User blog:Imrlybord7/Enlightenment time, children.

In spite of the massive effort that the administrative team has put into explaining exactly what happened, it appears as if more than a few of you still have no idea what the hell happened.

1. The amount of incredibly off-topic blogs was getting to be too much.

2. The mainspace, the most important part of the wiki, was being almost completely ignored.

3. Enough bad edits made it through without being reverted that high quality articles managed to sink to new lows, and most of our articles on games pre-CoD4 are in terrible shape and need work.

4. Darkman figured that enough was enough and contacted Cod4 on a different wiki.

5. Cod4 and Darkman began to formulate a plan to get the wiki back on track (and yes, dispute it all you want, but the wiki was most definitely NOT ON TRACK).

6. I don't know exactly what happened here other than that both EightOhEight and Chia were let in on it before I was.

7. Cod4 contacted me to show me what they were going to do. It seemed pretty alright to me, but I recommended that we bring in WYK and Bovell, who were, in my opinion, the two most level-headed and experienced administrators who had yet to be informed of the planned changes.

8. We reached a general consensus and posted the planned restrictions to the wiki.

9. The vast majority of you flipped the fuck out.

10. We eased up on the restrictions (I'm not going to go into detail on this one because all of you should be aware of the current situation by this time).

Now for the arguments that you may have heard already:

This is the Call of Duty Wiki. Our most important purpose, by a longshot, is to be a professional, unbiased, and complete encyclopedia on the Call of Duty series. This is not Facebook. Making e-friends here is quite alright, but not when everyone suddenly decides to talk about random crap instead of helping the wiki. You are all more than capable of exchanging screen names and carrying on such conversations elsewhere. Is it convenient to do it here? Yes. Does it divert attention away from more important matters? Absolutely. Many of you talked about how this wiki was "going to shit." Well, that happened a long time ago, children. You see, there used to be a time where myself and several other users would make hundreds of mainspace edits a month and were able to focus on making this wiki a better one. Then blogging came about. It started out as a small, harmless, and pretty cool feature. We got to know each other a bit better. It was fun. But over time, blogging insidiously began to occupy more and more of everyone's time. Without even realizing it, we all began to focus on relationships and lolcats more than Call of Duty. In this regard I believe that everyone, myself included, shares a bit of the blame. We let it get to this point. But then, once a few of us saw the issue and tried to rectify it, we were crucified. Demonized. It was totally ridiculous. The community acted like, as Darkman put it, we had just murdered their parents in front of them when all we did was try to force them to carry on their off-topic conversations elsewhere, while we, the people who actually care about this wiki and what it stands for, tried to fix it up a bit with no distractions. We didn't tell you that you could never speak to each other again. You still had your talk pages. You still had your off-wiki screen names. But no. Apparently it isn't good enough unless you can drag a significant portion of the community into your distracting discussions by bombarding the recent changes log.

We understand that we went (a little) too far. We understand that we should have been more transparent. Now please, get the hell off of our backs.