A note before we start: This article contains a bit more of me than you usually get in an ordinary Opinion piece in the Austenasian Times.
I’m writing this as me, Andrew, not in my capacity as Prime Minister. Nothing below is a government statement or government policy. It’s just me talking about a community I’ve been part of for nearly fourteen years, what happened while I was there, and what I think about it now.
My Life In Screenshots
They say that no one is a prophet in their hometown, and I never quite knew what they meant until now.
Back in May 2012, I came across this website called “MicroWikia”. I was twelve, a rasher of nothing and, as clarity washes over me, deeply lonely. I lied about my age by just a year, so I was “thirteen”, and therefore able to join the site under Wikia’s (now Fandom) Terms of Use.
MicroWiki admins hate this one simple trick!
And yes, we did. Years later, when I became MicroWiki’s head administrator, I would ban people for doing exactly the same as I had once done.
The hypocrisy is not lost on me.
I was twelve.
During that time — most of which, admittedly, I can’t recall as easily as I once could — I remember the same toxicity that is prevalent now being prevalent then.
Big egos, big personalities, dominating personalities, dominating presences.
Except, when I was a child, there wasn’t really anyone who would step in.
That never sat right with me then. It still doesn’t now, fourteen years later.
At first, I became a MicroWiki administrator, and later its head administrator, because I wanted to be the force that would step in — the person who would fight the good fight against the bad guys.
And for many of you reading this with disdain for me, I imagine you feel exactly the same way about me.
Perspectives are funny like that.
I never really stopped to consider the morality of how far my actions went, because I could compartmentalise them: “It’s for a righteous cause, and I’m a righteous man.”
I’d forget that behind that avatar was a real person — on a computer, an iPad or their phone; perhaps sat on the bog, giggling at the drama.
And, presumably, they sometimes forgot the same thing about me.
Indeed, I didn’t particularly want that responsibility, but I felt that I had it. The problem was that I had no safeguarding training or experience. MicroWiki’s staff were simply not equipped with the skills or resources necessary to deal properly with safeguarding issues — and, frankly, they probably still aren’t.
Good intentions did not magically give me those skills.
I wasn’t a very good head administrator. Still miles better than a lot of my predecessors, obviously, but not the kind of head administrator I wanted to be.
I think I overcompensated for what I viewed as the previous head administrator’s biggest weakness: the lack of a spine. And I’ve told him that to his face.
I had a lot of ideas for MicroWiki — ideas I probably could have materialised had I not spent the majority of my tenure arguing with people on Discord.
My late teens and early-to-mid twenties were spent well.
The worst thing about being in a community since childhood is that pretty much every stupid, embarrassing or questionable thing I’ve done since the age of twelve is probably documented somewhere, if you know where to look (and no, that isn’t an invitation).
Most people have the luxury of their adolescence gradually disappearing. Their stupid arguments are forgotten, their embarrassing opinions aren’t archived, and nobody produces a screenshot from 2013 to demonstrate that they were, in fact, an idiot when they were a teenager.
I don’t entirely have that luxury. Especially as I rose to become the head administrator of MicroWiki, made a variety of enemies and rattled several people.
I have my own theories about what happened before my fall, but that’s between me and my therapist.
Which brings us, somewhat unfortunately, back to the present.
The GUM In MicroWiki’s Shoe
Our recent announcement of the existence of the GUM Files — Discord server logs dating from the server’s creation until early 2025 — seems to have ruffled a few feathers.
I’ve since seen what looks remarkably like an effort to distract from their existence by pointing instead to dubious things I’ve done myself over the past fourteen years.
And I’d like to make something perfectly clear:
Yeah. No kidding. I joined this community when I was twelve.
I’ve been here for fourteen years. That’s a lot of time in which to make mistakes (sometimes big ones), say stupid things (sometimes very stupid things), and make decisions good and bad (some very good, some very bad). I’ve been heavily involved in this community for over half my lifetime, and that’s given me many prime opportunities to step on some rakes and get things wrong. Some of these things I’ve apologised for. Some of them I wouldn’t do today. Some of them probably seemed like perfectly sensible ideas to whatever iteration of teenage me that existed at the time.
If arguing against our possession of the GUM Files requires fourteen years of archaeological excavation through my adolescence and twenties, I can save you some time:
I was occasionally an idiot.
There is, however, something considerably less funny about the reaction to the GUM Files.
If people actually bothered to read what the article said, rather than what they wanted it to say, they’d realise that nobody was accused of anything.
We didn’t say the logs proved somebody had abused a child. We didn’t name somebody and declare them guilty of something. We explained why we weren’t publishing the logs in full.
Because they contain discussions concerning alleged victims, some of whom were minors.
That’s it. That’s what was said. That is serious enough to be respected by virtue of its own gravity. The dignity of victims, even when discussed second-or-third-hand, deserves to be preserved.
The fact that the mere possibility of there being a genuine safeguarding issue in this community has been met in some quarters with mockery, personal attacks and attempts to throw shade at the people pointing it out is, frankly, testament to the exact problem I’m talking about.
Maybe there’s something there. Maybe there isn’t. That’s what examining evidence is for.
But if somebody says, “Hang on, these records contain discussions about alleged victims, including children, perhaps we shouldn’t dump the entire archive onto the internet,” your immediate response probably shouldn’t be to start digging through fourteen years of that person’s life looking for something embarrassing.
And if your response to a potential safeguarding concern is “Yeah, but look what Andrew did,” then congratulations, you’ve demonstrated precisely why safeguarding should never have been left to a bunch of people arguing on Discord in the first place.
I have accumulated an impressive number of enemies over the years. Some of them dislike me for entirely valid reasons. Some of them for reasons so incredibly petty that explaining them would make both of us look ridiculous. And some apparently dislike me for reasons I’m not even aware of. Half of them I don’t actually know. Some I’ve never spoken to, others I presumably have; but if we did ever speak, they clearly didn’t leave much of an impression. Which sounds incredibly arrogant when I write it down.
Oh. Remember those big egos, big personalities, dominating personalities and dominating presences I was talking about earlier?
I became one.
There’s an uncomfortable realisation.
I became somebody whose name people knew without knowing me. Somebody people had already formed an opinion about before we’d ever spoken. Somebody who spent far too much time arguing with people on Discord because, apparently, somebody being wrong on the internet constituted a national emergency.
I became, at least in part, what twelve-year-old me disliked about the community in the first place.
And perhaps that explains some of the enemies.
Not all of them, mind you. I refuse to become that introspective — I’d never get anything done!
With Enemies Like These, Who Needs Friends?
There is one particular example of an ‘enemy’ that I find especially funny: I don’t actually know him.
I know he doesn’t like me. According to third parties — and I obviously can’t independently verify this — he apparently spends an extraordinary amount of time talking about me. Every day, I’m told.
Whether that’s hatred or something else, I’ll leave him to figure out.
But that’s the ridiculous thing.
He presumably knows “Andrew”. The Andrew from screenshots, stories, arguments, controversies and fourteen years of accumulated community lore.
I know Kublai Khan. All I know of him is his avatar, and that he doesn’t like me very much.
We don’t know each other. And somehow, that’s enough.
It’s a small community. Everybody “knows” each other, and nobody likes each other.
Except, perhaps, we don’t really know each other at all.
