Minecraft Wiki (website)

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. This was his reaction to the official Minecraft forum created by Notch, which was flood with spam and wasn't really focused on.

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 2010, Community portal was transformed to be an actual useful page for users, followed by creation of Admin noticeboard in early January 2011. 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.

In June 2011, Minecraft Wiki community, for the first time in its existence, got into an argument with Curse. This was due to Curse adding a sidebar for some promotional materials and later ads. Despite the protests, it wasn't removed, until the wiki migrated to Gamepedia.

In September 2011,  was closed. Since then, Minecraft Wiki is the biggest wiki about Minecraft with no significant competition to challenge it.

In August 2012, Minecraft Wiki has decided to change its wiki logo and header. The header has been implemented right away, though for the logo, it took a year to be finally changed on September 24, 2013.

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. The move was completed in August 2013. As an added bonus, Curse decided to get rid of the controversial right sidebar the wiki had been hating for a longer period of time.

In May 2013, the wiki had been experiencing server issues, with the proposal being to remove images from Blocks and Items. As most of the editors haven't agreed, the alternative was to use LoadPage. At that time, it was used very rarely, but due to these issues, lot of navboxes were converted into these pages, which had sped the wiki. Meanwhile, a creation of separate namespaces has been requested, though it wasn't agreed on. However, a proposal for something, which was agreed on, was created few days later. This proposal was about wiki header's color and the conclusion was to change its text color to white. There was a discussion to change its background color, but it stayed on and did so until 2021.

In September 2013, "Minetip" tooltips were officially introduced.

Until late 2013, all versions of an edition were hosted on a single page. This started to become a problem during Java Edition 1.7's development in October 2013. The first page was for Java Edition 1.8, at that time called "1.8". To make sure users will be able to navigate from a one version to an another one with ease, a navbox was created It was also decided "Pocket Edition" and Legacy Console Edition versions would also use their own prefix, and while Pocket Edition started to use this system in 2015, it took 6 more years for Console Editions, way after version pages have taken over the wiki.

On May 7, 2014, Curse introduced Curse Profiles, an integrated social media system in Gamepedia offering a wide range of features. It was meant to be an alternative for user pages and user talk pages, which would display the same information across the entire network.

Acquisition 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.

June 2019 was a very active month, with 3 important discussions ran at the same time. Firstly, there was 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 embedded 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.

Additionally, as a result of discussion, which ran from June to September 2019, wiki officially disallows its pages to be created by anonymous users, starting September 11, 2019. Until then, creation of new pages was restricted by an abuse filter, allowing only redirects creation for anonymous users and newly registered users.

And finally, since June 2019, wiki has been discussing proposal to document Minecraft spin offs and other games (Minecraft Earth, Minecraft Dungeons, Minecraft: Story Mode). This discussion took 9 months, since the discussion was basically fighting about the scope of the wiki. Eventually, the discussion was scheduled to closed in early 2020 and the final decision was that Minecraft Dungeons should be documented in its own separate namespace, while Minecraft Earth will be documented in mainspace. As the content has been already documented as a subpages of wiki projects, they were moved to the namespace relatively quickly.

However, this didn't last long. Relatively quickly, it was decided the Minecraft Earth information may be conflicting with the page and the movement of the pages was put on halt. Eventually, the result was a discussion, where it was decided that Minecraft Earth will also receive its own namespace.

As the wiki was becoming more complex and version histories were longer, it became clear there may be a need for a simplified guide. This was already fulfilled in late 2018 to early 2019, with 1.13 and 1.14 guides. However, the guides really took off after they have been added to Java Edition versions in late 2019, which spawned lot of interest into guides and together with Simple Guide table, all big major updates have had their guides created in coming months.

During 2020, as a result of COVID 19 pandemic, the wiki activity increased significantly, thus beginning a golden age of the wiki. This prompted much bigger projects, such as creation of launcher versions, together with Legacy Console Edition. Until September 2020, Legacy Console Edition version history page listed all version changelogs for all console editions prior to discontinuation of PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PlayStation Vita editions, with the exception of PlayStation 4 editions released after the discontinuation of these 3 editions. Ultimately, it was decided that it would be moved to their own pages, with the similar versions sharing one changelog from a special template.

The wiki has been moved to Unified Community Platform (UCP), a new platform uniting Fandom and Gamepedia wikis, on October 5, 2020. In early 2021, as part of "UCX project" at Fandom, the wiki received a new mobile skin called "FandomMobile".

Minecraft Wiki Crossovers, domain migration and FandomDesktop skin (November 2020 - August 2021)
After Gamepedia has been bought by Fandom, some of the admins from Fandom Minecraft Wiki (today's location at "minecraft-archive.fandom.com") joined Gamepedia Minecraft Wiki Discord server to discuss cooperation with each other. Initially, users disagreed with each other's, as many users had thoughts that Fandom wiki is "useless", citing the weird way of documenting versions and allowance of mod documentation. However, this started to change in early 2019, as "Project Crossover" was announced by both Fandom and Gamepedia. In late December 2019, the Minecraft Wiki Discord server agreed on opening a discussion about protentional merge with Fandom wiki. It was already clear, that Fandom will merge to Gamepedia, since Gamepedia was official wiki after all, just the question was, if it will actually happen. There were some people, who thought the Fandom wiki will co-exist with the Gamepedia one (which as was later proved wasn't the case). As such, a "Minecraft Wikis Crossover" Discord server was created.

However, the discussion wasn't active at all, until the migration of Gamepedia wikis to Fandom domain was announced. This is where an idea of "3 Minecraft Wikis" was proposed, which was an official wiki for everything Minecraft, a community wiki and a mods wiki. Additionally, a potential crossover with Minecraft Story Mode Wiki has also been discussed.

What finally made the discussion active were when the migration to Fandom domain officially began. The process of resolving conflicting wikis would make Fandom wiki unsearchable in search results, so the process has been sped up. Following a poll on Legacy Fandom Minecraft Wiki, with more than 53% of people supporting the crossover and a support between administrators, Fandom's original Minecraft Wiki was archived on March 9, 2021, and banner was added directing people to this Minecraft Wiki.

During this time, Gamepedia wiki was solving an only blocker, which may prevent the fork from happening. The Fandom Wiki has been using Discussions system, which allowed a discussion about anything Minecraft or wiki related. Following a discussion, it was decided Minecraft Wiki won't enable discussions. In the end, this haven't stopped crossover from happening.

On March 22, 2021, this wiki was migrated to "fandom.com" domain, while the archived wiki got moved to its current location, minecraft-archive.fandom.com.

Following this successful Crossover, crossovers with other wikis were announced, such as with wikis for Minecraft PlayStation Edition and Minecraft Earth. Ultimately, half a dozen of Mincraft-related wikis have been merged. However, Minecraft Story Mode Wiki has been approached again, yet with no results. During this time, Minecraft Story Mode Wiki project became an active project. Later, another approach has been done, now by their own Wiki Representative. Unfortunately, it became clear that admins on that wiki had no interest in merging, and that's when Story Mode Wiki really took off. On August 26, 2021, this project ended up with Minecraft Story Mode being set-up and articles have since then moved there.

Since July 2021, the wiki has been using FandomDesktop as its primary skin.

Being Unofficial, lack of activity and dark age (October 2021 - January 2023)
In early October 2021, it was announced that Microsoft has terminated an official wiki partnership. The wiki was forced to make changes to main page and change its logo it had been using since 2013. Since then, Minecraft Wiki moved on towards becoming the most useful guide for everything Minecraft, even though the activity declined.

2022 was a very quiet year, with not much of discussion being done. However, wiki had agreed on abandoning "Official pages" and the subpages were reclassified as wiki projects.

Since January 24, 2023, anonymous user cannot edit the wiki, as Minecraft has been declared by Fandom as a wiki falling under COPPA law.

Wiki has also agreed on creating a namespace for Minecraft Legends, which was set-up on January 30, 2023.

Trivia

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