Discussion:The Question of Influence

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SwankyPants (talk) 14:59, 19 April 2021 (MDT)

TL;DR: How much influence should a regular user be allowed to have on the wiki, or even a small section of the wiki?

As many may or may not know who I am or what this is about, I feel the need to introduce myself. I'm SwankyPants, a frequent user of this site. Recently, I've breached 2k edits, and currently I am working on a project I have self titled "The Great Monastic Crusade". Cheesy, yes, but it was the first thing I could come up with.

Essentially, the goal of this project is for me to fix, change, and otherwise improve just about every monk subclass that may or may not need it, with the goal of having a relatively high quality section for at least one SRD class, across the board. This has ranged from small edits, revisions, full rewrites/works, and other such things. As of now, the number of pages I've(more or less) finished working on for this project total 21, ~10% of all monk subclasses, give or take. This only counts those that I've worked on as part of this project, and before this point I've probably worked on a dozen more. Odds are, I'm not stopping any time soon, and by the time I will stop, that percentage may be twice or even three times the size.

From my perspective, this might be a problem for a few reasons. For starters, in doing this I may have too much influence over how most monk subclasses are balanced. Sure, I put out a lot of balance tags, and while those still effect it, I don't exactly have the final say over everything, and the tags go on a smattering of things, none too centralized. However, this is a concentrated effort by one person(me), who is actively changing a large amount of pages from a single section to fit his opinion of balance. While I am trying to keep myself in check by regularly communicating with the community discord for thoughts on my work, they only do so much.

My pages often are formatted and worded fairly well, and seem official enough. It's more likely that someone will use a page I worked on. So, as I see it, I may or may not have influenced the stability of several different campaigns, with little to no oversight.

While this influence may or may not be bad, it's still a lot for me to essentially be an authority on this as a regular guy with no real qualification

So my question is, should I be allowed to do this? If not, to what degree should I be allowed? Should I stop now?

Beyond that, in this project, I've essentially replaced several different pages and made them entirely different than what they were, shreds of their former selves. If you look at things like Way of the Star (5e Subclass), or Way of the Silent Death (5e Subclass), and then their original versions, the originals hardly exist as of now. I have completely changed pages with few to no tags. Do I have the authority to continue doing this, too?