Minecraft Wiki (website)

Source:

Creation of the wiki and painful begginings (June 2009 - October 2010)
On June 16, 2009, a Minecraft player by the name of citricsquid has had created a site called Minecraft Forums, after seeing the spammed original Mojang forum.

A day later, Quatroking joined the Minecraft Forums as the 10th member. It was him, who suggested Minecraft Wiki and since citricsquid agreed and decided to create the wiki, Quatroking became the first full-time admin on Minecraft Wiki.

At that time, the wiki was called "Minepedia - The Minecraft Wiki!" , but was referred to as "Minepedia" and hosted at "minecraftwiki.net".

The wiki wasn't very different from other Minecraft wikis. There were tons of those on internet already and some of the bigger ones would get created in next few weeks. However, the connection between wiki, forums and Notch were key factors, which affected the wiki's popularity.

Unfortunately, the things didn't go well. At the same time as both sites were created, citricsquid has had left the high school and didn't have enough money to afford hosting any longer, and so on August 3, 2009, forums and the wiki went offline. After 3 weeks, community member "aera" (a person known for creating a first ever custom server "myne!") offered to cover the costs and on August 28, 2009, Minecraft Forums and Minepedia are online again.

After that, both forums and Minecraft Wiki started to become essential part of Minecraft community. And as the game continued to grow, the forum and the wiki did so too, doubling in size every 2 months.

In August 2010, the sites outgrew the hosting that aera was providing and needed a new plan. This resulted in community member WedTM stepping forward and offered the hardware. Unfortunately, both forums and wiki were growing just too quickly, and it became an issue in just few weeks again.

The September 2010 was a very difficult time. In a single month, the daily views quintupled from 200,000 to 1,000,000. Until this point, there were no ads or donations, but as the hardware has been outgrewed and the bill for the hosting has reached $2000, the administration team turned to the community for donations. In one week, $3500 were raised, enough to rent a better hardware. To achieve more stability, ads were introduced shortly after. This meant there had to be a legal entity responsible for the sites, and thus a company "Redstone Wire, Ltd" was formed and incorporated on September 30, 2010.

The next month was more of the stable months. However, the sites were still growing rapidly, meaning the stability issues were returning very often. Additionally, this was still just a volunteers running the site, which meant lot of the stuff was on the shoulders of community and admins, who were managing a site as big as StackOverflow, which has been becoming messier every single day. For example, the main point for discussion was a talk page of the wiki's main page. However, the discussion was mixing up with the discussion about the main page itself, which would make the archives very difficult to follow.

That was a motivation to create and maintain a Community portal page, which was created on October 14. Originally, the portal wasn't meant to exist at all, as the page was created just to inform administrators, that they link to it from sidebar. Later that week, the portal transformed into a place to list two links, one to forums and second to Minecraft.net, and since October 20, 2010, it has officially become the place for discussing the wiki, replacing Main Page's talk (whose content was moved to the community portal the following week).

Wiki under Curse.com (November 2010 - January 2013)
In fall 2010, the wiki space was experiencing one of the biggest events in wikis history. Up until then, 99.9% of non-Wikimedia Foundation wiki space (known also as Fan-wiki space) was under the wiki platform Wikia (today known as Fandom and it is a wiki platform you're just on). Wikia's newest fixed-width skin, Oasis, summoned hate from various big wikis, which in turn was a good time for other companies to offer their own wiki services. One of these companies was Curse.

Curse started as a database of mods for World of Warcraft, but by the 2009, they've expanded to other areas, for example forums. It was at that time Curse decided to host their first wiki. Surprisingly, it wasn't their first touch with wiki space either. In 2007, they had a short-lived partnership with Wikia, which lasted for just 5 months, but it was enough for them to realize there's a space for something like a wiki farm. After seeing success of their wikis, they were expanding. But very slowly. By the end of October 2010, it had just 7 wikis, which is meant they were more of a joke than a wiki farm. But at the same time, a drama raised on Wikia and so Curse took the stage. They were now looking for including every wiki.

So at the beginning of November 2010, the president of Curse, Donovan Duncan, reached out to citricsquid and the team. The deal was that Curse would acquire sites under "Redstone Wire Ltd" and would hire citricsquid, aera and WedTM. This happened by the November 15, 2010, since when the site was owned by Curse.

Few weeks later in December, 2010, "Minepedia" had to renamed to "Minecraft Wiki", since the owners of domain "minepedia.net" has raised a legal issue, which concluded that the wiki could no longer be named as "Minepedia". However, the transition was very slow, and references were being changed throughout the 2011.

In months following, Minecraft Wiki improved its management pages. In late December 2009, Community portal was transformed to be an actual useful page for users, followed by creation of Admin noticeboard in early January 2010. There were also new templates being created. For example, a user named "Fenhl" created a [ first version] of History template, and a template Crafting. This spawned new possibilities, which were fulfilled with templates Inventory slot and Crafting Table.

Migration to Gamepedia and wiki's first golden age (Late 2012 - 2016)
With the number of wikis Curse was hosting raising rapidly, more and more problems came along with upgrading them. Since all of the wikis ran on their own MediaWiki cores, updating meant technical issues for a longer period of time. Additionally, due how wikis were on their own URLs, features like site-wide logging could not exist and SEO was per-wiki, which wasn't ideal, if somebody wanted to compete with Wikia.

That was an inspiration of Gamepedia wiki farm, powered by "Hydra" wiki engine. This introduced a single MediaWiki core, easily manageable extensions, site-wide logging and it made Gamepedia wikis stronger in SEO.

Acquicision by Twitch and big changes to the wiki (2016 - November 2018)
In 2016, Amazon bought Curse through its subsidiary "Twitch Interactive". Since then, random Twitch stream was pasted directly under an article.

In 2017, Gamepedia announced an end to its Gamepedia PRO paid service, that was replaced by free Gamepedia PRO, that can be earned by editing wikis.

Summer of 2018 was a very active one. In early June, a wiki project for refactoring version labels was created. On June 15, 2018, Minecraft Wiki Discord server was officially launched. After a discussion, the second custom wiki role, patrollers, was created on July 12, 2018, which was followed by now defunct "Patroller requests" page, which was a place for verifying edits.

Bedrock Edition, Launcher, Consoles, spin-offs (June 2017 - September 2020)
Until March 9, 2019, the wiki primarily focused on Java Edition. After all, this was the original Minecraft, while rest were created long after. However, this started to change.

First of all, On June 13, 2017, a wiki project "Renaming" was created. The goal of it was simple - "focus on other editions of Minecraft". This project was influential to the Minecraft community from the day 1 of the project. On June 17, 2017, the term Bedrock Edition saw its first usage, which was a term which later became de facto standard for the wiki and community as a whole and in the end was officially adopted by Mojang and became the official name of the edition, starting June 7, 2022. On June 23, 2017, Mojang's (at that time) current Community manager and wiki editor, HelenAngel stepped in and tried to discuss her own opinions. While the argument for why Bedrock Edition shouldn't be named as "Bedrock Edition" haven't persuaded rest of the wiki editors, her comment about Console Edition rename did and so wiki came to the agreement, that since Console Edition does no longer include all editions, it should be suffixed by word "Legacy", so Console Edition became Legacy Console Edition.

After the Bedrock Edition 1.2.0 came though, the discussion staled. People tried to move on to the next logical step, which was to rename the pages. These proposals failed, which resulted discussion stopping in April 2018.

After it was revived in January 2019, discussion was finally rebooted and in less than 2 months, wiki agreed on prefixing versions. Pages started to focus more on all editions of the game. All Java Edition articles have gotten "Java Edition" prefix (for example, 1.12.2 became Java Edition 1.12.2) starting March 9, 2019, while pages without prefix have become disambiguations. Later, there were discussions to make Bedrock Edition the primary edition of the wiki but was opposed.

In June 2019, a discussion started about if the wiki should continue to use videos from "MCspotlights". In short, until 2015, Curse employed two YouTubers to make videos about Minecraft for Minecraft Wiki. These were embeded into pages. Then, in 2015, the Curse decided to cancel mcspotlight project, with no reason. As the time went by, they were getting more and more outdated, to the point one wiki editor started to remove them. This didn't go unnoticed and was brought up on the community portal with the result being a creation of wiki project called "Wiki videos". It took off, but all videos were taken off after.

Starting September 11, 2019, wiki officially disallows its pages to be created by unregistered users. Until then, it was restricted by an abuse filter.

Meanwhile, since June 2019, there was a discussion to document Minecraft spin offs and other games (Minecraft Earth, Minecraft Dungeons, Minecraft: Story Mode). While discussing, Minecraft Earth was released and articles started to be made. Later in early 2020, articles were moved to a Minecraft Earth Wiki and Minecraft Dungeons Wiki projects. The discussion was lasting really long and the discussion had to be scheduled to be closed.

However, the wiki had reached an agreement and Minecraft Dungeons started to be documented in a separate namespace, while Minecraft Earth was in main space. Unfortunately, there were still problems with Minecraft Earth Wiki, resulting into split of Minecraft Earth information (both MCE exclusive articles and MCE information on normal Minecraft articles) back to MCE Wiki project and a new discussion. The result was Minecraft Earth namespace.

In late 2019, first guides were added to the wiki about recent updates of the game (1.13 and 1.14). Thanks to many innovations to make guides easier, like Simple Guide table, guides were created really fast and became normal part of update changelogs on our wiki.

In September 2020, wiki decided to finally rid of the "long" Legacy Console Edition version history by separating it's versions into own articles, rather than having all of them on one page. While the page was so long (certainly one of the biggest articles on the wiki), the entire process took just a week.

Migrations to UCP, fandom.com domain and UCX (October 2020 - July 2021)
In mid 2019, Unified Community Platform (UCP) was announced. The entire plan was announced in February 2020 and it divided the UCP project into 2 phases: Phase 1 (Development of Unified Community Platform) and Phase 2 (Development of additional features, like Unified skin and tools)

The wiki was moved to this new platform on October 5, 2020.

On March 22, wiki was migrated to "fandom.com" domain.

Since July 2021, wiki is using FandomDesktop as its primary skin.

Minecraft Wiki Crossovers (November 2020 - April 2021)
After Gamepedia was bought by Fandom, there were many discussions regarding Minecraft Wiki on Fandom (today located at "minecraft-archive.fandom.com"). At first, the idea was really disagreed and it felt as done idea. However, in early 2019, Project Crossover was announced. In late December, 2019, Minecraft Wiki finally agreed on a discussion about the crossover, thus Minecraft Wiki Crossover server was created, but apart from creation day discussions, it was really inactive place.

The discussion became active for some time, when migration of Gamepedia wikis to Fandom domain was announced. There were many discussions and there were plans to make a Crossover with an active "Minecraft Story Mode Wiki", but discussions went bad due protests and was the idea was scraped.

The other discussion, however, was semi-active until first notices about migrations to Fandom domain were made. Following a poll on Legacy Fandom Minecraft Wiki with more than 53% of people supporting the crossover and a support between administrators, on March 9,2021, Fandom's original Minecraft Wiki was archived and banner was added directing people to this Minecraft Wiki.

Following this successful Crossover, Minecraft Earth Wiki, PlayStation Wiki and even the Minecraft PC wiki were merged really fast.

Minecraft Story Mode subwiki and continual changes to the wiki (June 2021 - present)
After the first unsuccessful Crossover, Minecraft Story Mode Wiki project became an active project. Few months prior, this project was nearly closed, since it was empty and dead. However, then it was revived and few of articles were created.

Later, an another try was done, now by their own Wiki Representative. Unfortunately, later it became clear that admins on that wiki were clearly ignoring the message and so the idea of crossover have fallen apart.

But as the wiki started to be more nervous about the crossover, the Minecraft Story Mode Wiki project's size increased by over 100 articles and was ready to receive its own namespace.

On August 26, 2021, Minecraft Story Mode Wiki mamespace was finally created and articles moved into it...

Mojang and Microsoft said goodbye and problems with Fandom (October 2021 - present)
In October 2021, a formal letter directy from Microsoft was discovered in Fandom's office. It weren't good news. The official wiki partnership was terminated. The wiki had to remove logos from main page, from top of the infoboxes and change its logo. The changes were done in acceptable range, so we had to say goodbye to our iconic logo and header we had for over 9 years.

At that time, the last former Gamepedia staff left and as of now, there are just 5 WRs from that era. Fandom started Fandomize Gamepedia wiki's with adding Gamepedia's features to its platform or removing features not present on Fandom.

As of now, there are big issues with the community as a whole. Community portal's activity dropped to 2 posts per month (from over 7-15). Most of the things now are now discussed on Discord, even when we agreed to use CP for that.

The activity dropped, but there are still some discussions on talk pages or in Discord server. The Wiki videos project died, but still haven't fully closed yet.

Trivia

 * While the proposal of Community portal was to take a style from Wowpedia, the actual change was the style of "The Evony Wiki".