User blog:Servant of Evillious/Six Month Report: 2013 Part I



Well it’s that time of the year. As per our admin’s approval, I will be providing a six month report of our progress since 2013 started and give an idea of where we are heading. The purpose of this post is to help illustrate the amount of changes/improvements made to the wiki as well as help explain why we have made some of the changes we have made (so yes… this is a consolidated post for all your complaints…) and how some of these will affect future works. Enough of that! Let’s get this road paved!

Blood-Stained Switch
In December, we had the release of Blood-Stained Switch and later Deadly Sins of Evil: The Lunacy of Duke Venomania. For Blood-Stained, a comment translation led to the wiki labeling it as “non-canon” for the time being and was ignored. That said, once more information was translated and made available, the interpretation of this comment was determined incorrect and the information provided directly tied Blood-Stained Switch to being a canon song as well as requiring quite a few changes, besides adding a song page.

Validity Debate
Now the wiki is well aware of a specific topic being brought up regarding mothy’s comments. To give the necessary backstory: information is usually left by mothy in the form of comments whenever he releases a new song. Usually, new comments are added to old song videos as well as the comments he places on the new release, hinting at or adding different information.

The issue brought up by one of our wiki users contested that the NND user “mothy” wasn’t who we thought he was and that the comments should be ignored since we couldn’t confirm that the user was in fact our creator. Now, the argument sounds good as a synopsis, but it is flawed in several areas. First off, just because there is no “author’s comments” section enabled on mothy’s NND account, doesn’t mean the one leaving the comments isn’t him.

Now for the counter-argument (this is directed straight at you Chana): First off, the videos being posted are indeed by mothy, as are any information he puts in Japanese or English in them. The account posting them is advertised on his blog and twitter consistently since the beginning and there is little doubt the account is his. Also, saying that the user commenting is a “copy cat” brings up several issues. On a technical level, two users named “mothy” is infeasible for NND. You can’t have two accounts with the same name, so the person who is commenting is the person who posts the videos.

On a common sense level, if there was a fake running rampant for all this time in the comments section, why hasn’t the actual mothy done anything about it, especially since it is happening on his own account.

Now, you could say “well he doesn’t read the fan’s comments” but then there is the issue of the information itself. The user assumed to be mothy is very knowledgeable about information and sometimes reveals or hints at details before they have an official release.

In conclusion, the conspiracy of where we get our comments is determined invalid. Anyone willing to doubt that will have to conjure an argument for how mothy’s twitter, blog, and NND account are all fakes and that everything we have known is a lie. Until then, mothy is mothy; plain and simple.

HER and Ma
Now the information from mothy’s comments confirmed his intent that BSS is part of Evillious (although his comment seems to refer to it not being part of any particular series or era in the timeline) and with that caused some difficulties. Speculation was abound to who Ma was, usually centered around the idea she was Elluka gone mad or once again possessed by Irina. Instead, mothy says that the patient of BSS was split into two halves:

アイアールを猫と人間に分離させる.

"Separated into IR cat and human."

Naturally, there have been issues trying to reconcile this information with Recollective Musicbox and how to proceed. On top of that, the confirmation came that Elluka and Irina combined to “form Ma”. The term “combined” gives a different connotation from possession and the term “form” implies a new entity. That, combined with the extra chapters featuring Ma showing her share personality traits akin to both Elluka and Irina, we created a page for Ma and separated her and information regarding her from Elluka.

For now and likely into the future, we are going to be separating Irina, Elluka, and Ma as separate characters due to their unique circumstances. There is still a bit of room to interpret what this combined entity is metaphysically (a new person entirely, some conglomerate of Elluka and Irina’s minds and wills, Irina dominating Elluka or vice-versa, etc.) so it is best to segregate everyone to remain clear and simple for you, our readers.

Now for the next matter… We have been waiting on more details about the mysterious patient of BSS before taking any radical action. However, details have been scant and no new songs or comments by mothy have further elaborated on her. Because keeping detailed information on Ma defeats the purpose of our “segregation” policy on these characters, the patient will be getting her own page. When this info was first made public, the name “IR” was used to give this character a name besides “the patient” or “the girl” being used. The basis for this comment links back to mothy with his statement here:

アイアールの人間の部分がエルルカになった

"Human part of IR became Elluka"

Now, this name has served its purpose but is now deemed inefficient as being used. Usually, mothy spells out “I.R.” in English characters when referring to Irina, rather than in Japanese. As a result, the name was fitting but it does cause confusion between the two and considering it “official” when IR is used to describe “I.R.” or “Abyss I.R.” has caused trouble. Another possibility is that Irina is supposed to be the patient herself (or was who she was before the “split” into her other half, Elluka).

Because of this uncertainty, we will just be creating a page for the character herself and consider her separate from the others as well, not touching how we treat Elluka or Irina until another source reinforces our understanding of this unusual dilemma. So we are opening up the discussion to you, the community of Evillious.

The name for this character and her article is currently set to be “Her” or “HER” in reference to being the “Hereditary Evil Raiser” with the syndrome of the same name or just give the dramatic pronoun of “Her” to denote the special place she now has in the story (or rather, the backstory). Do you find these names acceptable? If so, which would you prefer? Now’s your chance to cast your vote on this before we set up the page.

With this, we will also be making some separate but somewhat related changes to Elluka and Irina. For one, we are going to discard the notion of “sister-in-laws” for them. Irina only refers to Elluka as her “sister” or “big sister”, which may refer to them being two halves of the same being rather than legal relationship. Also, we don’t know if Elluka actually married Kirill or simply took on the name sometime afterward in memorial to him (you know, since marrying someone who went mad after you killed his sister isn’t the first thing you think about).

Irina’s relationship to Kirill may also be in doubt. The romaji for the word translated as “little sister” (imouto) in RM also means, “stepsister”, which further complicates the matter. Simply put, Irina and Elluka will be “other halves” to each other, the patient of BSS will be their “original form”, and Ma will be their “recombined form”. Kirill will be listed as Irina’s brother and Elluka’s fiancé. We will work to remove any mention of them being in-laws until more information is put out.

Finally, a page will be made for the HER syndrome itself, with all information we have on it. It will be easier for us to have a page for what we do know of this condition, no matter how small that is, and expand upon it as we learn more information (and there are a lot of videos to search for comments about HER by mothy).

Lunacy Material
With the release of the Venomania novel and manga, new information was mined and the manga was summarized in its own page. That said, the page is in poor quality and could use improvement (more on that below).

Regardless, we now have full translations of the manga and several character pages have already been improved with this information. The plan is to have the others brought up to the same quality in the coming weeks.

With that, we will be adding a new page for Rajih and remove him from the minor characters page (more on that below also). With that, the translations are being released on tumblr and can be viewed there.

The novel on the other hand, besides a few scant facts, is going to not probably have any notable information posted from it for a while, until a full translation is made available. Expect the manga and basic understand of events being all we have until then.

Characters
Character pages make up about a third of this wiki, currently; more than likely, this will continue to be the trend as two new character pages have already been mentioned above and inevitably more will be made as new characters are revealed. Our policy with making characters has been a little inconsistent, largely because of how it has been handled in the past. Characters who probably shouldn’t have a page due to lack of information (cough Caspar and Joseph cough cough) have one anyway while others with larger roles don’t (Rajih, Minis, and Ein).

The policy you can expect us to see is this: If the character doesn’t have an image portraying them, they won’t have a page. If the character contribute little to the plot and has few and/or rather uneventful appearances, they won’t have a page. If the character is nameless or lacks an alias we can give them until an official name is revealed, they won’t have a page. For those that do have pages, major changes have occurred over the past six months to improve article quality.

Infoboxes
Infoboxes were recently reworked to have a universal format in both their set up and wording, with the idea of being concise yet descriptive the prevailing idea when organizing this. Changes made to Elluka and Irina as well as other characters like Michaela, Eldoh, and Gumillia will be adjusted to match the quality of other pages.

Quotes
Quotes have been a little across the board but we are going to be laying down a new policy for quotes. A quote must be something a character verbally said, not thought. Therefore, many lines said as part of The Servant of Evil, while told as a monologue by Allen, are mostly his inner-thoughts in his novels, and therefore can’t be used.

In contrast, a line that is in quotation marks or presented in the song as something a character said (ie, Banica Conchita’s question to the Stupid Butler as well as the Maid and Butler’s declaration to those who stand before their master) can be considered a quote until a novel or other media proves it otherwise.

Finally, the quote can’t just be any quote and does not have to be the “quote” provided in the Fanbook. The purpose of quotes on character pages is to provide some insight into the character, usually defining a characteristic of the character or an aspect of their personality. Ney’s quote reflects on her duality and hidden nature while being a spy; Gumillia’s reflects on her take on “death” and her concern for others safety, which ironically comes back to bite her in The Last Revolver. These are good quotes and give new readers an idea of the character before diving into the main article.

History Sections
Overall, history sections have been greatly improved across the board for characters. Before, scant details, poor spelling and grammar, and inconsistent linking dominated the sections and made learning information a scavenger hunt. You would learn some details about a character on one page but then be told that a character did something else on another character’s page, leaving you wondering what else was scattered across the wiki. This was unprofessional and needed to be changed.

History sections now properly reflect events a character was involved in told from that character’s perspective. Character pages that were once poor quality have now been given proper treatment, with pages like Mariam Futapie tripling in size with more detailed information and organized sequence of events.

For those newcomers to the wiki, it should make acquiring information much easier while those who have been here for some time can now see the changes and properly read over what is known about each character.

The section isn’t perfect, and changes are going to be made to improve how we organize events into sections (more on that below). On top of that, not all pages have been finished yet. Michaela, Keel, Mikina, and Yukina Freesis have yet to be improved as part of the Story of Evil Project and Liliane Mouchet won’t be touched until Phase II when we begin improving sections relating to Praeludium. We ask that you be patient as the process to improve these pages (rereading the novels and other material specifically relating to the character while writing everything out) can “burn out” the editor rather quickly.

Character Traits
Character Traits have been greatly improved overall and we will continue to improve them as needed. Personality sections in particular however, have been further supported by our Character Connections section improvements and the hope is to have this finished by the end of the summer.

Featured in…
We recently reformatted Featured in… sections so that it was a gallery linking to each song rather than a section for the song, followed by an assorted description. The reason for this was because it ended up just repeating what was already mentioned in the History section, more often than not, and that the information was better learned on the actual song page if a reader is interested in learning more. There also needed to be a greater balance of images within the articles, as a lack of pictures in History sections is a small plague we hope to rectify soon (more on that below). The loss of text was instead redirected at adding some meat to the bony Character Connections section.

Character Connections
We have recently begun renaming “Connections to other Character” to a truncated name and are reworking how these connections work. They will not function more specifically as character relationship sections, elaborating more on how a person feels about each person they know rather than just a small one line of text saying who they are. You can learn most about who these characters are by just reading the History Section and following the links to their own character pages so the small redundancy was unneeded.

Now, the sections can help those who haven’t read the novels get a “feel” for the relationship between characters. You may read “Character A does Action C for Character B” but you may not know why Character A did that. This section should help clarify. The idea is not to reiterate what interactions Characters A and B had either. We will try to minimize repeating actions unless it is important on how Character A’s relationship with Character B developed (ie, Margarita was happy have married Caspar but his philandering hurt her and she became depressed by their failing marital life, etc. etc.).

The improvements aren’t closed to being finished but we hope they will help add more meat to pages in place of the loss of text to the Featured in… Section.

Gallery and Trivia Sections
Galleries sections had tabs added to them, thankfully, which has helped sort and truncate gallery sizes on pages. However, a new policy will soon be implemented to help further improve organization, especially in regards to text. Because this may also be complimented with further improvements to other sections on Character pages, the details are being refined before anything is done.

Trivia sections on the other hand are going to go through a different process. While they, like most sections, were improved, the policy regarding them has been laid down. For all trivia sections, a trivia point can only be one sentence (one period per bullet) and can only extended to three lines maximum. Trivia is supposed to be short and insightful; if a succinct sentence cannot be formed, it is a comment or dissertation, not trivia. This will avoid 15 line paragraphs being trivia for now on.

For the most part, redundant or obvious info will also be removed for now although certain trivia points (like character names being based on their Vocaloid) is planned to be implemented consistently across relevant pages in the future.

Albums
Back in February, album pages were implemented as part of improving mothy’s page and add more to the wiki. Lacking a proper template for them, we used a character infobox and kind of threw together the pages as best we could. While there have been improvements, album pages are still poor quality and were built on even shakier foundations. A major project is planned to help greatly improve them in the near future, assuming all goes well for now.

Manga
As mentioned previously, The Lunacy of Duke Venomania manga had a page added, although its quality could be improved. The Comedy of Evil Project also received a page after its release. The initial name translations were changed once we discussed one of our translator’s more thorough look at them. A small change in the future is being considered to add “The” before “Servant” for the Opera Buffa manga, simply to remain consistent with our other translations for “The Servant of Evil”.

Songs
A vast majority of song pages were rewritten from the ground up with entire sections and trivia reorganized and added with a greater consistency. Related Songs, as a section, was left untouched for the most part but will be looked at more closely in the future. We also have been adding pictures to galleries for songs. While these images aren’t perfect and needed to be edited for better cropping, they are acceptable for now and a great improvement over having no song images at all.

EC and Mothy
Around February the Comprehensive Guide page was revamped and made the Evillious Chronicles page since it ended up just summarizing the Evillious Chronicles. However, in the months since its recreation, it has become outdated and a quality gap becomes increasingly apparent. As a result, a second revamp will occur again in the future, greatly changing it and hopefully fixing current issues it suffers. Similarly, Akuno-P himself was given a page with a lot of information, including gallery links to the novel pages and a list of the songs he had created. The page is acceptable now but plans to further improve it are being made.

Series
In Spring, we added End of the Four as a series page, including two of the Masters songs that will be a part of it once they are released. Mothy made his comments that he plans on creating songs for Hellish and Heavenly and does give a name to these four songs as a series. Therefore, the page was made. Similarly, series pages were given improvements to their sections and quality.

While there is a basic structure followed by each of them, they all branch off at one point or another to suit their individual needs (Story of Evil can’t be treated the same way as Seven Deadly Sins Series for instance). Also, several series pages also function as a page for their namesake. Due to this, a Terminology Section was added to the SDS and Original Sin Series to help consolidate information on terms used in relation to them.

Before, information on Demons of Sin and what exactly the Seven Deadly Sins were was never outright addressed and defined on the wiki and kind of left to picking up hints around the wiki. It became clear after we added the section that most were ignorant of these hints that were left, as questions quickly popped up at “where the hell this stuff about demons” came from so it was a needed improvement to those pages.

States
We began recategorizing country pages and dubbing them “states” as a more technical term that better applies to the territories that have shifted from being their own nations to just being another part of a larger nation. Similarly, the pages themselves were completely revamped, including sections on their Geography, Governments, and Culture. Pages like Lucifenia and Beelzenia greatly benefitted from this and the groundwork has been set up well into the future for when more information is learned from the different novels.

Places and Groups
Among out locations, we already had one “place” which was Gallerian’s Theater, which renamed Evil’s Theater. The reason for this is due to the Evils Kingdom booklet titling it’s EC 982 section as such when referring to the theater’s construction, a fact later reinforced when the renaming of Millennium Tree Forest was titled as Evil’s Forest. Similar name changes have been considered for the courtroom and cinema to be renamed “Evil’s Court” and “Evil’s Kingdom” but that is a different discussion.

New pages were made for the Millennium Tree Forest and the Lucifenian Royal Palace, with more planned to be added when more information is gained for other places. Similarly, pages were added for groups like the Lucifenian Resistance and the Three Heroes, and two subcategories were added groups. Family pages were placed under one of these subcategories, “families”, while groups with a clear hierarchy were given the subcategory of “organizations”.

All these group pages were improved to reflect a better quality and a page was made for the Venomania Bloodline long before that to help illustrate these rather large family lines from the Marlon and Venomania gene pool. More groups will likely be added but for now, we are finished with focusing on adding them.

Miscellaneous Changes
Like its series, each of the Seven Deadly Sins were improved greatly to help raise its quality. Also, our main page was completely redone, streamlining it to look more visually pleasing. One of the better functions it now serves is as a news outlet, with a news section on the right side for all EC fans, both new and old who visit the wiki and its complementary slideshow with news updating new releases for books, songs, and manga. This will also be connected to tumblr as a media outlet, which has allowed us to spread the news around much better. Information from the Evils Court material has also been inputted and added to relevant pages.

Categories have also been slowly redone in preparation for a major improvement to their pages once all the categories and sub-categories are added to pages. Currently, we have categories properly applied to characters, locations, groups, and series, although there will be further improvements yet to come.

Conclusion
As you can see, our users have done a lot of changes and estimations point to nearly the entire wiki having major improvements done to it, approximately 87%. This ignores some of the smaller, more specific changes we have done such as renaming several song pages to reflect mothy’s English translation (Judgement of Corruption vs Judgment of Corruption) on NND or assuming Master of the Hellish Yard is an awakened vessel of sin until the Wrath song comes out, rather than sort of sitting the issue on a fence.

A major concern of the wiki is making sure our information is clear and easy to find and read for our visitors and to help grow the Evillious community and fandom. That said, we are in no way near finished with the wiki and we will continue to work so long as we have the time and passion to for the series to continue editing. Still, there is a lot to be proud of for our members of the wiki who worked so hard to make these changes happen.

Current Projections
At the moment, there are plans for the following additions/changes in the next six months:
 * Continued revamping of categories to rebuild organization on the wiki
 * Improvements to mothy’s page
 * Revamping of the Evillious Chronicles page (again)
 * Revamping media pages (particularly novel, manga, album, and side story pages)
 * Adding information from Twiright Prank, The Daughter of Fog, the Lunacy manga, and Her Reason
 * Revamping Minor Character pages
 * Browsing through previously revamped or updated pages to ensure all information is correct


 * Reevaluating what is considered part of a series

Important Discussions
Besides the aforementioned HER and HER Syndrome pages, there are discussions on whether to consider Servant of Evil ~Opera Buffa~! canon and add the information to the timeline. Currently, we are waiting for three-five chapter translations before making any judgments one way or the other. It will give us an idea how seriously we should take the manga’s events and how to best implement their information.

Then there is the never ending discussion on what is fanon is always an endless debate. Outright wrong information or unreasonable speculation always seems to linger somewhere in one line or another, especially as we learn new information from mothy or his works. Even our reasonable speculation is debated constantly with some unmentioned changes

Special Honors
I’d like to recognize the following users for their invaluable contributions to the wiki in the past six months for a vast majority of the above listed changes and for their continued support:
 * Octofan
 * ChefGummy
 * Adept-eX
 * Maddji

Survey
Give us your opinions as we collect data to help determine which direction we should be taking the wiki for now and into the future! We ask that you answer all poll questions to give us the best and most consistent results. No need to have your own account, just answer!

How long have you been part of the Evillious fandom? Less than a month At least 3 months At least 6 months At least a year At least 3+ years How did you find the wiki? I found it on my own while trying to learn about a specific song/series. A friend told me about it and I looked it up. I saw it mentioned on youtube/tumblr/facebook/etc. I googled it. Other What do you think of the changes overall? I think they are all great! I like most of them. I don't really care. I dislike some of them. I hate all of them! How helpful have these changes been to you? Everything has been a lot clearer now in the past six months! They have been helpful but not everything has been clear. I haven't really noticed any changes. I don't think many of these have been very helpful. I am completely confused and nothing helped alleviate my confusion! What changes from the past six months are the most satisfying? Character pages: I know who does what! References: I can finally know where info is coming from. Series: All this confusing stuff is starting to make sense! Songs: A lot of cool info and clear trivia about the songs. New pages: All the new pages added have been really helpful. Do you like our new main page? Yes! It is awesome! Yeah, I think it is okay. I haven't really given it much thought. Nah, I don't think it is that great. Bleh... It sucks! Do you like our new main page's News section? Yes! I look every day for new announcements. Yeah but I don't check it that often. I didn't even know the wiki gave news. No, I kind of find it useless. I never bother checking and I never will. How has the wiki helped you as a fan of Evillious? This series is so cool and deep! I am so glad I read the wiki. The wiki has been great but it hasn't helped me gain that much more interest. Meh, it's a wiki. It doesn't affect how I feel about Evillious. After reading this wiki, I have lost a bit of interest in this series. Reading through it all, Evillious isn't as cool as I thought/hoped it would be. Did you find this blog post useful, helpful, or insightful? Yes No Fan Opinion: Which name would you prefer for the singer of Blood-Stained Switch's page? HER Her IR Other (leave comment)