You may have noticed that over the last few weeks, massive automatic edits have been occurring on the wiki. These edits are part of my efforts to clean up the site so that it is easier for readers to navigate. Keep reading to find out more about the changes happening on Bleach Fan Fiction Wiki in 2022!
Why?[]
I'm not going to sugarcoat things: The wiki's activity is more or less dead. This is partly because most all of the original users who contributed to the community have moved on with their lives, and partly because the kids these days just don't use wiki like they used to. Fanfiction gets published on the evergreen Ao3 and Fanfic.net, or on a host of sites of rotating popularity including Wattpad, tumblr, Aminoapps, etc. etc. etc. As far as fanon lore-building goes, I'm not too sure where that happens: probably WorldAnvil and forums. And RPs? My guess is most new roleplayers stick to discord format chat RPs and post their OCs as gdoc apps.
Why do I go into all this detail you ask?
Well, because of the "market research" mentioned above, it's helpful to know our niche as a fanfiction/fanon wiki so we aren't trying to compete against formats we aren't meant to compete with. Since there aren't a lot of new editors or a lot of new content being posted here on the wiki, it's my intention to make BFF more of an "archive" of OCs, fanfics, and roleplays that casual google browsers (site analytics tell us those are our biggest hitters, drawn to BFF via popular page titles like "Bankai") can read and enjoy. This is the purpose of a wiki anyway: to host articles about a given topic. In this case, our articles happen to be fics and OCs.
It's not all grimdark news though (obviously), otherwise I wouldn't be spending so much time and effort into site clean-up projects. Remember, Bleach anime returns October 2022.
One more time for the people in the back?
Anyway, in anticipation of what will hopefully be a surge of interest in Bleach, it's time to (pardonemoi le français) get our shit together and kick our asses into gear. It's time to put BFF in-step with the purpose of wiki-ing, which includes Marie Kondo-ing the old junk lying around, re-organizing our cupboards, and generally making the site a smoother, more easily navigable experience for visitors and (hopefully) editors alike.
(This comes just in time for FANDOM's MediaWiki upgrades and the move from classic style infoboxes to portable style infoboxes. In other words, we gotta lotta work to do to update anyway, might as well do an overhaul).
Big Changes[]
Without getting too far into semantic AND pedantic weeds, let's just say that the main efforts/changes to BFF in 2022 will revolve getting everything unified: making this place look like a SINGLE community with a SINGLE manual of style. To that end, the biggest changes to BFF include:
- New policy updates: Mainly, how we will incorporate Canon Content on this wiki moving forward.
- Also, making our policies user-friendly policy by clarifying and relevantizing things (yeah I made that word up don't be a Heard Turd and sue)
- On-going admin site-maintenance/clean-up projects such as Categorization (a category tree reorganization project), the site appearance, and infobox standardization (there are too many infoboxes and they haunt me. You have no idea how they haunt me).
- Massive deletes of unused and empty pages and images
So Where the Heck's the Community? / How Do I Get Involved?[]
What!? This blog has inspired you to help out starting like, right now!?
Sarcasm aside, one immediate area that we need help with is our Clean Up Project. There's more info on that page to explain how you can make minor edits to get pages' formats and contents up to snuff. Either that or you can spam the random page button like I do to add categories and tag articles for clean up or deletion. (It's not an obsession, I swear. Why are you looking at me like that?)
Final note: Please direct any questions, comments, concerns, complaints to management etc. to our discord, where we have been since 2019. You can find us here. Most user interaction happens via DMs nowadays. This is also where announcements about Bleach and the site are posted.
Looking forward to an exciting 2022. Bankai on my friends, and stay Shikai.
