whom I predate by several years and am both surprised and bemused that I can manage to recall a time before they joined the site.
In reflecting on my time on this site, there are several people to whom I owe gratitude. QuiGonJin was an early mentor who motivated and encouraged me when I first began nominating and reviewing CANs in 2018. Imperators, of course, deserves a world of credit for having to deal with me for half a decade now. It is due mostly to his mentorship that I am where I am now, and he has done the thankless task of constantly cleaning up after my errors and helping me hammer out precedents for how we deal with the more irritating aspects of SWTOR. Lewisr was among the first people I regularly interacted with on-site in 2016 and 2017 and offered me advice when I asked for it (for the record btw-Lew has always been Lew lmfao, even back then he was constantly in the RC). I owe Dani a great debt for helping me to reflect on certain mistakes in late 2022 and gently but firmly nudging me on the path to improvement and growth. Tommy, Anil, and Ecks are also people whom I credit with being patient with me and offering encouragement back in the day.
(Tope, too, in an odd sense deserves acknowledgement but not gratitude. He never really was as harsh with me for my mistakes and screwups when he’d be infinitely harsher to far more competent people over far lesser mistakes, and as a result of never having been truly chewed out by him when I didn’t deserve it I was never driven off the site by him like he did to so many others. It should go without saying, but this is not an endorsement of his dictatorship so much as a pretty clear indictment of his treatment of pretty well near goddamn everyone.)
I can most often be found performing EduCorps duties. You will likely also see me rollbacking edits in the RC, performing AC duties, or editing on my messy collection of subpages. On rare occasions I will actually nominate an article.
In addition to WP:TOR, I am a member of WP:Resistance (my only significant contributions having been a couple CANs Dani helped me with), WP:Pride (sadly, I can’t say I do much except spam Kawoshin and Diakko fanart in the project channel), and WP:Warfare.
Fan26 (Talk) 01:10, 31 October 2023 (UTC)
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Current projects[]
- "Welcome Fan, Master of TOR"
- ―Imperators II
- Star Wars: The Old Republic
- Crew skill CANs
- Republic Fleet project
- random The Essential Guide to Warfare bits and ends
