Safe Age

## Overview

The **Safe Age** was a period of time in the Surreal Memes Wiki that lasted for approximately 6 weeks, from mid to late October 2018 to the end of November 2018. It started with JoeJoe's Adoption and ended with the introduction of the first SMW Democracy. It was the first era involving active wiki staff since the early ages.

While vandalism and warfare was virtually nonexistent in the Safe Age, this was when issues such as bureaucrat corruption and page spam started to become significant. The wiki was peaceful enough and the period was a large step up from the Age of Chaos, but problems were far from solved.

## Summary

After The Final War ended and I.R.O.N.I.C was victorious, the surreal memes wiki entered a period of uncertainty. There were no vandal attacks except for one minor one on October 1st, but there was no way of knowing if the relative peace would stay or what would become of the wiki.

On October 16th, 2018, medium-significance user JoeJoeTheAnimator made a blog post claiming he was going to adopt the wiki (that is, become a bureaucrat there). His reasoning of why he should be the adopter was that he helped revert earlier mass vandalism. Still, the idea was questioned as JoeJoe had not done nearly as much for the wiki as some other, older users.

Nonetheless, JoeJoe adopted the wiki on October 19th. After being asked, he gave bureaucrat powers to PoseidonHeir and admin to Noob6 OTHER. Some other users also gained powers. The entire wiki rejoiced at this this since these would be the first active admins since Nullatrum, and now vandals and trolls would be much easier to deal with.

However, one problems began to pop up. Almost immediately, Noob6 started abusing his admin powers. Since admin is a lower rank than bureaucrat, this was easy enough to deal with though, and he lost them within the day. But then, JoeJoe started to cause problems himself.

First, he created more and more pages that were completely unrelated to surreal memes. This caused a few other users, notably SANTACLAWS and PoseidonHeir (who were both bureaucrats at this point) to confront JoeJoe about this. JoeJoe, however, refused to stop and even avoid the questioning. By now, the other bureaucrats didn't really trust JoeJoe anymore. Tensions between JoeJoe and the others grew and would eventually become the First JJTA Cold War.

Since Poseidon and SANTA had the same level of power as JoeJoe, none of them could be removed from their position without getting the FANDOM staff to do it. No one wanted that to happen, but JoeJoe became continuously more annoying and avoiding of the questions. Even after the other bureaucrats threatened to wage a war with I.R.O.N.I.C on their side, JoeJoe didn't stop.

The last straw was when he made a threatening editor's note saying that anyone who questioned the surreality of his pages would be blocked or have their given powers taken away. Adding to that, he made unfair wiki rules and generally acted like a dictator. All the other admins and bureaucrats were very ticked off at this point and felt something needed to be done.

By the beginning of November, Poseidon decided that contacting the FANDOM staff and asking them to remove JoeJoe's role was the best option. He posted a message on Bert's wall on Community central. JoeJoe was informed of the message, however, and when he saw it, he finally agreed to be more cooperative. When JoeJoe apologized, Poseidon told the staff that removing his powers would not be necessary.

JoeJoe still caused some problems for the rest of November, but they were nothing compared to what he was doing earlier and he was more or less a helpful and cooperative bureaucrat for the next few weeks. Another problem started to grow exponentially, though: page spam.

In November, there was an influx of new users into the wiki. Friends would invite friends, who would invite friends, and so on. The problem was, many of these new people didn't quite grasp the concept of surreal memes, and they would create pages that were low-quality, non-canon or even simply trash.

At some point these "trash" pages made up more than a third of the wiki, and there was no effective way to deal with them. They were being created faster than they could be deleted or moved someplace else. Although there was no conflict, in terms of surreality level alone the wiki was a shadow of its former self.

GammaRaul, a then relatively new, trustworthy, admin, started a movement to try and save the wiki. His "Be The Change" movement centered around cleaning up spam pages, teaching new users how to actually be surreal, and things like that. It helped the state of the wiki a bit and brought attention to the fact that change was needed, but it wouldn't be enough.

With even the Be The Change movement not fixing the problem, SANTACLAWS had to develop an extreme idea: the idea to bring a clear system of government to the wiki. A democracy. The idea was thought through, developed, expanded on, and by late November a discussion post was made with a poll, asking the community what they thought of the idea. 100% of users voted "yes" on the poll, and in a few days the idea was adopted, and the first elections would be on December 1st.

With the creation of a democratic government, the Democratic Age would begin. In the weeks to come, page spam would become less of a problem. JoeJoe would later get much more corrupt but his power had diminished, and he was no longer as much of a problem. However, the wiki's problems were not even close to finished...