Blog:HighJewElfKing/South Park in 2021

Hey gang, as we close out what I hope has been a better year for all of you. It’s time to recap the year here in regards to the wiki, the Discord and South Park, as well as look to the future. Given that I don’t do these updates frequently anymore, this may be quite long so grab some popcorn.

Our Wiki: A New Design

This year, our wiki had a major design redesign. With the launch of FandomDesktop we looked to the show itself for our new redesign, adding Starks Pond with  as the day theme with The Coon and South Park at night for our night mode. We also doubled down on the green color accents, made our galleries look awesome in wide screen mode and redesigned our homepage. We will continue to look at getting a new logo into 2022, but our previous logo sucked so we went back to the OG South Park Archives logo for now. Our wiki is one of the best looking at Fandom and we’re definitely proud about that. Thanks again to SG for his hard work on the wiki design this year.

Our Wiki: New Admins & Staff Changes

We had a huge change in staff this year. We fired two Discord Mods, while adding the new Discord Admins with Apple and Airborn. On the wiki side, as a lot of you know, it was a rougher start of the year in this regard, with discussions mods in and out as well as the incident and firing of HerbiMetal. Myself and SG also had some trouble to work through this year (kinda like how the broship broke up and came back) Not going to lie and say it was an incredibly rough time for me and for all of staff for most of the year until October.

Enter this fall, Apple showed herself throughout all this year to be a very capable person and was promoted to admin. JohnVMaster, previously in charge of the South Park Studios “Official Wiki” also came over and was super helpful to me all year not only from a wiki perspective, but as fantastic friend. So he was a no brainer choice for Admin. Me and SG also made up and this brings us to today. We have an amazing team in SG, Apple, JVM, SkyRider and Cryptar. I couldn’t be more excited to work with these great people throughout next year.

South Park Archives Discord

Our Discord has been great this year too. There has been some new developments over the past two months in regards to Discord, which I’ll discuss later on. But this time last year, our Discord just broke 900 members. At this time, we have 1,700+. From November to December 2021, we had over 200 new members. 94% of our users are new to Discord. It was a huge year for our Discord. We’d like to look at starting “Game nights” etc on both South Park Discords next year as something to do while we all wait for the show to come back.

Going forward, it is not feasibly possible to compete with the South Park Studios Discord, it’s counterproductive to compete with it since we mod the official one. That’s why we will be focusing less on the SPA Discord in 2022, unless something should change. We will continue to keep SPA Discord active, fun and spam free as a great South Park server choice for fans and our wiki community but the spotlight is no longer on it. I’ll talk more about the new Official Discord below. (Join SPA Discord at https://discord.gg/south-park)

South Park Renewals, Special and Paramount Movies

South Park shocked everybody this year when it was announced that a new 900 million dollar deal would extend the show to season 30. The announcement also said Trey and Matt would make 14 moves for ViacomCBS streaming service Paramount Plus.

South Park returned in March with another one hour special called “South ParQ Vaccination Special”

In November, South Park announced South Park: Post Covid, a one hour “Made for TV Movie” / Event. Post Covid was a major fast forward for the series and gave us a peek of the boys lives as adults.

In December, it was followed up with South Park: Post Covid: The Return of Covid. Which continued the adult storyline and also saw the boys go back in time to fix the broship. The end offered a peek at what the future looked like then.

Demand for the Paramount Movies content was insanely high. After Post Covid, we recorded an all time record for views in the history of South Park Archives with over 147K page views and over 70K views directly on the Post Covid movie page.

Return of Covid broke that record I just told you, with over 200K users looking for information and over 100K views directly on the movie page. The most searched for keyword was: “Victor Chaos” with over 400 searches.

It’s rumored South Park will return with a new season Q1 of next year. We’ll keep you posted as always.

The South Park Studios Discord

At the tail end of this year in November, we were surprised to learn that South Park Studios acquired a fan Discord server. This server turned out to be the former Reddit South Park Discord. Seeing mod applications open, myself and JVM decided to apply. Much to my surprise, he was accepted (not a surprise) but shockingly I was also. Being in the server has allowed us to directly talk to South Park Studios (talk about a dream come true) and talk to the broader South Park community. We’ve had a blast there getting to know the fans and it’s heartwarming to hear just how many fans appreciate our work on the wiki. The mod team there is fantastic besides just us and the server has a very special vibe to it. We’re excited for the opportunities this Discord could lead us with cross collaboration and the future there as well as continuing to talk to awesome fellow South Park fans. You can join the South Park Official Discord at https://discord.gg/southpark.

Data Deep Dive

So what did we achieve together this year? Let’s find out and dive into some data:

• Since December 2020, the community created over 800 new pages!

• Since December 2020, the community amassed over  25,000+ Edits (Full total including bad faith and reverted edits)

• During the year until November 2021. The wiki averaged 60-80K page views a week and 100-200K during Post Covid and Return of Covid.

• Mobile rains supreme, in fact over 66% of viewers in the last 30 days used their mobile device to access the wiki. Desktop was roughly half.

• This years most searched for pages included: Eric Cartman, Kenny McCormick, Randy Marsh, Kyle Broflovski, and Butters Stotch. Professor Chaos and The Coon also got plenty of searches.

• Most of our viewers are from the USA, Followed by the Brits, Canadians, Russians and Australians. The most interesting countries to show up this year were Norway in July and Chile in November.

Twitter and Social Media

The discussion for us post SPS Discord got us questioning our own social media presence. Does our wiki have a “brand”? Does that brand go past Discord and Fandom? Not really. We’re looking to change that. JVM has been working hard on our Twitter presence, Twitter is a big social media platform that is used by a lot of people in the South Park community so expanding our presence there is important. We’ve made incredible progress this year since the account was made in August. pre- Post Covid we had 80 followers. We now have over 400. Our Post Covid related tweets brought some crazy stats. One tweet mentioning how future Craig and his dad looked similar exploded, amassing over 600 likes and over 17K impressions.

We have our sights set on Twitter verification (blue checkmark) next year and we’ll continue to work on Twitter throughout 2022. JVM has taken the lead with this and I thank him very much for his work. Be sure to give our Twitter a follow https://twitter.com/southpark_wiki. Outside of Twitter, we’ll actively investigate TikTok, Instagram and other social media platforms to expand next year.

One platform we are no longer putting effort into is Fandom Discussions. We’re actively pushing for Fandom to remove this feature from South Park Archives. It’s far too much work for what little return it gives us. It’s caused us broader community issues (like when a viral TikTok post was shared with incorrect information from our discussions), drama and diminishes the reputation of the community, it also has seen no new moderation or user features from Fandom in 2021. We call on Fandom to remove this feature from South Park Archives so our staff can focus on the community.

The Future

So what’s the future hold for South Park Archives? Promising stuff I’d say. Those of you who know me, know exactly what I want to do. Including something with the studio, I’d say we’re closer to that than ever. We will build our sites awareness, AKA our brand and continue to grow this wiki.

On the wiki itself we never ever stop, we got projects planned to completely gut our character category page, merchandise pages, and Phone Destroyer pages. We plan to make changes to the interactions and Alter Ego pages as well as add quotes (a common searched for item by fans) to the wiki as well. We’ll also dabble in maps and other new contents as well. All while reviewing our content to make sure it’s up to date and adding new content when needed.

All in all, the future for South Park Archives is really bright. I’ve never been more confident about that.

Thank you and HAPPY NEW YEAR

Where could I begin? I’m incredibly thankful as I enter my 5th year here for everyone here. Starting off with our incredible admins. I’m so proud of all of them for the work they do here and am so blessed to work alongside them. SG, Apple and JVM have been incredible helps this year to me and I appreciate it beyond belief. I also appreciate the editing machine that is SkyRider747, nobody knows the editing trenches like him and we are so lucky to have him here. Cryptar has been great as always too.

I’m thankful for our Discord users who help keep the social aspects of our community alive and foster a great environment. And our Discord Mods who keep the authoritah in check. Airborn, Klaus and Standground.

Same goes to our new friends at the SPS Discord who have made me appreciate South Park and the general community so much more over the past two months. As well the great fellow mods there.

Our incredible editors are the backbone of our community, I’m incredibly grateful for the work they put into our community to grow it and make it better.

Our readers play a huge part in our community. I thank them for checking out our content, sharing it and hope they all enjoy the wiki and the vast amount of information they can find here.

I’m thankful we get to work with people across Fandom to better the wiki. This year, I got to give a major shoutout to our Wiki Representative Kylara and Mandy from Fandom for the help they’ve extended to us this year. We look forward to working with them and all of Fandom staff next year as we try to make the wiki even better.

No matter who you may be, I realize you still (for some reason) have a choice in wikis for South Park. I once again express my gratitude and thanks that you choose South Park Archives for your South Park information needs. THANK YOU  ALL for supporting us.

Happy New Year and 2022 from all your friends at South Park Archives!

HighJewElfKing • Talk