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The wiki was born on October 1st, 2005, created by our first user and admin, W-Drizzt/Drizzt, who it seems kicked off the Main Page, wrote an article about Drizzt Do'Urden, and departed within the month. But other editors remained and kept going with it. Hashimashadoo, who still pops in sometimes today, took over as the next administrator.
Nevertheless, the wiki crawled along for another year under a few dedicated editors until, after much patient article creation, it hit the kind of critical mass needed to attract a lot more editors. I remember in about 2006 Hash trying to recruit editors at the play-by-post Forgotten Realms community we played in; I wish I'd known then how much I'd love it now, and gotten involved at the time. I'd have so much done today. Hash's campaign must have been successful because, in October 2006, as you'll see from the graphs below, activity at FRW shot up across the board, leading to the thriving wiki we have today. This is when Zerak-Tul and Fw190a8 became admins, whom we still see around today.
The current regime came into place with Darkwynters in August and Moviesign in November 2011, and me getting involved in February 2012. 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 friendly community, and soon became very involved. The three of us were elevated to admins in 2012 and 2013. Our most recent admin is Lhynard, who burst in in only November last year.
That's what I've gleaned from my graphs and some information around the wiki. Perhaps some veterans could share some recollections, old battles fought. Some of it has got to be interesting. :-)
Now, those graphs I mentioned. Unfortunately, Wikia Statistics only go up to January 2015, so the last nine months are unknown, but I believe the trends remain. I've downloaded and plotted the figures for clarity, here:
File:FRW 2015 graphs.pdf (PDF)
Those are numbers of active editors (not anons) with more than 5 edits (casual) and more than 100 edits (dedicated, admins); numbers of edits to content namespace articles (the regular ones you read); the number of new content articles created; and the total number of content articles; all per month. In these, you can see the wiki remained fairly small but constant for a year, then suddenly accelerated in October 2006. Past that point, despite monthly fluctuations, the number of editors and their activity have remained roughly constant, while the wiki has developed at a constant rate.
The arrival of 4th edition D&D (June 2008) and the new 4th-edition Forgotten Realms sourcebooks (August & September 2008) seems to have contributed to a rise in the number of casual editors, the number of edits made, and the number of new articles, presumably about 4e content, as you'd expect. This peaked in January 2009, perhaps as the new edition smell wore off and things settled back down to normal. The number of editors tailed off over the year.
There's a dramatic peak in all the data in September/October 2010. This is about the time that the Years pages were created and subsequently formatted, many mass-produced articles that unnaturally inflate the numbers. Something similar happened in January/February 2014, when we created the Days pages.
The number of new articles actually drops to negatives in the latter half of 2012. Why? Well, since the Wikia Statistics are missing the column for actual number of new articles created per month, I had to calculate the difference in total number of articles from month to month. The totals decrease slightly at these points as a result of articles being deleted, the result of a clean-up campaign to remove plagiarised, copyright-infringing, non-FR, and homebrew articles.
The Admin Dashboard gives the Quick Stats, though these only go back a week. Here's the figures.
Sep 20: 56,800 views, 483 edits
Sep 21: 54,000 views, 252 edits
Sep 22: 53,400 views, 272 edits
Sep 23: 52,100 views, 202 edits
Sep 24: 49,800 views, 203 edits
Sep 25: 51,000 views, 365 edits
Sep 26: 49,300 views, 160 edits
These fluctuate quite a bit, so I wouldn't read much into the decline. "Sep 26" isn't over yet at time of writing. In fact, I have a feeling more people check in on Monday to see the new Did You Knows?, but I need to watch them more often. But the total for the week is 366,400 views and 1937 edits. Though many of these views may come from dedicated editors trawling the wiki for clean-up and work, many more should be coming from the readership.
But what are they looking at? Most Visited shows the 25 most visited articles. These are, today, in order: Faerûn, Drizzt Do'Urden, Spellplague, Menzoberranzan, Asmodeus, Human, Lolth, Mind flayer, Portal:Deities, Seldarine, Waterdeep, Kelemvor, Ao, Tiefling, Underdark, Cyric, Graz'zt, List of novels in order of publication, Dragonborn, Primordial, Dwarf, Torm, Nine Hells, and Chauntea. Most of these are always in the list (for some reason, Eilistraee isn't in today), and pretty much what you'd suspect: Drizzt and drow, the key places, the big name gods, and popular races and monsters. (Personally, I think the fandom could have better taste.) I imagine most people look these up on Google, find FRW is the first or second hit, and read the article. Hopefully, some go on to read other articles. So, if you're looking for a big project, one that will be seen by the most number of people, that will most raise the image of the wiki, this list is a good place to start.
Going further, the Wikia Activity Monitor is provided by Wikia to show how our wiki compares to other wikis in terms of activity. And we're doing pretty good. The FRW is in the top 5000 Wikia sites, which is why we're covered in the WAM at all and usually contact about new features. Today, 27th September, the FRW is ranked an impressive 142 out of the 5000 top wikis, and once peaked at an amazing 63. That's up from 237 in May 2013 and 235 in September 2014, the last time I reported on these. It's also ranked at an equally impressive 66 out of 2002 in the Games category up from 112 and 107 at the same times. Our WAM Score is currently 96.26/100 and rising, definitely up from 94.12 and 94.77 in previous years. Play around with WAM, compare us to your other favourite, or least favourite wikis.
How these ranks and scores are calculated isn't explained, but are claimed to be "a combination of traffic, engagement and growth". These are prone to surges and fluctuations according to real-world events. The figures only go back to January 1, 2012, and are only available one day at a time. Still, even accounting for this, the figures show we've apparently doubled, and at one point quadrupled, our rank in the last year, and are much among the top wikis on the internet. Since my own graphs and analysis show that numbers of active editors, edits, and new articles have been roughly the same for the last five years, I believe the changes in the WAM ranks and score are largely due to traffic: increased page views from fans and a larger readership, indicating an increased profile in the fandom.
Of course, the graphs and statistics only give numbers, not quality. That's more subjective and anecdotal. The increased traffic is surely because of our improved quality and more comprehensive articles – they wouldn't come if the FRW wasn't a good first-stop for lore. The bad reputation of the past, for being messy, unsourced, and core-focused, is passing. If I hit "Random Page" and bump around the wiki, I am now more often than not going to find a decent page, one that's well formatted, tidy, cited, categorised, one that's not copied, homebrewed, or a mess. The problem pages are almost all tagged or known about, and are being regularly rehabilitated. Almost all those mass-produced Years pages had content copied from the Grand History; I've been deleting and rewriting those and I'm pleased to report that I have less than a century to go. New articles from anonymous, new, and casual users are all vetted, fixed, and copy-edited, ensuring quality content is being added.
Now for things we need to improve in order to grow, not at a constant rate, but an accelerated one.
Short of me going completed unemployed, existing editors can't do more work than they have time for. Number of new articles and number of edits are products of the number of editors. So, we need more editors and more who'll stick around. Advertising at the WotC and Candlekeep forums has raised our profile, increasing traffic and readership, but not led to many more people taking up editing. So how else can we attract and keep more casual and dedicated editors? How can we get the anons to make accounts? These are the problems we've discussed before. The community is already very welcoming. Perhaps we could engage with them more, giving personal one-on-one tuition on creating articles? Automatic tips and tricks? Some novel features? Simplified templates? Unfortunately, it's nigh impossible to contact anonymous editors and their IP addresses change every few days, and some have been very reluctant to even make accounts. Ideas?
Perhaps if or when a proper 5th edition FR sourcebook is released, if ever, we will see a fresh influx as we did with 4th edition. And hopefully we'll keep them this time.
We seem to get a lot of editors for whom English is a second language, or else their online written English is not so good. It shows the Forgotten Realms and the Forgotten Realms Wiki have an international reach, which is good. Unfortunately, errors and hard-to-read articles do not make the wiki look good. Some of you have been following me in copy-editing new and old articles – correcting spelling and grammar, rephrasing difficult sentences, using natural-sounding terms – which is a big help. If you're admins, you can mark "patrolled" on new articles (removing the yellow shading) at Special:NewPages (where I work from), to save us doubling up. But I invite everyone to have a go at improving on these (I'm getting rather frustrated and exhausted by the load, to be honest.) I plan to write a style guide some time.
Stubs, I feel, are another big problem. Many editors make short stub articles, a few short lines that cover the basics but leave a lot unsaid. While the stubs increase our article count, they don't add a lot of content. IMO, they're just not interesting to read and not useful as a resource. They're filler. I'd rather read one complete article than a dozen stubs.
What else? Improved and consistent website art and unique styling will make the FRW look more professional and cleaner. We've been working on that with new logos and icons from Jandor and Thomas Love, and updated infoboxes for the different skins, thanks to Moviesign. A better mobile presence should make the wiki more useful around the game-table, so developing our accessibility via the Wikia apps could help (I think I have to do that? Ugh.)
I like that the Main Page is a little bit different from day to day, week to week, with cycled featured articles, images, daily events, and images. It invites readers to check in every morning to see the new features. Maybe a featured quote would work well? Ed Greenwood has a quote opening every chapter of his novels, and many other novels and sourcebooks provide some snappy quotes that don't quite go anywhere else.
We've discussed community-wide, cooperative projects as a way fleshing out some key topics on the wiki and making it more comprehensive. We could do a single topic, like Drizzt, or a more general topic all things Cormyr. I call it horde editing. :D
It's been a long ten years for the wiki, with ups and downs, but so many more ups than downs. I congratulate the first few editors who formed it out of nothing, which is the most difficult task for any project like this. That it's lasted this long is a stunning achievement, when so many other wikis die off and languish. I congratulate those who saw it through the rough times in the middle, keeping it alive. And I congratulate the last couple editors, all of us, those of us who've turned it around, raised the quality across the board, raised our profile and popularity, implemented new features and put us among the best wikis on the web.
We're in the high levels now. Let's go slay a dragon.
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. 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. 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.
We are in the halcyon days. Although I still slowly plod on like before, you can make much more impact nowadays and it feels like our work will be preserved.
Excellent words of wisdom, BadCat!!! I completely agree that this wiki has become more like a community since joining in 2011... I am extremely glad the wiki has turned to an "include" all edition policy... I have also noticed the rate of troll activity has greatly diminished over the last few years... great job admins and editors :)
Movie, probably BCM is talking about mobile apps: Check [[1]], [[2]].
Patrolling: I used to try to patrol everything in New Pages, until the volume got too great. Fortunately, once I got to know the reliable, well-written editors, I could skip their work, and only check in occasionally when curious or writing the Did You Knows. Now I focus on the anons and those with more limited English.
Apps: Thanks, Jandor, those apps. Wikia's listed some of its general apps here. "My Wikia" is seemingly just general Wikia reading, so out of our hands. It's Apple-only, so I can't check this out. There are some Android apps for individual wikis; we're not among them, so maybe they need to be individually created? I don't know the first thing about this.
What we have been directed to is Game Guides. I don't think it's well suited to the FRW. This is more video game–focused, we're only a part of it because FR is a part of D&D, which is kept under Games in Wikia. Nevertheless, the FRW's presence in the app needs some maintenance and updating, by admins it seems.
Thanks, Eli, that's sad to hear about the old days, but shows how far we've come too.
Jandor, I think I'll assemble a potted history at Forgotten Realms Wiki:About (we already have a little one), and a special statement on the Main Page.
For some reason, I can't make forum post templates here. And no, I've not see the movie. I just wanted something medieval sounding and pompous. :)
I've started expanding the history of the wiki with above recollections, stats, and the coronation dates of admins. Since the About page is protected, I've copied it to User:BadCatMan/Forgotten Realms Wiki history. I invite everyone to come by, leave a recollection of the past, some information about new users or features being implemented, etc. I've not finished my own work on it yet, however.