Table of Contents

Enclusionism

<note>This article is just an expression of an opinion Full Metal Lion developed over his time on the Island. It is not an official policy or endorsed by any moderator or admin.1)2)3)4)5)6)</note> (Not to be confused with inclusionism, the philosophy that the wiki should have lots of pages on many topics)

Enclusionism is a doctrine guideline conjecture play on words philosophyn opinion that states that if an Islandy resource7) can be hosted on the Improbable Island servers, then it probably should be. For the average player trying to manage resources, this translates to putting lots of things into the Enquirer, especially the Wiki of Lies or the Gallery of Shame.8)

The core reasoning behind enclusionism is that things which are not hosted on the Island's servers tend to be lost with time. The Island has been around since 2008, which makes it old in Internet years. The Island has outlasted a surprisingly large amount of websites. Of course, you have the cases where a player sets up a website to host some Island-related resources and the domain name lapses9) after a couple of years as the player loses interest10)11)12), but the Island also outlasted userscripts.org, which was a real website that had millions of visits per month.13)

Even if a website doesn't stop existing, it might delete or move the data, or the Island community might forget where to find it14)15) It's hard to tell whether the Island will outlast a given website or vice versa, but we have pretty good odds on the prediction that the Island will not outlast itself,16) ergo the Island's servers are a good place to store things to prevent them from being lost.

One must be smart in the application of this principle, though. For instance, not all parts of the server are created equal: it's easier to find things in the wiki than the forum; the bio of a character is probably not a great place to put permanent, publicly interesting information not about that character; and /dev/null is not a good place to store things at all. Keeping a copy of encluded information on your own hard drive may also prove to be useful!

Furthermore, enclusion should usually be nondestructive. If you'll examine the examples below, you'll find that the ones that were encluded from somewhere else have a link to that original place. One should try to get the permission of the person who created the resource one is encluding, if possible.17) However, if the unencluded resource can be locked, with directions to edit the version on the wiki, this might reduce redundancy. Additionally, if every agrees that the old resource can be destroyed safely after enclusion, and there are no very important links pointing to the old resource, then destroying the unencluded resource could save some space on a hard drive somewhere, or reduce redundancy. Backups are important, but they don't usually have to be public.

Obvious examples of this philosophy in practice can be found at the wiki pages Loaders, Titan Hunting, the Greasemonkey namespace and Lions. More subtle examples can be found in, say, the text color list.

Candidates for Enclusion

What Is NOT a Good Candidate for Enclusion?

There are some resources which shouldn't be moved onto the wiki or on the gallery, usually because it would be too much effort or the Enquirer can't support all of the features that that resource needs. Examples:

1)
That we know of.
2)
Although Hairy Mary has a high degree of sympathy for the opinions expressed here.
3)
Full Metal Lion has been editing the Wiki of Lies for 8 years, though, so his opinion should count for something
4)
If Full Metal Lion's Wiki of Lies career were a human being it would probably be able to edit a wiki by now.
5)
It wouldn't be able to edit a wiki very well, though.
6)
what a coincidence, neither can Full Metal Lion!
7)
resource here meaning “thing”
8)
The term “enclusionism” is derived from changing the i in inclusion to the e in enquirer
9)
or whatever
10)
not that those players are bad people or anything! Interests change as time goes on, that's fine!
11)
for a good example of this phenomenon, see the part of the Text Color List that deals with color preview tools and currently points to Improbable Island's official preview tool at http://improbableisland.com/writingtool.php. That footnote has, throughout its history, pointed to http://www.slugwatch.com/public/iitextpreview.html, Beeps's http://bitwise-guy.com/improbable/ci/preview, Devin's http://www.shadedraco.com/ii-text-preview.html, and/or Rentoraa's http://thedarkworld.net/projects/ii-preview/. The only one of these fan efforts remaining on the internet as of 2016-07-10 is Rentoraa's (which is the most recent by far) and it's now outdated, anyway.
12)
or, come to think of it, see the note at the top of Loaders for the most surprising example of this phenomenon
13)
Of course, some off-Island websites are still holding up. Here's a list of them:
14)
I don't know of any examples of this actually happening, feel free to add them to this footnote if you do
15)
If I knew of any examples, they wouldn't really be examples, now would they?
16)
well, Labs is a data point counter to that, but we'll get into that in a later footnote…
17)
Also, encluding something against the creator's wishes would be unkind.
18)
Cousjava?
19)
and possibly other things
20)
I can't find it in any archives
21)
Perhaps each blog should get one page, (perhaps in the namespace “blogs”) and that page would have all of the blog posts, in order, organized with headlines.
23)
a spreadsheet for personal use could easily be uploaded to the Gallery of Shame, probably
24)
You know what I just noticed? This is the only link to that folder on the entire Wiki of Lies, as of Oct 10, 2016 (but almost certainly since this essay was written, and probably ever). I recently had to find that folder, so I searched the wiki for my own essay about why you shouldn't store thing in google docs because people might lose track of them in order to find a bunch of google docs I had lost track of. Just by complaining about this problem I've alleviated it!
25)
duh
26)
Especially because some people start, say, an online spreadsheet out of the goodness of their hearts and don't want to bother with learning wiki syntax and don't want Full Metal Lion stumbling into their lives yelling “HEY GUYS HAVE YOU CONSIDERED MOVING THIS WHOLE OPERATION TO THE WIKI?”
27)
Additionally, they might have pretty colors in their spreadsheets.
28)
This guideline is the primary reason I haven't encluded labs, manifested in three ways:
  1. The information in labs doesn't seem interesting enough
  2. I would want to ask CavemanJoe about doing so, and that bastard never returns my calls
  3. I cannot find a complete archive of labs. (Indeed, the most interesting things, like a wiki page intriguingly titled “You Are Smart”, are not covered in any archive I can find)
If I did enclude the wiki of labs, it would probably be as a namespace in the wiki
29)
This is also why I haven't tried to enclude all the art from http://improbableislanders.deviantart.com/, especially because I'd need to ask permission from everyone. I have sent a message to the leader of the group asking her to remind the members of the group that the Gallery of Shame exists, though.
30)
this is another reason to ask permission first