User:Joe Beaudoin Jr.

From Battlestar Wiki Props, the free, open content Battlestar Galactica encyclopedia and episode guide

Joe Beaudoin Jr. is the project leader and researcher for Battlestar Wiki, an online encyclopedia dedicated to all four of the Battlestar Galactica television shows. Outside of running the fan site, Joe is a writer, editor, webmaster, and vice president of White Eye Productions, Inc., an up-and-coming comic book company that launched in July 2008.

Early on, Joe’s entrepreneurial spirit lead him to become a columnist for the Star Trek Galactic Newsletter in the mid-1990s, work with the William Shatner Connection endorsed “Bring Back Kirk” campaign, and later working for sites such as TrekNation, BattlestarGalactica.com, and the Battlestar Fan Club. It is at the Battlestar Fan Club where he met Lawrence White, who had the dream of starting up his own comic book company where the creators retained ownership of their characters and stories.

Joe’s interest in Battlestar Galactica was born out of his general interest in science fiction, being a fan of The X-Files, Babylon 5, Star Trek, Space: Above and Beyond, and Irwin Allen’s various series. After catching reruns of the show on the Sci-Fi Channel back in the 90s and around 2000, he became a fan with a “love/hate” relationship with Battlestar, helping out in the revival efforts undertaken by Richard Hatch (Apollo / Tom Zarek).

In relation to this, he began the Battlestar Galactica InfoSphere, a large portal-like website that merged fan created endeavors and encyclopedic information, in addition to the PDF-published electronic magazine called, “The Galactican”, which featured interviews with such personalities as Herb Jefferson, Jr., articles about the revival efforts, and op-ed pieces about the show, which ended publication in mid-2003.

Initially heavily skeptical about Ron Moore’s re-imagining of the concept, he grew to love the series after watching the first season with recordings provided by a friend in the United Kingdom, where the show first aired. This lead to rekindling his interest in the series, and launch of the Battlestar Wiki project.

BATTLESTAR WIKI BACKGROUND

The Battlestar Wiki project, whose roots date back to the inception of the Battlestar Galactica InfoSphere fansite in 2000, was started in February 2005 after discovering Wikipedia—itself an online editable resource that many thousands of people collaborate on.

Starting off as just a mere hobby and side pet-project, Battlestar Wiki soon experienced large growth spurts that turned running the website into a job in and of itself. Realizing quickly that he needed to learn about the benefits and drawbacks to the wiki model, Joe began editing controversial subjects on Wikipedia to learn more about its community from the inside, entering himself into situations that contributors on the site face on a daily basis, eventually ascending to become a Wikipedia administrator in December 2005. “I deliberately sought to test the waters with the whole wiki-concept. Coming from an ‘old-school webmaster’ background, I had my fears about running a website that people from all over the world can contribute to on a dynamic basis.” Eventually, Joe left the Wikipedia project because “I had learned more about how not to approach a dynamic, so-called ‘Web 2.0′ website than I had ever believed possible. Plus, there is a disturbing lack of general oversight, accountability, and even abuses of power by the administrators. I really began to question Wikipedia’s effectiveness as a tertiary reference source.” Joe and the intelligent, hard-working volunteer contributors at Battlestar Wiki were able to learn from Wikipedia’s mistakes and generate—as a team—a website that AOL called “most comprehensive” in 2008.

Visited by hundreds of thousands of people per month, the Wiki is one of the largest and most frequented websites on the Internet, ranking in the top 20 to 30 thousand websites according to both Alexa and Quantcast. It has been repeatedly mentioned in such official venues as USA Today, Wired.com, UGO, and other well-known entertainment-based websites. Impressed by the Battlestar Wiki’s comprehensiveness, Alec Peters offered Joe a position helping chronicle the history of the new Battlestar’s numerous props, costumes, and set pieces.