On the Uncyclomedia Cabal, and why we never get anything done
We had an idea when launching Uncyclopedia on a new server - to set up an official blog so that, as much as anything else, the community would know what is going behind the scenes.
You may notice this never happened. You may even wonder why, for all of .31 seconds before you get distracted by a cat picture, and the simple answer is that it is because we're a pile of lazy-arse loons and generally there's nothing going on behind the scenes in the first place. Or to put it more bluntly, it's because we're Uncyclopedians.
The blog never happened because nobody got around to making it happen. The things we might have blogged about also generally never happened because we never got around to making them happen either, thus providing little reason to get around to setting up the blog. We never changed anything about the site itself because we never got around to seeing if there'd even be any reason to do so. We never came up with an official name for, let alone set up, any Organisation or Foundation, because we never got around to discussing it. We never announced our team because we never got around to figuring out who our team really was. For the most part, things just happened without any particular guidance from anyone.
And in practice it didn't matter. Users on the site see sysadmins (the closest thing we have to a 'staff' group besides Zombiebaron) and probably just take them to be other admins, because basically they are just other admins. It's the admins, and random votes, and people who do things, that really run the place. The only significant limiting factor in any of it is what people can actually be bothered to do, and what they have to do it with.
What we have
We have 1.4 servers, or something along those lines. We have a cat named Mr. Scruffy who supposedly runs them, and a bunch of daemons and crap to really run them because this is like, the future, and crap, and proper servers should run themselves. We have basically no money, and a team that operates out of an IRC channel where mostly we just talk about things like Wikipedia, MediaWiki development, the Wikimedia Foundation, Illogicopedia, university, credit unions, Guild Wars 2, Magic The Gathering, Safeway wifi, pine trees, VFH, algorithm proofs, mangos, and generally whatever happens to be on our minds.
We have no titles, no real leadership, and no formal organisation, but we do have folks who sometimes do stuff:
- Lord and Ruler: A mob of Uncyclopedians in the Village Dump
- Finances and Marketing: EMC
- Operations and Development: Bizzeebeever, Legoktm, Emufarmers, Isarra, Jack Phoenix
- Zombiebaron: Zombiebaron
- Everyone else: RAHB, Andorin Kato, Frosty, some wikipedians, some wikimedians, and frankly the entire damn admin corpse (not a typo)
Currently we are discussing ways to analyse the lifecycle of a bug. This, obviously, has nothing to do with Uncyclopedia, because we never got around to setting up a bug tracker.
Topics are for people who stay on topic.
Someone once made a comment about how the Wikimedia Foundation is not run like a Wikipedia article, and for good reason. Conversely the Uncyclomedia Cabal may very well be what happens when an organisation is run like an Uncyclopedia article. I don't recommend that either, but at least this way it's hard to fail to live up to expectations.
