User:Spike

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Spike is a bureaucrat Admin from the original Uncyclopedia parody wiki at Wikia (now at uncyclopedia.ca). Ten years after learning what a wiki is and how to author stuff that other people can actually see on the Internet, it is astonishing to have two wikis of my own! And it is still fun creating pretty pages, creating news and encyclopedia articles that look like the real thing, and coding in JavaScript, especially with jQuery (the Tinkertoy of the Internet).

I am here a couple times a week and am an occasional patroller and sporadic benefactor, but am not part of Miraheze management. I contribute to RfCs on Miraheze policy, but put my trust in motivated Stewards rather than a fine Rulebook.

My Miraheze wikis

I am the Editor-in-Chief at The Mirror, a parody news outlet, where you are welcome to write news articles that will amuse current-events fans, if we should get any.

I've also started the RFO-BASIC! wiki, to flesh out the documentation of a BASIC interpreter that can be side-loaded into Android devices.

Annoyances

In 2017, webhost Wikia changed its unified login in a way that shuts out users of legacy browsers. (Miraheze did likewise in 2018, and I fell away for a while.) In addition, a Wikia vandal hack in 2015 became the excuse for a giant crackdown on the innocent, mostly involving keeping Admins from administering. A Community Representative promised to "study" my sudden inability to edit the Message of the Day, and "when the phone didn't ring, I knew it was him." Later, the European Data Privacy act became a better excuse for preventing Uncyclopedians from indulging their desire to imitate the format of Wikipedia.

Earlier Wikia crusades involved stamping out nip-slips,[1] integrating our humor with their ad campaigns, and attaching a cover-your-ass disclaimer that spoiled the humor effect. That drove half the editors away to a fork website[2] that has been in comparable decline.

Aspirations

A month before I arrived at Miraheze, someone took the user name Spike. I vowed to petition to acquire it in six months' time, and did so (on Stewards' noticeboard), endured one year of indecision and laments about not having an Official Policy for this, then one month of notification and waiting for the old Spike to protest, and finally got the name change (from "Spike the Dog").

In the meantime, Miraheze made the same decision as Wikia, to render itself inaccessible through Firefox 10 (by adopting TLS v2.0), and I mostly fell away in 2018.

In 2019, Wikia decided that Uncyclopedia and its foreign-language offshoots were not worth the effort for a politically correct San Francisco social-media corporation. I advocated for Uncyclopedians to transfer the English-language wiki here, for which management here showed no eagerness. "The community" voted to be co-hosted with the Fork, a unique arrangement under which the impostor could snuff out its annoying legitimate twin by merely not following through on its promise, which is exactly what happened. So the original Uncyclopedia set up in a dimly lit tent at uncyclopedia.ca, and the Fork engaged in a cross-website campaign of de-platforming.

Notes

  1. Yes, I see the rule against porn here too, but it has never been integral to my contributions.
  2. Which this website's interwikis appear to treat as the real one: Appealed 4-Nov-17 with Phabricator T2384 and ultimately changed unilaterally on TheMirror.