User blog:Eebit/Past vs. Present Tense

Based on this edit to the Kamordah page and this edit to the Hupperdook page by Abelhawk, I figured we (the active editors of the wiki) should probably have a discussion about how we're going to tackle writing articles going forward, so we're not tripping over each other any more.

There has been sparse discussion about it in various isolated pockets on the wiki already, but given that blog posts are much more visible than the Discussion board (given that blogs appear on the front page and also the Special:RecentChanges page and Discussion board posts do not), I thought I would make this blog post to collect the discussions that I've seen and increase their visibility.

Here are threads that I've seen discussing the various approaches:


 * This thread on Nwegh's wall
 * This thread on Hemhem20X6's wall
 * This discussion post by Lukaluri

My personal take is that we already have a longstanding precedent on the wiki of writing things in the present tense. I think that documenting changes to various locales that Vox Machina / the Mighty Nein have visited is important -- for example, I think we should make sure to talk about Emon pre- and post-Chroma Conclave. We have seen Emon change in canon, so we can document the pre-Conclave stuff in the past tense.

But until we see active change, based on the precedent set by the wiki, writing the other articles in past tense assumes that they have been shown to have been destroyed. We have written deceased characters in the past tense to this end, after all!

I'd definitely like to see where the consensus of the active editing userbase lies, so if you have thoughts on how we should proceed I'd love to read them. Obviously we're kind of short on admins these days so we're lacking that "definitive" voice, but hopefully one of them will come back soon to weigh in.