Wookieepedia, the most popular Star Wars wiki, appears to have entered an unexpected moment of crisis. It's impossible to overstate how important Wookieepedia, the fan-run Wiki, is to the Star Wars fandom. It's one of the largest Fandom sites in existence, with 193,050 pages and counting, and the site has even been frequented by actors and writers as well as general fans.
There's probably no better online resource when it comes to Star Wars, with Wookieepedia guiding viewers seamlessly through Legends and canon information. Even more impressively, over the last few years, the "Wook" (as it is often called) has become an important part of the online fan community in its own right. Unfortunately, over the last week, the Wook has found itself at the heart of a major controversy.
Leslye Headland's The Acolyte has proved to be one of Lucasfilm's most controversial releases to date, with an online backlash and a pretty transparent review-bombing campaign. One of the strangest controversies was over the age of Jedi Master Ki-Adi-Mundi, a character who makes a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo in The Acolyte episode 4. This appearance contradicted a 1999 CD-ROM and a 2013 trading card, both of which established that Ki-Adi-Mundi shouldn't have been born yet. Neither are actually canon, and Lucas himself contradicted the CD-ROM later in the prequel trilogy when he changed Ki-Adi-Mundi's lightsaber color.
Ki-Adi-Mundi's age became an unlikely flashpoint, especially when the canon page on Ki-Adi-Mundi was edited on Wookieepedia to reflect his appearance in The Acolyte. This resulted in death threat messages against the editor, and these were publicly shared by Jordan Wilson - then a key member of the Social Media Team and administrator of the Wook. Wilson had not been given permission to make these public, however, and has since acknowledged that doing so was a mistake. This seems to be the inciting incident for a major change at Wookieepedia.
this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2024
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Can you elaborate? It was my understanding that from the time Disney erased the EU everything that was newly produced by Disney (plus the existing movies and the Clone Wars cartoon) were all considered canon. Disney originally proposed eliminating tier structure of canon the EU had, which I know has led to some canon snarls in Disney canon, but those snarls are exactly because everything they produce is canon.
EDIT: For what its worth, I did not downvote you.
Boba Fett escaping the Sarlacc pit is from the EU, Disney took that main concept and then disregarded basically everything else the EU had to say about that.
The entirety of lore around the history and traditions of the Mandalorians is from the EU, Disney took a few general ideas from that and then did their own thing.
So there are some examples of 'the EU is not canon, except for parts of it, when we say so.'
Thrawn is in arguably the most confusing situation.
Originally he is the main bad guy of the Thrawn Trilogy storyline, and much of the EU dovetailed with this, including a good number of the earlier video games... but then Filoni gave him a backstory in Clone Wars and Rebels.
For a good period of time, no one knew if Disney would include Clone Wars and Rebels as canon, because Disney was not clear on this, but then they decided they are canon, but due to movies 7 8 and 9, the actual primary storyline of Thrawn is impossible, but then Asoka and the characters from Rebels get a Disney show, so basically some derivative parts of Thrawn are canon while the original works he is from are not.
I am just going off the top of my head here, but also in terms of spacecraft, there were a bunch of ships in earlier video games, such as K Wings and TIE Defenders, that many older fans who played the older games and read EU stuff are familiar with, which do not appear in Disney movies and are instead replaced by other spacecraft... this does I guess make sense if Disney just says none of those things are canon anymore, but a whole lot of older Star Wars fans absolutely loved that stuff.
I think it is now long defunct, but there may still be a downloadable version of Free Worlds, Tides or War, a Star Wars mod for Freelancer, on ModDB, that was able to build up basically an entire universe of factions and ships based around the EU, set something like 10 or 20 years after movie 6. It features a good deal of these ships, and was created before Disney acquired Star Wars.
If someone tried to make that mod today, it would be impossible, as the canon is now altered, confused, incomplete and inconsistent and far from detailed enough to provide the status of various factions and planets in the New Order timeline, whereas before, there was a mostly consistent EU to directly draw a multitude of specific details from.
I don't think it's confusing at all. The current canon can selectively incorporate elements of the old EU. Some classic EU being incorporated does not recanonize everything around those elements. It is best, for canon purposes, to treat the incorporated EU elements as if you don't know about the EU.
I say this as someone who deeply enjoys the EU, and prefers it to the state of modern official canon.