World Record Progression: Gelatin Fan article any%

{{GelatinFan}}... a contestant on The Wiki Camp made by the user Lily56709, who has gone through plenty of challenges. The first challenge required Lily to create a contestant page, which lead to the birth of {{GelatinFan}}. Lily worked hard on {{GelatinFan}}'s article, and as of today its 4,924 characters long excluding categories. With a list of changes, personality, coverage, trivia, and even goofs, Lily outdid herself with the creation of this article. But on April 29th, history changed itself, and wiki editors from across the world tried to speedrun the creation of {{GelatinFan}}'s page, making it as few characters it could possibly be.

Today, we're going to look at the world record progression of the any% category of the {{GelatinFan}} article.

The first ever speedrun of this category was done by a user named batman77bil. Batman's run was fairly basic, and the only tricks he used in this run was skipping over events that's not required for 100% completion. The first thing he's able to remove from the article is the Postive relationships/Negative relationships. For those who don't know, whenever you form a positive or negative relationship with another character in The Wiki Camp, that character is added to {{GelatinFan}}'s infobox. So to save some time, Batman does a run where {{GelatinFan}} barely interacts with the other characters, making it so that he does not form any positive or negative relationships with them. He also avoids some of the optional events listed in the Coverage section, which is stuff {{GelatinFan}} does in between challenges, including playing tic-tac-toe with slug, rickrolling sercy, and disguising himself as a Bird Specialist. Skipping all of these events causes the Coverage section to be cut down in characters immensely. The gallery is also optional, as the stuff contained within is just bonus content that can be found on other pages.

Link to batman77bil's run: Creating the Gelatin Fan article any% in 3,193 characters by batman77bil

For the first run of the category, it was pretty good, coming in at a total of 3,193 characters, shaving off 1,713 from the original article, and at the time this was thought to be a perfect any% run, as it perfectly skipped all of the optional events. Until one day, a user by the name of doblemic made a run of his own, beating batman77bil's record.

Doblemic was able to heavily alter the history of {{GelatinFan}} in order to take away a lot of characters from the article. Instead of being on Team I Love You, doblemic had {{GelatinFan}} join a team simply named O, and for challenge 3, he made an episode titled P. These title changes saved a lot of characters from {{GelatinFan}}'s article. Along with this, doblemic was able to perform many skips in the run, trying to minimize the article's length as much as possible. His run clocked in at 2,354 characters, beating batman77bil's record by 839.

Link to doblemic's run: Creating the Gelatin Fan article any% in 2,354 characters by doblemic

A few days later, Doblemic was able to beat his own record even further by using some tricks involving the source code. The character count in these runs isn't just determined how many characters appear on the article, but instead how many characters appear in the source code. For example, you'd think a blue link to the page O would only count as one character, but it actually counts as five, because creating a blue link requires you to surround the link with 2 square brackets on each side. With this in mind, Doblemic was able to cut down the character count by 270, just by removing stuff such as blue links, headings, sub-headings, and bullet points.

Link to doblemic's second run: Creating the Gelatin Fan article any% in 2,084 characters by doblemic

This record of 2,084 stayed for quite some time, until a famous glitch hunter named Shoestapler discovered one of the most infamous glitches in this category, called the "Changes Skip". At the time, the Changes section of the {{GelatinFan}} article took up a total of 365 characters, and unfortunately, this section was required to complete the article. But Shoestapler found a way to skip this part of the article entirely, by changing your system's date to any date between May 27, 2017 and December 23, 2017, you're able to revert the Gelatin Fan template to it's oldest revision, completely getting rid of the need to have the Changes section in the first place. Changing to any date after December 23 causes the changes section to reappear, and setting it to a date before May 27 causes the article to crash whenever trying to open it up.

The first run to use this trick was by a user named Faro, who lowered the record down to 1,498 characters. During this run, Faro discovered that setting your systems date to exactly May 27 causes one of the trivias about the amount of users who have the {{Gelatin Fan}} template on their BFDI wiki profile to disappear, because at this date, there were no users who had that template on their page as it was just created.

Link to Faro's run: Creating the Gelatin Fan article any% in 1,498 characters by Faro

Faro's run was the first ever speedrun to reach <2,000, and the next goal the community tried to achieve was <1,000. This, however, would be a really hard goal to accomplish for runners. With the current record being 1,498 characters long, 498 of those characters would have to be removed in order to accomplish this. Runners tried for many months to make it possible, but eventually the community started to give up, thinking 1,498 was the smallest the {{GelatinFan}} article could get.

...that is, until a user named Ham05 came along and changed everything. Ham submitted a run that was absolutely groundbreaking. You see, having {{GelatinFan}}'s name appear properly can be quite annoying, as it requires you to surround his name with nowiki and /nowiki. This takes up a lot of characters, especially because {{GelatinFan}}'s name is repeated plenty of times throughout the run. Ham found a solution to this by turning {{GelatinFan}} into an actual template. This saved a LOT of characters, bringing the run down to 1,226. Unfortunately, this still didn't bring the record down to <1,000, but it was definitely progress. Ham would not give up now however, as he would spend all day grinding this run until he somehow reached the goal.

Link to Ham05's run: Creating the Gelatin Fan article any% in 1,226 characters by Ham05

Now you might be wondering where {{GelatinFan}}'s creator, Lily has been throughout all of this. Lily actually had no idea that people were speedrunning {{GelatinFan}}'s article until one day Ham05 reached out to her asking whether or not {{GelatinFan}} was male. Lily responded by saying "No, {{GelatinFan}} is just a template.". This was important information, as now Ham would be able to remove the statements on the page that {{GelatinFan}} is male, as it had just been confirmed that he is not. This would be able to bring the record down to 1,172 characters, but Ham didn't wanna stop there. He didn't wanna stop until he got rid of just 172 more characters.

Confused by this sudden confrontation, Lily decided to check on The Wiki Camp to see the dozens of runs that have been submitted while she was gone. During this time, Lily had been trying to brainstorm ideas for Challenge 4 of the camp, but couldn't think of a way to submit a page that's just 280 characters or less. She thought this newfound speedrunning community could help her a lot in the challenge, so she decided to help the community out until this article could somehow get taken down to less than 280 characters.

Lily & Ham05 worked together for many days trying to get the <1,000 record. They kept getting closer and closer, making the record slightly lower more and more, until one day it finally happened. After finding plenty of new skips, they managed to get the record to the triple digits, 792. This run was flawless, and the entire community cheered after finally getting this goal of <1,000 characters. After weeks of grinding, Lily had accepted that this was the perfect run, and making the character count any lower would be impossible, and the rest of the community let this category to rest.

Link to Lily's run: Creating the Gelatin Fan article any% in 792 characters by Lily

Out of nowhere, a few months later, a man named Todd Rogers submitted a run that was only 281 characters long, and it got accepted. The {{GelatinFan}} speedrunning community immediately became suspicious of this run, as many things about it were... off. For starters, the article doesn't include Lily's wiki username or discord ID, and for the article for be eligible for judging it has to include both. Also, half of the page was cut off by a donation from Morgan Freeman preventing us from seeing the rest of the run. There was something fishy about this run, and the community spent the next few weeks discussing the validity of it.

Link to Todd Rogers' run: Creating the Gelatin Fan article any% in 281 characters by Todd Rogers

This even got the attention of {{GelatinFan}} himself, and he discussed this matter with the rest of his team over at Team I Love You Headquarters. After hours of sitting down and thinking with his teammates, {{GelatinFan}} thought of a perfect way to perfect the speedrun category, and beat Todd Rogers at his own game, and also complete Challenge 4 in the process.

{{GelatinFan}} stunned the community by submitting a run that's only 266 characters long. Unlike Todd's run, there was no fishiness here. All of the required information to complete the article was present on this page. This was the perfect run. You could even post the entirety of the {{GelatinFan}} article on Twitter if you really wanted. With this in mind, {{GelatinFan}} wasn't done just yet. He wanted to make some adjustments to his run.

Proud of this month long journey, {{GelatinFan}} took this entire 10,000 character documentary and turned it into a template named "$Blocky" (name suggested by King Phonline) and added it to the run, and because it was a template, it only added 13 characters to the run, keeping this final record at a safe 279 characters.

Link to {{GelatinFan}}'s run: Creating the Gelatin Fan article any% in 279 characters by Lily

And that's it. This was the world record history of the {{GelatinFan}}. It was quite a long journey, but in the end {{GelatinFan}} was able to take the record and even submit it for a challenge. Thanks for watching everyone, see you next time.