Join us for another in a series of interviews with winners of awards from our recent 2022 Awards Ceremony. Our goal is to give you insight into how our fleet’s best simmers write, and imagine their characters.
This month we’re interviewing the writer behind Lt. Commander Maz Rodan playing a joined Trill and serves as the First Officer of the USS Arrow. He won the Sarpeidon Award: “Awarded to a simmer who has made outstanding contributions to the 118Wiki”
DeVeau: You shared a bit about yourself in your last interview, would you be willing to tell us a little about yourself and your character that you haven’t before?
Rodan: Hi, I’m David and I live in a little beach town on the east coast of the UK. As for Maz, he’s a Joined Trill of five lifetimes, and he’s really finding his own at the moment, with lots of command experience coming his way and an upcoming Zhian’tara, which I’m very excited about!
How did you find out about SB118?
It was the summer of 2001. Voyager was in its last season and my friend and I were looking online for pretty much anything Star Trek-related. I’d never even heard of PBEM before, but it looked fun and so we applied.
This year, you won the Sarpeidon award due to your work on the wiki. How did you get into wiki code?
Very slowly! For a long time, I treated the wiki as something made of glass, and one wrong edit, a stray colon here, an errant apostrophe there would bring it crashing down. But I practised and reviewed every detail until I was sure I was confident to make edits. I serve as both Wiki Operator and Mission Archivist for the Arrow, and so keeping our pages up to date is a passion of mine, from ship reports, crew rosters, awards, ribbons, and even NPC pages. If you check out any page I’ve created, I tend to be quite uniform in style, and I find that helps to learn to code.
What are some challenges of working with a wiki-like SB118’s?
Certainly using lots of different templates, and things you haven’t perhaps tried before. There’s a lot of choice, and often when trying to edit things, you’ll find that one set of code doesn’t always work with another.
What’s your favourite part about working with the wiki?
Finding little treasures from the past. I’ve really enjoyed discovering all the old vessels I’ve served on, checking out their crew history, and re-reading some old mission archives. Even checked out ship histories from vessels I haven’t served on and imagined what it was like to sim on them.
What sort of resources do you recommend for those who wish to learn how to better work with wiki syntax?
Sandboxes are fun to practise, but I think the best way to dive into the wiki edit process is to check out others’ work. Edit someone’s page and just get a grip on what they’ve put in, and try it out for yourself. Once you get the hang of it, it’s pretty fun.
Thanks for your time, Lt. Commander Rodan!
You can read more about Lt. Commander Maz Rodan on the wiki.
