Aldrich Lucas
Aldrich Lucas | |
|---|---|
 Common depiction of Aldrich Lucas; a drawing of Death Note character L by Silent Reaper | |
| Born | Victoria, Australia |
Aldrich Lucas, known affectionately as Aldy, is an Australian retired micronationalist was the founder of the Students' Isocratic Oligarchy of Yabloko. He was an admin of MicroWiki in 2011, and played a role in the migration from Wikia to Referata to MicroWiki.org.uk. He was ousted from the community during Yablokogate.
Career
Founding and rise of Yabloko
The online forums upon which Yabloko would be based were originally created by Aldrich for personal use by him and his friends on 4 January 2010. On 10 April, Lucas proposed to his friends the idea for the formation of a micronation; taking a liking to this idea, work began the following day by members of the forums on forming the micronation, with Lucas becoming its de facto leader. The micronation was eventually named Yabloko, a romanisation of the Russian Яблоко meaning "apple". Lucas gave Yabloko an online presence within the intermicronational community after joining the micronational wiki and encyclopaedia MicroWiki on 18 April; he created an article for the developing micronation. Lucas began writing the constitution of Yabloko on 4 June and completed the first draft on 12 June. He wrote it heavily based upon the Australian and Canadian constitutions, with slight influence from the American constitution. The constitution was completed on 25 June and passed through parliament, formally establishing the Students' Isocratic Oligarchy of Yabloko. Lucas was appointed as the Grand Chancellor of the isocratic oligarchy.
Lucas immediately started becoming more active in the MicroWiki community from July, serving in several intermicronational offices and positions. He spearheaded Yabloko's membership into the Organisation of Active Micronations (OAM) on 3 July and the Society for the Advancement of Micronationalism on 6 July. Lucas was appointed the first Secretary of the OAM Partnership Assistance Office—tasked with dealing with partnerships concerning OAM member states—on 20 July, serving until 18 November. He began to express an interest in an intermicronational currency on 8 September, and later joined the Micronational Economic Community on 11 October upon its establishment. October saw the growing influence of Yabloko in the MicroWiki community, largely as a result of Lucas' efforts; the micronation was ranked seventh on the first OAM Influence Survey on 16 October. On 4 October, he designed four chivalric orders—the Order of Yabloko, Order of the Ocelot, Order of the Kangaroo and the Vision for Yabloko Award—to recognise contributions and achievements within Yabloko as well as the wider micronational community.
Intermicronational positions and ventures
Lucas dissolved the parliament of Yabloko on 7 October, after having prorogued the First Parliament. Membership was then opened to all citizens who satisfied the new qualifications and expressed their interest to the Lord Speaker. While Yabloko went into a state of inactivity in the second half of October, Lucas continued to assert his influence in the MicroWiki sector. After several discussions regarding a national anthem of Yabloko, it was announced by Lucas on 10 December to be the second track of the Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn soundtrack, "Unicorn" composed by Hiroyuki Sawano. December ended with the temporary departure of Lucas' close associate Philip Fish. Fish thanked Lucas "for projecting Yabloko so far in such a short period of time." Lucas was appointed the Secretary of the OAM External Affairs Office on 3 January 2011, and served until 7 March. Lucas then served as Vice Secretary-General of the OAM between 7 March and 25 April, having won the March 2011 election with 26% of the vote.
Lucas created and hosted the first Schneider Awards between 16 March and 12 April, named after MicroWiki founder Fabian Schneider. The judges consisted of Alexander Reinhardt; Niels I, Grand Duke of Flandrensis; Parker I of the Secundomian Federation; Quentin I, King of the Kingdom of Wyvern; and Tom Turner. Schneider himself returned from inactivity to oppose the awards, disagreeing with the categories which insulted the recipients. Lucas served as acting Secretary-General of the OAM following the resignation of Turner on 25 April. His term ended on 16 May after the May 2011 OAM Election. Lucas was then appointed to the OAM Internal Affairs Office on 13 July.
Yablokogate
MicroWiki
Lucas created an account on MicroWiki on 18 April 2010, and quickly became an active editor. He nominated himself as a candidate during the November administrator elections on MicroWiki on 28 October; he was elected on 8 November with eleven votes. During the migration from Wikia, Lucas reserved three domains for MicroWiki on 17 October on the wiki hosting services Wikkii, ShoutWiki and Referata, so that users could deliberate on which would be the best to host MicroWiki's content. While ShoutWiki was considered first on 20 October, it was discovered on 4 November that the import could not work due to ShoutWiki requiring all XML files to be less than 1.8 megabytes, with MicroWiki's files being slightly over said limit.
After Referata was chosen on 6 November, Lucas began importing articles, although several namespaces—including user pages, user talk, files and user blogs—could not be imported due to files having to be manually added to the new wiki. Lucas asked for volunteers to register accounts on Referata and aid in manually copying and importing the unsupported namespaces. By 7 November, Referata had 749 articles. However, it was discovered later that day that Referata had a maximum storage of 100 megabytes worth of files, whilst MicroWiki had over 200 megabytes worth of files in use. On 14 November, Petya d'Égtavie purchased an independent domain instead—first MicroWiki.co.cc and later MicroWiki.org.uk by 2 December.
Due to software restrictions, all pages on the old Wikia website had to be manually imported. Lucas took on the liberty of doing this strenuous task, leading to his edit count skyrocketing. Lucas had reached "almost 16,000" edits by 8 January 2011. Using estimates based on calculating his known edit counts, it is likely that Lucas became the first user to reach 20,000 edits in May 2011 and 30,000 edits in January 2012.