Wikipedia:WikiBeaver

Commensalism and mutualism

The WikiBeaver shares a productive symbiotic relationship with several other WikiFauna.

• WikiGnomes: While the WikiBeaver constructs templates and category systems, the WikiGnome applies them throughout the encyclopedia, quietly improving individual articles. The WikiBeaver builds the category; the WikiGnome populates it. A WikiGnome-wikibeaver pair can accomplish in a week what a solitary WikiDragon would take a month to do — though the Dragon's output will be more readable.
• WikiElves: Often found populating and maintaining the infrastructure created by WikiBeavers.
• WikiFairies: Responsible for beautifying documentation pages and improving the presentation of otherwise functional structures.
• WikiElephants: Remember which templates were deleted in 2007 and why. The WikiBeaver maintains a cautious mutualism with them.
• WikiEngineers: Speak the WikiBeaver's native language of Lua and module documentation. A WikiBeaver and a WikiEngineer working in collaboration can produce a template suite of terrifying power and elegance; the same pair left unsupervised can produce a module that no living editor understands.
• WikiKnights: Defenders of Wikipedia's pillars, whose relationship with WikiBeavers is generally cooperative, although the Knight sometimes mistakes a new template for a policy violation.
• WikiPrincesses: A relationship of mutual indifference. The WikiPrincess glories in Wikipedia's collection of data but does not contribute; the WikiBeaver contributes structurally but rarely glories in anything. They pass one another on category pages without comment.

Predation & Defense

Despite their peaceful nature, WikiBeavers face persistent environmental pressures from several natural predators:

• WikiHunters and WikiSharks, who aggressively hunt down and nominate unused or overly engineered structural templates for deletion.
• WikiJanitors, who inadvertently dismantle a WikiBeaver's hard work during routines cleaning sweeps under the justification of redundancy.

When threatened or provoked—most frequently by reckless editors breaking complex code parameters without discussion—the WikiBeaver defends its territory by slapping its metaphorical flat tail against the water to sound alarms across community noticeboards, swiftly reverting the damaging edits, or retreating into their private userspace lodge to sulk.

Creationism

In the writings of St. Jimmy Wales, he mentions "certain beasts, which, by means of their flat tails, do beat the waters of the wiki into ordered channels." He further discusses that though their works may be "dry and full of curly brackets," they are "most truly blessed" because "by their structure, the wild articles are tamed, and the reader findeth his way."

Dam-builders

Dam-builders are ambitious structural architects who engineer massive, deeply interconnected frameworks including master category schemes, Lua modules, template ecosystems, and extensive WikiProject infrastructure.

A Dam-builder is rarely satisfied with fixing a single issue and instead seeks to redesign the entire river system responsible for producing it.

Common signs include:

• Large template suites
• Category-tree redesigns
• Lua experimentation
• Extensive planning documents

Lodge-maintainers

Lodge-maintainers are meticulous caretakers who devote themselves to preserving existing infrastructure.

Rather than constructing new systems, they focus on repairing damaged ones, updating documentation, correcting template parameters, and maintaining taxonomic order throughout the ecosystem.

Common signs include:

• Documentation editing

  

• Template upkeep
• Category maintenance
• Parameter debugging

A Lodge-maintainer may spend several hours repairing a structure whose existence most editors never notice.

River-surveyors

A less common archetype.

River-surveyors spend much of their time analyzing the interactions between systems rather than directly building them. They patrol template histories, monitor category flow, identify structural weaknesses, and recommend improvements.

They are often found producing lengthy discussions explaining why two category systems should or should not merge.

Stick-hoarders

Often considered a developmental stage rather than a full archetype.

Stick-hoarders create and collect infrastructure "for future use".

They maintain numerous draft templates, unfinished category frameworks, and abandoned project pages.

While many eventually mature into Dam-builders, some spend years accumulating sticks without constructing an actual dam.

Researchers continue debating whether this behavior should be considered adaptive.

Elder Beavers

Rare veteran specimens.

Elder Beavers possess encyclopedic knowledge of long-forgotten templates, historical category disputes, and deleted infrastructure.

When asked why a template behaves strangely, they can often answer:

"That was added in 2008."

without consulting documentation.

They are respected, feared, and occasionally mistaken for WikiElephants.

Values

• Industry — The WikiBeaver works. Not dramatically, not grandly, but steadily, and the work accumulates.
• Order — A place for everything and everything in its place. The WikiBeaver is genuinely distressed by a red-linked category.
• Thrift — The WikiBeaver reuses. Why build a new template when Foo can be extended with a parameter?
• Community — The WikiBeaver builds for others. Its dams are not monuments to itself but infrastructure for the whole ecosystem.

Attributes

• Flat tail — The ability to slap the water: to raise an alarm, to summon help, or simply to make a point in a discussion.
• Buck teeth — The ability to gnaw through bureaucratic undergrowth: to parse a tangled category tree, to untangle a template's parameter logic.
• Wood shavings — The visible residue of construction: a user page full of draft templates, a sandbox full of half-built modules.
• Lodge — A user subpage or WikiProject where the WikiBeaver retreats to plan, to draft, and to recover from the stress of other fauna.

Magical powers

• Transclusion — The ability to appear in many places at once, through the judicious use of templates.
• Categorization — The ability to place any article in its proper home, even articles that resist.
• Documentation — The ability to explain one's own works so thoroughly that no one dares modify them.
• Parser functions — A rare and feared power, understood by few, capable of transforming a simple template into a Turing-complete engine of chaos.
• Damming — The ability to stop the flow of a discussion by introducing a structural objection ("this should be a template, not a policy page") that must be resolved before anything else can proceed.

Self-identification

WikiBeavers may self-identify through userboxes. The standard userbox is:

This user identifies as a WikiBeaver. Don't mess with their templates or they will bite!

A more discreet method is to display a small beaver icon on one's userpage (is common, this can also be resized) or simply to leave a trail of well-documented templates behind you and let others draw their own conclusions.

WikiBeaver registration: Interested users can register at the WikiBeaver registration page.