User:BadCatMan/Forgotten Realms Wiki history

History
The Forgotten Realms Wiki was born on October 1st, 2005, whilst Wikia was still named "Wikicities". It was created by its first user and admin, Drizzt, who said on his user page, "Hello! I am the founder/admin of this wikicity. I do not treat it like my own, this is everyone's wikicity, I merely suggested an idea." He kicked off the Main Page and other wiki architecture, designed the first logo, welcomed other users, and started articles about Drizzt Do'Urden, drow, and Drow Sign. However, he became inactive within the month, leaving the wiki in the hands of Hashimashadoo in December.

For the next year, as the statistics show, the wiki ticked along at a relatively slow but steady pace under a few dedicated editors. Activity came to an almost complete halt in the last quarter of 2006, with little more than 400 articles, before suddenly shooting up to new heights by the end of the year. This may have been the product of a recruitment campaign by Hashimashadoo. But it seemed the FRW had also hit the kind of critical mass needed to attract a lot more editors; despite seasonal fluctuations and external events, activity would never decline much beyond this point. At the end of 2006, long-standing contributors Zerak-Tul and Fw190a8 were added to the administration team. The next year and a half saw a period of consistent growth.

The arrival of 4th-edition D&D (in June 2008) and the new 4th-edition Forgotten Realms sourcebooks (August/September 2008) contributed to another significant increase in activity, with a marked rise in the number of casual editors, the number of edits made, and the number of new articles. It seems that new fans coming to the Forgotten Realms with the new edition and altered setting wanted to see 4th-edition content and post-Spellplague lore. However, the changes to the setting had been widely controversial, even unpopular among the fandom, and this was reflected upon the FRW. Some fans would criticize a perceived 4th-edition bias and turn away from the wiki. Behind the scenes, it seems existing editors could not keep on top of the influx of new lore.

This post-4e activity peaked in January 2009, with the FRW's greatest number of casual editors and numbers of edits and new articles per month. At that time, Hashimashadoo raised SkyeNiTessine to admin status. Activity gradually settled back down to normal, perhaps as the new edition smell wore off, while the number of editors tailed off over the course of the year. Nevertheless, the damage had been done. Eli the Tanner, who joined at the end of 2009, tells us, "many of us editors plodded along mostly by trial-and-error in the early days. The community before 2011 was very fractured and had a wild west, DIY feel. There were broad waves of 4e editors rewriting entire 'core' articles, often deleting entire tracts of previous lore in the name of 'updating' the wikia to the new edition. The mods like Fw190a8, Hashimashadoo, and Cronje were the sheriffs of the day that worked to push for citations and did their best to kerb the trolls and unreferenced work. However, most editors had to fight for their own articles, and it was often a case of 'out-referencing' another editor to stop them deleting your work. Many of the battlegrounds drove the editors away as little could meaningfully get done."

Nevertheless, and the community and the wiki survived. Eli notes, "However, Fw190a8's golden rule of 'reference everything' endured and was picked up by editors like myself and became well-established when the 2011/12 crop of BadCatMan, Darkwynters, Moviesign, TerrorBlades & Thomaslove92 arrived". From 2011, Hashimashadoo began raising up long-lasting and quality editors to admin status, with Quinsareth (who'd started in March 2007) in March 2011 and Cronje (started May 2010) in June 2012, while future admins Darkwynters and Moviesign joined respectively in August and November of 2011. February 2012 saw the arrival of BadCatMan, who says, "I left another wiki with a very hostile admin and non-cooperative community; I wish I'd never gotten involved. Though the quality of the FRW had put me off for years, I found things on the up-and-up and a much more friendly community, and soon became very involved." They all quickly became very involved in the running and maintenance of the wiki. In September, after seeing Cronje given admin status, he simply asked in the forums how to become an admin, and he Darkwynters (who'd joined in August 2011) won the posts by acclaim in October. Hashimashadoo granted bureaucrat powers to BadCatMan in May 2013. In June 2013, Darkwynters nominated Moviesign, and he was duly upgraded to administrator by BadCatMan. As old admins faded away or lost their access to the offline world, BadCatMan, Darkwynters, and Moviesign became a triumvirate managing the wiki on a day-to-day basis, enforcing policies and creating new ones, and implementing new features. Lhynard arrived in November 2014 and quickly impressed, being invited by BadCatMan to become an admin in April 2015. Fortunately, he accepted and stayed. A

Eli the Tanner describes the later atmosphere: "Post 2011, the community began building new policies that have shaped what we have today. The new climate allowed specialists like Daranios and Coswig to flourish unimpeded."

Moviesign reminisces
I guess it says something that my first edits (on any wiki anywhere, I think) were to create and use a Cite book template. After I got acclimated to wiki work and began some pet projects, I got interested in the more technical side of things and adding new features. My first real template was the Currency table and I was hooked. The 4th edition controversy was still echoing through the wiki (mostly on Talk pages and Forum:Split the wiki, which was a big deal at the time) and I had quite a few 2nd edition sources that I wanted to use in my contributions, so I spoke out in favor of treating all editions equally (I'm particularly proud of my 16:48, January 9, 2012 post), and then later proposed changes to our infoboxes to support edition-specific sections. Thankfully, the wiki did not split and I got to have fun reconstructing templates to handle everything from 1e to the as-yet-mythical 5e.

After BadCatMan joined, there was a push by User:Fw190a8 to spruce up the Main Page and get some fresh content, preferably in automatic rotation, so BCM and User:Cronje (I believe) put their heads together and after a couple months we got a new Main Page in January 2013 with weekly "Did you know?" trivia and a rotating Featured Article. I got in the spirit of things with the "On this day" feature and helped out with code for Featured Article, Featured Source, and Featured Image. Now our main page is quite dynamic and I hope viewers actually pause and look at it before they search for something they are interested in.

Wikia recently announced that a large percentage of viewers are accessing the wiki via mobile devices and the old wikimarkup infoboxes consistently break when viewed on a mobile device. I am currently in the process of converting all our infoboxes to the new "portable" style and I'm hoping that we can keep all the functionality that the old style gave us. I think all of wikidom can be summed up in three little words: work in progress. &mdash;Moviesign (talk) 17:05, September 28, 2015 (UTC)