Y'know, for some reason, I never really thought about the idea that Wikia had much in the way of guidelines regarding what you could make wikis about lol seemed like a bit of a lawless land
Wikia, which has since changed its name to Fandom, I suspect both because of the obvious reasons (tie yourself to a common term to make yourself more popular) and also because the name Wikia was probably becoming radioactive due to a lot of the quality of any useful informational resource being spotty at best, and also holy **** was Wikia so laggy back near the end of them using that name.
Maybe a better way to put it was that is that it violated what was allowed -- iirc, specifically they can't be about real people (I would guess excepting famous/significant ones).
But yeah, Wikias or Fandom or whatever have a bunch of problems. I guess depending on the specific one and who writes them, some are good (like I used Xenoblade's a lot when I was replaying
Xenoblade Chronicles), but some are bad and overeditorialized (like Umineko's) -- and all of them are too bloated with advertising and formatting garbage. I use a lot of ad/script blockers, and it's usually a pain to get their websites to actually work.
As far as who takes offense to what, I try nowadays to separate myself from "edgy" lingo that was popular in the mid 2000's internet. I like to be inclusive, but I don't want to over-analyze everything I say because I could feel bad for a lot of things that potentially affected no one. Now if someone came to me and said that they didn't like the way I said something (and it wasn't a ridiculous claim and the accomodation I must make is reasonable), then it is definitely considerable for me to change the way I talk about that something.
Yeah, I feel like I'm (usually) the same way, where I naturally avoid using language that I think can offend or rub people the wrong way -- although I also think that, because I draw my personal line conservatively, that I would resist somebody trying to "correct" something that I've already thought about and determined to be acceptable. Like, when I see language "corrections" like this happen, it usually seems like they're connecting too many dots (i.e. if you say phrase A, it sort of sounds like phrase B, which invokes memories of event C, and event C has something in common with D, which is horrible, so if you say A you're really saying D)
I'm holding this because using the quotation tags is a huge chore on my cracked up smart phone. But I do think there's some truth to this. It's a pendulum of sorts. I do think optics is important to consider when making any kind of quip, but I hold this more so against people that have the self awareness to know how something will mostly or at least to a large degree be interpreted negatively. If someone said something, a joke or otherwise that just had the misfortune of being poorly phrased and people lose their minds, it's that kind of scenario where I'm more likely to come to their defense.
I remember I was a drinking at a bar a few years ago and the stupid drunk shenanigans for that night was everyone was doing accent imitation because some guy from Texas was with us. Everyone was going around to see who could do the best Texas accent. When it came to me I couldn't think of sentence to come up with so my dumbass says "Suzie and Billy were out in the fields picking cotton" and I have never been so jumped in my entire life. Long story short, everyone called me a racist POS and left me outside a lone and I never drank at that bar again lmao.
I realize ofcourse that obviously invoked racist imagery that people weren't crazy about, but at the same time I was really upset not one person was willing to be understanding of the fact it was an entirely innocent accident. I feel like that sort of thing happens a lot.
Yeah, it's like, if someone says something bad in all earnestness, and a large number of people come down on them as if they said it purposefully intending to be rude/offensive/horrible, I think anyone would be naturally resistant to that, so it's important to consider the why/how and not just the what.
Sorry that happened to you, but that's actually a pretty good example. Like, maybe you deserved to feel foolish for saying that, but saying it's racist and shutting you out is just overreacting, imo. This is just me, but I feel like one of the great tragedies of the 2010s is that people started taking Nazis so seriously again. Mel Brooks said one of his life's goals was to make people laugh
at Nazis, and now near the end of his life, it's suddenly turning back the other way because of Twitter. Hell, the only Nazi rally I remember seeing referenced before 2014 or so was in
The Blues Brothers, when Jake and Elwood drive through a rally of the Neo-Nazi group, the American Socialist White Peoples' Party (ASWPP... asswipe), to thunderous applause from the crowd. It seems like now, a scene like that would get vilified for portraying them at all.
Ultimately, I think it comes down to an individual's inability to properly contextualize how very massive the world is, with the ability of the internet to show you small things from very far away -- and not only show them, but amplify them so that they seem very big. Kony 2012 is always my go-to example of this, but you don't need to get political, or even real-world, to see it. How often does it seem like, in a discussion about entertainment, that
everybody thinks something that you don't agree with? (My recent example was a post in a Denver Broncos forum, where a user complained about how "everybody" was hating the moves the general manager was making in the early offseason, even though he'd made some good ones by this point -- of course, in actuality, relatively few people were complaining, this user was just particularly sensitive towards the ones that were. Apply this to TV shows, movies, video games, books, etc., it happens everywhere.) It's a natural, yet unfortunate tendency of humans to naturally react more to things we find distasteful than the inverse... or that's my take, anyway. Hopefully we all learn to adapt and better contextualize information, because right now Facebook/Google/etc. are making a killing on exploiting this aspect of our psychology, and imo it's doing a lot of harm to society.
I don't even feel like going back up to figure out how I landed on this subject -- I figure the thread is dead enough that it can't hurt, anyway.