RLMWiki:Standards

If you're here for tips on how to write a page, you should visit RLMWiki:Style Guide instead.

Hi I'm User:Orangestar and I'm going to be writing this in a mostly first person conversational style, because the wiki is young and I want to get my personal vision out of the way to help it blossom into its best form.

As a quick preamble, I was inspired to create this wiki by my favorite fan wiki of all time, the Homestar Runner Wiki, so a lot of my opinions, intentions, design, and style for this will be deliberately ripped off of inspired by that wiki's standards. If some of this looks familiar to you, you'll fit right in.

I primarily would like to monitor this project from the perspective of a system administrator, and have no interest in performing community management, public relations, etc. I envision any community around RLMWiki to happen organically as users find good places to get together for real time discussion and make personal pages for themselves.

With that being said, more avenues of communication are flatly good. If you need to contact me directly about anything regarding the wiki, its community, ideas, or technical issues (e.g. the site is down) I can be reached

• on Mastodon, orangestar@wetdry.world
• on Matrix, @orangestar:matrix.orangestar.dev
• via E-Mail, orangestar@cats4gold.net

Other methods of contact may be found at my homepage.

How to treat the Wiki

Move Fast and Break Things

More edits are a net good thing. If you feel the need to edit the wiki to add something, do it.

English Wikipedia has a rule that "Wikipedia has no hard rules." This is summarized on the page wikipedia:Wikipedia:Ignore all rules: If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore it. It's one of the "5 Pillars" of Wikipedia policy, and it directly influences the rule to Be bold.

I think this is a good attitude to have. This is a place where coalition of information is a net positive for archival and preservation. In the spirit of Red Letter Media's attitude towards their own props and sets, I've called this rule "move fast and break things." Personally, I think that attitude fits our spunky little indie wiki more than it does the corporate megacompany that I'm blatantly stealing the motto from.

As for breaking things, this server's running on bare metal. If something breaks, I can physically walk up to the machine to fix it.

Don't hassle each other

Treat the people working on the site with respect. Be cordial on talk pages, and do not be petty or spiteful with how you handle other people's contributions - or how they handle yours.

Unlike the wiki software, the editors maintaining it are real people. They should not be moved fast upon, nor should they be broken. I expect you all to be on your best behavior to make this website as good as it possibly can be.

Human nature can be fickle. It is common to misinterpret communication over text, confuse a good-natured revert or revision with a personal attack, and so forth. If you are disappointed with the way something was written, edited, reverted, or otherwise changed on the wiki, I encourage you to take it to talk pages first. Recognize when a revert-of-a-revert may lead to an edit war, and get opinions and consensus from your fellow editors before altering their work.

While this is secondary to the first rule, it is assumed you will take heed in knowing when to apply either rule to your current situation.

Edit with intent to help

Ensure all edits are true, respectful, and interesting. Do not write jokes, make up lies, or speculate wildly on this wiki. Treat this website like you would any other online encyclopedia.

Some backstory: I created RLMWiki after reading one of Mike's exceptionally long descriptions and realizing that the vast swathes of inside jokes and references he was making would be lost on the casual observer. Without even checking, I assumed any existing RLM wiki was probably a Fandom/Wikia wiki full of its own brand of fandom memes that would cause further confusion and alienate outside viewers. The earliest pages were written inside an Obsidian notebook and were converted to wikitext with Pandoc when it got too big.

The goal was simple: be true, be honest, and be thorough. Do we know why Jessica Nakles stopped appearing in RLM videos? No. Is it our goal to speculate or joke whether people were being pervy in the YT comments, she fell out of favor with Mike Stoklasa, or she simply moved away and got a new job? Absolutely not. We don't know if any of those things are true and it would be inappropriate for us to push those opinions on our readers. A good wiki should be neutral and factual.

For the record, I collated those theories from horrible people on Reddit. I'm fairly certain nobody knows why Jessi left and I hope she's doing fine.

Write Watsonian Where Possible

Refrain from editorializing on in-character RLM content. If something happens in an episode or sketch, it is gospel with regards to that show. Treat the actions and characters on shows like Half in the Bag as seriously as possible.

The terms "Watsonian" and "Doylist" were invented by fans of Sherlock Holmes and popularized by internet wiki TVTropes to quickly refer to the two ways a story's actions can be explained.

The Watsonian explanation is the "diagetic" or "in-universe" explanation for the occurrence. It's the answer you would get if you asked Dr. Watson why Sherlock Holmes did something (were he real.)

The Doylist explanation is the "out-of-character" reason. It's the answer that explains, logically, why a book was written that way. It's the answer you would get if you asked Sir Arthur Conan Doyle why Sherlock Holmes did something (purely speculatively, of course. I believe Doyle was actually quite good about giving in-universe answers.)

Within the context of RLMWiki, please try to write any situation that occurs in RLM shows, especially scripted ones, as though you are documenting actions like Dr. Watson. If Mike says he can document the trip up Mount Everest by running a VHS camcorder with a power cable all the way from the VCR repair shop, then that statement is gospel and it goes in the wiki without comment. You're free to make remarks (e.g. "This suggests that technology in the Half in the Bag universe is more recent than that of our world") but don't be snarky or make jokes.

Besides, the joke is funnier when you take it completely serious.

Copyright

IANAL. I have no experience dealing with copyright law and have absolutely no idea how to write legally binding text for a wiki. However, almost all of the content on RLMWiki, from screencaps to quotes to ideas, are copyright material of Red Letter Media. Additionally, a large majority of that content is licensed under the YouTube Standard License, which includes some prohibitions about what parts of the video may be distributed outside of their website, which may include screencaps and thumbnails - something our Wiki is designed to catalog.

I'm pretty sure this falls under fair use, and even if it didn't YouTube has nothing to gain by initiating legal proceedings against us since we're a nonprofit fan project, but... you know, technically if they did that they'd probably be in the right. Something to keep in mind.

So if you upload a file and notice the only copyright option is "No license"? That's my fault. I don't know what to write so I'm just leaving it blank and we can build that ark when the flood shows up.

See Also

• RLMWiki:Style Guide