Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-4530750-20160228040801/@comment-4516354-20160302071946

I have been hesitant to comment on this matter due to my personal disagreements with the moderator "chairing" this conversation, however I feel like I have a lot to say on this matter, especially with regards to input, and regarding the validity of votes hitherto being mentioned as evidence for the retention of TSG material.

I do not advocate maintaining TSG's content on this wiki for a number of reasons. Primary of these, of course, is the oft mentioned attitudes and behaviours assigned to senior TSG members, especially Dion. People in this community have been driven to emotional extremes, a great deal of duress and pain, by these attitudes and behaviours. This is an intolerable state of affairs, and we have a collective responsibility to create an atmosphere that engenders cooperation and trust, as the vast majority of roleplayers do, and not one of cruelty. TSG breached that trust, they breached the conventions of our community, which together lays ownership to this wiki, and in doing so, have invalidated that social contract that would otherwise entitle them to representation.

With regards to disputes over the Falador matter, I should point out that - as someone who paid considerable attention to that issue at the time, and, in fact, raised considerable protest at the conduct of the vote - by the standards we hold votes in our community today, the result would not have been valid. In the recent vote for the Sliske's Countdown events, suspect votes were validated by the event moderator and annulled if those persons were not found to have an active and participatory role in the RSRP community. The vote at the time over whether Dion's claim to Falador was valid (notably after he paid the last remaining member of the Cross dynasty a considerable OOC bribe to attain it) was swamped by TSG members who had never once before posted in the RP-IG forum, nor had been seen by the vast majority of active roleplayers. If that vote had been conducted to the same standard then as votes are now, Dion's claim would liably have been rightfully rejected by this community. Ultimately, that scandal was one of the driving forces behind the collapse of the land claims administration system, something which has arguably had both good and bad effects on our community, but it represented the destruction of what had prior been a functioning institution.

The vast majority of roleplayers in this community, in the public sphere and canon to which this wiki is largely dedicated, do not recognise the role TSG played in our history because of this illegitimacy. OOC bribes (which, despite Makuta's statement, are not commonplace, else I would have bought back Kandarin by now), real life harrassment, active and cruel bullying, discrimination, disrespect, disruption of our roleplaying activities, are the standard fayre of TSG. Both major times that TSG have involved themselves in the workings of our community have proven to be damaging - destructive to roleplay with their OOC cult-like structure and suspect dealings, and stubborn to circumvent, abusing the insufficiency of the then land claims rules and the subsequent total absence of land claims rules to be a persistent stain and obstacle to our ability to drive forward our own storylines and utilise the resources at hand. An entire major city was throttled of activity, and that lasting damage remains.

We are a community, and we have a responsibility to each other. That unspoken social contract to provide respect and cooperation with each other that has not been respected by Dion and his cohort, and his defenders have more often resorted to ad hominems against their critics than actually engaging with the matter at hand. We cannot stand idly by when their actions have rendered members of this community to tears, their indolence has obstructed and damaged our ability to enjoy ourselves, and their retorts constitute little more than childish bickering.

Therefore, I hope people can muster behind the cause to remove TSG's content from this wiki, and - in doing so - actually set a precedent for a more stringent, clean, refined wiki. Because prior commentors are correct in stating that there is a lot of non-TSG clutter in this wiki, and perhaps its time to fix that. So once this matter is resolved, I'd advocate setting up some sort of... commission between community members and mods to clear that up. A group effort, democratic in nature with verified voters, and so on, and so forth, but that's a discussion for another time.

Let's make our community whole again, rather than driving the splinter deeper.