Minecraft Wiki (website)

The Minecraft Wiki is an online encyclopedia which covers the Minecraft franchise and is maintained by the game's voluntary community. Over the years, it has gone through a number of periods where its users have built and shaped such a website.

Description
The Minecraft Wiki runs on the MediaWiki software, also used by Wikipedia and many other large wikis. Like other wikis, the content on the Minecraft Wiki is created by volunteers and almost all pages are open to be edited by anyone with a Fandom website account. There are also a number of admins with certain capabilities such as being able to delete pages, but otherwise behave like other editors.

Recent edits on the wiki are shown in the Recent Changes page, where they can be reviewed and corrected if necessary. Every edit to a page is also listed in its "page history" view (accessible under the dropdown next to the "Edit/"View source" button on Desktop view).

Content on the wiki is divided into different "namespaces", which are specified as prefixes in the page title. Articles about Minecraft are in the "default namespace" and do not have any prefix, while Minecraft Dungeons articles are in a separate namespace and have a "Minecraft Dungeons:" prefix, and Minecraft Legends similarly has its own namespace and prefix. There are many other namespaces that are "behind the scenes" and do not directly serve content to readers, including "File", containing all of the images, audio and other files uploaded to the wiki; "Template", containing code that allows complex content to be more added and modified on articles; and "Category", which allows pages to be organized into categories.

Every page also has an attached "Talk:" page for discussion on that particular page. This allows wiki editors to participate in discussions without having to use a different platform, and for past discussions to be searchable on the wiki itself. The majority of larger decisions are reached through community discussion rather than being decided by a single admin or editor.

History
The Minecraft Wiki was founded on June 17, 2009 by citricsquid (Samuel Ryan, a British student who got to know Minecraft during his last school year in May 2009), who also created the Minecraft Forum. It was originally named Minepedia and hosted at. In August 2009, the wiki went offline for three weeks due to a lack of financial resources for hosting. With financial support provided by community member aera, the wiki came back online on August 28, 2009. Since then, the wiki has been growing quickly along with the growth of Minecraft itself, doubling in visitors every month.

On August 19, 2010, a backup failure caused edits since August 3, 2010 to be lost, resulting in discussions about a new hosting plan. Despite community member WedTM giving some hardware, the site has been growing too quickly, raising issues again, which ended up with wiki staff asking for donations, implementing ads and incorporating Redstone Wire Ltd to manage both the wiki and forums. While these measures helped, the wiki still suffered from performance issues.

Around the same time, a company called Curse Inc. had been trying to step into the wiki hosting business. They approached Redstone Wire Ltd about acquiring the wiki and forums, which was accepted and since November 15, 2010, the wiki had been owned by Curse. Not long after in December 2010, Minepedia was forced to rename to Minecraft Wiki due to legal issues.

In August 2012, Minecraft Wiki introduced a new header, which was followed by a new logo on September 24, 2013.

In December 2012, Curse officially launched the wiki farm Gamepedia, with a goal of unifying all of its wikis under a single domain to better compete with other wiki farms, along with using a single engine to power all of the wikis. Minecraft Wiki officially moved to Gamepedia in August 2013.

In January 2016, Minecraft Wiki launched a short-lived mobile application. On July 18, 2016 at around 15:00 UTC, Minecraft Wiki surpassed 1 million edits.

On August 26, 2016, Curse has been acquired by Amazon through its subsidiary "Twitch Interactive", introducing new forms of advertisements. On November 24, 2017, Minecraft Wiki has been moved to Amazon Web Services.

In June 2018, the wiki's Discord server was launched.

On December 12, 2018, it was announced that Fandom acquired Gamepedia, including the Minecraft Wiki.

There have been various pushes over the years to make the wiki less centered around Java Edition. From March 9, 2019 all Java Edition versions have been prefixed with Java Edition, Bedrock Edition are prefixed by then unofficial term "Bedrock Edition" and Console Edition is being renamed to Legacy Console Edition. In the months following, a wiki project dedicated to creating videos for wiki articles was created, anonymous users were disallowed from creating new pages (effective September 11, 2019), simplified version history guides were officially adopted, and the wiki expanded beyond base game with the addition of Minecraft Dungeons and Minecraft Earth content.

On December 17, 2019, a Discord server was launched to discuss merging with the original Fandom Minecraft Wiki started as part of Fandom's "Crossover" process, ultimately leading to that wiki being closed and redirected 15 months later on March 9, 2021. After that, a few more Minecraft wikis merged. After disputes about Minecraft: Story Mode Wiki, a Minecraft Story Mode namespace was created in August 2021.

On August 2021, the Minecraft Wiki, along with other wikis formerly on Gamepedia, switched from the old Hydra skin to the FandomDesktop skin.

In October 2021, the Minecraft Wiki was required to change the wiki logo, main page and usages of official Minecraft logos due to the expiration of a contract with Microsoft and their copyright.

Since the acquisition and changes by Fandom, there have been multiple discussions about switching to another wiki platform.

As of January 24, 2023, anonymous users can no longer edit the wiki due to the potential risks of violating COPPA. This reduced the amount of vandalism on the wiki, but also decreased the amount of constructive activity by increasing the barrier to entry for editing.

A namespace for Minecraft Legends was set up on January 30, 2023.

Wiki statistics

 * pages
 * articles
 * registered users
 * active users
 * files
 * edits
 * admins