This is a short report, at least by Arch standards, but I wanted to get a few announcements out.

First up: the Parabellum Trivia ends in a little under a week, along with all the other Cycle 2 competitions, so get those entries in! This is a normal, boring trivia that should only take a few minutes, not an insane Arch trivia you’ll spend four hours on.

Second, I want to congratulate our winners for the Q2 SA Decathlon: Zebina "Ji" Arad, Morgan Sorenn, and Lexiconus Qor, with an additional shout-out to June’s winner, Lan.

Wiki Things

I was hoping we’d get one or even two great applications for Wiki Tribune, or at least one pretty decent one. Instead, we got several really solid ones. Ultimately, Korvis and I went with Nikora Rhan, who has been doing quite a lot of uncompensated maintenance on our wiki for years now, and has a deep understanding of our categories, templates, and user behavior. Bograt and Wolfe both impressed us and have joined the effort as Wiki Staff to support Rhan. Lastly, our outgoing Tribune, Bentre Stahoes, is also sticking around as staff.

A Wiki Staff isn’t new, but it’s been several years since we had one. There was simply a lack of interest in the role and I’m delighted that things have turned around so much.

Most of what’s been happening on the wiki front hasn’t been flashy or glamorous, but there has been a lot bubbling under the surface. The wiki is almost entirely free of red links now, for example, and Rhan alone has removed hundreds of unused files. What’s more, he was able to reach out to members to ensure we’re not deleting the only copy somebody has of art commissions, which is a level of service I was not able to offer by myself. I’ve fleshed out the documentation and SOPs to cover things that were not previously documented and the team has been doing a lot of planning and had discussions about how to improve the wiki experience for you going forward. I’m genuinely excited to see where they take things.

The down side to all of this is that I haven’t had much bandwidth to spare for the SA this past month, and my staff is once again up to ten people working in three vaguely related areas. But I consider this an up front investment and not a recurring cost. While I’ll continue to be involved in wiki management, I’m going to be leaning on Nikora and the gang for the large majority of normal maintenance. So hopefully I’ll have more SA accomplishments to report on the next time you hear from me.

Trivia Things

Kanal’s weekly trivia sessions are popular, but the truth is that running them every single week gets extremely tiresome. His job as Trivia Tribune is to ensure that we have that consistent weekly event, not to run it personally every single time. I poked around a bit during my last term to try to get other volunteers, without much success. But so far, we’ve had an easier run of it this round. As many of you know, we just wrapped up a three-week series by Siv and we have one by Korvyn teed up for this Sunday. This is good for everyone, as it gives Kanal a bit of a break but provides more variety in trivia topics and styles. So I want to talk a bit about how to get involved if you’d like to run your own trivia session using the Discord bot.

Jenni wrote up a wiki how-to on this a while back, but it’s pretty straightforward. Write fifteenish multiple choice questions. Indicate which answer is right. Then reach out to me and Kanal and we’ll get you on the calendar. We’ll get things set up with the bot and create the Discord server event for you. You will make the competition on the site and handle grading, and thus get the credits and XP. That’s it.

One last reminder: you don’t have to use the bot. If you want to run a chat trivia like we used to do in Telegram or IRC, you’re welcome to use #trivia for that. If you want to run a site-based trivia competition, go for it. But the bot is a club resource and we’re here to support you if you want to use it.

Closing Remarks

As always, if anyone sees any errors in the course notes or exam questions, please submit them through the form. Scrolls of Foundation are a nutritious part of a healthy XP diet.

I am always available at [Log in to view e-mail addresses] or archenksov on Discord.

Academy Changelog

DARK BROTHERHOOD FUNDAMENTALS
Activities 101: Fiction
- Updated references to Run-ons to reflect their replacement with RP competitions (Xantros)

DEPARTMENT OF GALACTIC STUDIES
Philosophy II: Cults of the Force
- Corrected Typo on question 15 (Kora)

DEPARTMENT OF LEADERSHIP, LAW, AND COMMUNICATION
Cryptography 101
- Clarified a question in the exam