Democratic Age

### Name Origin

Named after the democratic system that was established at the beginning of the era

## Overview

The **Democratic Age** was a historical period of the Surreal Memes Wiki lasting from the beginning of December 2018 to mid-February 2019. It was largely defined by the creation of a democratic government in the wiki and Squidward pepe’s escapade. While the democratic Age saw many of the Safe Age’s problems such as uncontrolled page spam and admin corruption at least partly fixed, this era also had a higher amount of actual conflict than the Safe Age.

## Summary

In late november, to fix the problems of the late Safe Age wiki admins SANTACLAWS and PoseidonHeir had the idea of establishing a clear, organized and democratic government. They set up a public discussions poll regarding the matter and an overwhelming majority of users voted for the idea.

And so the idea went through. It had to be tweaked a bit, but this was the end result: There would be elections every 2 months, for president and vice president. All the wiki’s bureaucrats made up a council, and that council would vote on things the president or VP wanted to pass.

The first elections were held on December 1st. 44 people voted, GammaRaul won a plurality of 16 votes, followed by SANTACLAWS with 12. In the days before the elections, however, RONALDTHEGOD14, a new user, wanted to run, and promised that if he won he would completely lift page restrictions so people could post whatever they wanted. Of course, this would be very destructive.

Many people questioned if RONALD was able to run, but technically nothing was stopping him as the candidate rules were poorly written at the time. The admins begrudgingly added him to the poll. Luckily, he only got 3 votes and was dead last. The real problems with RONALD after the election. After losing, he was presumably angry and he created his own organization called F.I.W.O, or freedom in the wiki organization.

FIWO’s main objective was to fight page restrictions and ideally overthrow the SMW’s government. RONALD’s organization didn’t get a lot of support, with only TheObjectShowRandomnessOfficial (a troublesome user later determined to be an alt of JoeJoeTheAnimator) joining. This still didn’t stop RONALD from trying to fight the wiki government and try to get support, but he was quickly shut down by the bureaucrats when it became clear he wanted a war.

For the first half of December, the wiki was doing pretty good with very few problems or dramas. But now, it would have to face another problem, easily it’s largest yet: a vandal, even though vandals hadn’t been a problem since before JoeJoe’s Adoption. This vandal, by the name of Squidward Pepe, originated on the SMW History Wiki. On December 14th, she spammed NSFW pictures there and quickly got blocked.

The attack continued on the SMW History Wiki. Dr. DARK Francis, the blocking admin, quickly warned the Surreal Memes Wiki and shut down transit between the two sites (symbolically, or course). However, it wasn’t long before Squidward Pepe found the SMW and moved there to continue her raid. Squidward Pepe was a vandal like no other; she would vandalize, spam NSFW, and even use cross site scripting in her later attacks. As soon as one account was blocked, she’d just create a new one with a different IP; over the months she had at least 50 confirmed accounts.

The peak of the attack was at the end of December, when admins were constantly cleaning up messes, blocking accounts and ordering evacuations of the wiki. But in a couple days, it all ended. What saved the wiki was when authorities saw an unlogged account presumed to be Squidward Pepe with a publicly shown IP and traced it back to England. Squidward Pepe seemed scared of this prospect, and she surrendered, gave up vandalizing and for some reason admitted to being in Germany.

It looked like the wiki would catch a break, but naturally, it didn’t. Squidward Pepe returned within a couple days pretending to be another, older minor vandal by the name of Richerpet. Some were fooled by this, and some weren’t. Luckily, “Richerpet’s” attacks were nothing compared to the earlier ones and they were dealt with comparatively easily. But a new problem sprang up again: JoeJoeTheAnimator. JoeJoe hadn’t been a problem at all since the Safe Age. He even regained trustworthiness by helping defeat Squidward Pepe. But now, he was becoming corrupt again.

TheObjectShowRandomnessOfficial, a user who had earlier joined FIWO and was reported to be harassing Dr. DARK Francis, was promoted by JoeJoe. Promoted to bureaucrat, that is, meaning there was literally nobody who could remove his powers except for the FANDOM staff. The other bureaucrats were outraged by this, and they confronted him again. Eventually TheObjectShowRandomnessOfficial removed his own permissions (as he was later found to be an alt of JoeJoe, it was probably to keep himself out of trouble).

For the rest of January 2019 not much happened. Some plans were developed to fight future Squidward Pepe attacks and overall by the end of the month the wiki was much more prepared. The second wiki elections were to be held on February the 1st. Like normal, candidates applied, the poll was set up, and things were going smoothly.

But there was one strange thing: JoeJoe, who was running, was getting an unusually high number of votes. Since the election was on an article poll, the names of the voters were invisible. The admins suspected RONALDTHEGOD was rigging the elections with his alts, but they had no proof.

To see what was happening, they moved the poll to a transparent discussions poll, where you could see who voted for who. It quickly became clear that JoeJoe was using a bunch of alts to manipulate the results for himself. When the other admins found out they were furious and they expelled JoeJoe from the Council of Bureaucrats.

In the end, it was PoseidonHeir that won and not JoeJoe. Still, it was only the beginning of JoeJoe’s crimes; a few days later, he deleted the User Scale of Trustworthiness for only having 75%, despite the fact that this was a lot better of a rating than he should have gotten.

This was the point of no return for JoeJoe, and by now he was hated across the wiki. The USOT was un-deleted and there was a minor conflict between JoeJoe and the other admins, who were again outraged. The end for JoeJoe would come very soon, though. He want to Miraheze - an alternative to FANDOM - and created propaganda pages about the other SMW admins, depicting them as corrupt and evil.

A user called Bendrownedfan111 quickly informed GamnaRaul of these pages on his message wall. They got the attention of the other admins almost immediately and they all confronted JoeJoe. JoeJoe, of course, was avoiding the confrontation and dodging all questions. A poll was set up asking if JoeJoe should have his bureaucrat powers removed.

The poll attracted a lot of attention, and while the majority of the SMW community voted “no”, JoeJoe once again used his alt accounts and sockpuppets to manipulate the results. This made everyone hate JoeJoe, and he finally got the message and retired from the wiki, removed his own bureaucrat powers and was promptly blocked by GammaRaul. Just like that.

But out of the blue, a vandal called AntiJoeJoeTheAnimator started attacking the wiki using cross site scripting. He was quickly dealt with, but then yet another vandal, Paranormal Virus, (likely the same person) began attacking in the same way, except he also left NSFW pictures in random places. The day of the attacks was overwhelming and it took hours to fully clean up the damage. The wiki recovered from the chaos eventually. No one knows why AntiJJTA and Paranormal Virus attacked, or if they had any relation to JoeJoe himself.

Meanwhile, JoeJoe had retreated to Miraheze. The conflict between him and the Surreal Memes Wiki was far from over...