Minecraft Wiki:History

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History[]

Creation and early history (June 2009 - October 2010)[]

On June 16, 2009, a Minecraft player known as citricsquid created the Minecraft Forums. This was done in reaction to the large amount of spam on the official Minecraft forum created by Notch.^[1]

On the next day, Quatroking wrote a suggestion to the forums. In the suggestion, he proposed to create a wiki for Minecraft. Citricsquid created the wiki as Quatroking suggested. Shortly after that, Quatroking became the wiki's first administrator.

Back then, Minecraft Wiki was known as "Minepedia"^[2] and was hosted at minecraftwiki.net.^[3] There were many other wikis for Minecraft both before and after Minepedia. It's thought that Minepedia's ties with Notch and Minecraft Forums helped its popularity.

On August 3, 2009, the forums and wiki went offline because citricsquid could no longer afford hosting. After 3 weeks, community member aera, known for creating the first ever custom server "myne!", offered to cover the costs. On August 28, 2009, the Minecraft Forums and Minepedia came back online.

Both the forums and the wiki resumed their growth after this outage. As the community for Minecraft itself grew, so did the forum and the wiki. During that period, the number of visitors to the two websites doubled every 2 months.

In July 2010, Minepedia created a wiki page for Minecraft bugs. This unofficial bug tracker was how players reported bugs in practice back then. It's currently found at Minecraft Wiki:Issues.

On August 19, 2010, a backup failure caused loss of all edits from August 3 to August 18.^[4] As a result, the community started discussing a new hosting plan. Community member WedTM offered more hardware. However, despite this gift, the growth of the two websites kept causing further issues. Later that same month, anonymous editing was disabled due to the large amount of unconstructive activity coming from such users.

Over September, the two websites had a five-fold growth in daily views: from 200,000 to 1,000,000. Hosting costs reached $2,000 per month, and the hosting team asked the community for donations. In one week, $3,500 were raised, which was enough to rent better hardware. For more stable income, the hosting team added ads shortly after that. These changes made it needed to create a legal entity responsible for the sites. On September 30, 2010, Redstone Wire Ltd was formed and incorporated.

During October, the wiki and the forum had regular technical issues as their popularity kept rising. By that time, the two sites together became almost as popular as StackOverflow, and it was harder and harder to manage them.

In October, wiki editors made some major changes to how they discuss the wiki. Originally, the talk page of the wiki's main page was used both to discuss the main page itself, and to discuss the wiki in general. This made it harder to find relevant topics in archives. On October 14, wiki editors created the community portal page. Shortly after that, the community portal became a hub for links (to the forums and to Minecraft.net), and on October 20, it became the on-wiki forum for wiki discussion. The talk page for the main page had its content moved to the community portal the following week.

Wiki under Curse.com (November 2010 - December 2012)[]

In fall 2010, the wiki space was experiencing one of the biggest events in its history. Up until then, 99.9% of non-Wikimedia Foundation wiki space (known also as Fan-wiki space) was dominated by the wiki platform Wikia (today known as Fandom and it is a wiki platform you're just browsing on). Wikia's newest fixed-width skin, Oasis, was met with strong disapproval by various wiki editors, which meant people may have intentions to leave Wikia, which in turn was a good time for other companies to offer their own wiki services. One of those companies which took advantage was Curse.

Curse started as a database of World of Warcraft mods, but by the 2009, they've expanded to other areas, such as forums for example. It was at that time Curse decided to host their first wiki. 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,^[5] but it was enough for them to realize there's a space for something like a wiki farm. After seeing decent success with the wikis they were hosting, they've decided to expand. But the process was still very slowly, as by the end of October 2010, it had just 7 wikis, which is meant they were more of a joke hosting service 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.

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 be 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. ^[6]

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^[7], followed by creation of Admin noticeboard in early January 2011.

The excessive usage of images on the wiki has been stressing the server for some time. This resulted in an idea of a single image, a stylesheet added through CSS with all blocks and items on the bitmap, and it would display parts of this one image. This became a template known as {{Sprite}}.^[8]

In June 2011, Minecraft Wiki community, for the first time in its existence, got into an argument with Curse.^[9] This was due to Curse adding a sidebar for some promotional materials and later ads. Despite the protests and repeated rants from community members, the sidebar remained until early 2013, when the wiki migrated to Gamepedia platform.

On September 6, 2011, anonymous editing was re-enabled after the implementation of extra tools, such as the Abuse Filter, to counter unconstructive edits.^[10] September 2011 also marked the closure of minepedia.net^[11]. Since then, the 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^[12]. The header has been implemented right away, although it took a year for the logo to be finally changed on September 24, 2013.^[13]

Migration to Gamepedia (December 2012 - August 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 long period of time.

In May 2013, the wiki had been experiencing server issues, with the proposal being to remove images from {{Blocks}} and {{Items}}.^[14] 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.^[15] There was a discussion to change its background color, but it stayed on
 #729fcf and did so until 2021.

In September 2013, "Minetip" tooltips were officially introduced.^[16]

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.^[17] 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^[18] 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.

In Late 2014, Official Feed the Beast Wiki has had migrated to Gamepedia and therefore a logical question began circulating on wikis about the future of Mods on this wiki, though it took few years until something was decided on.

In October 2014, it has been suggested to create a namespace alias. Since then, MCW: and MCT: are aliases for "Minecraft Wiki" and "Minecraft Wiki talk" namespaces respectively.^[19]

On March 14, 2015, Talk page guidelines have been introduced.^[20][21]

In January 2016, a mobile app was finally launched for Minecraft Wiki. The mobile app has been one of the most requested things from both readers and editors since at least 2011. However, the excitement didn't last long, as the has been met with lot of criticism, concerning its inability to edit pages, read other namespaces or just reading other languages.^[22] While there were plans to add offline mode, add other languages and other features, it didn't take too long for the app to be abandoned. The last update was released in August 2016, and since then the app has been crashing for everybody, until it was withdrawn from the store sometime in 2017.

On July 18, 2016 at around 15:00 UTC, Minecraft Wiki surpassed 1 million edits, with the 1,000,000 millionth edit being done by Meeples10.

From acquisition to acquisition (August 2016 - November 2018)[]

On August 26, 2016, Curse has been acquired by Amazon through its subsidiary "Twitch Interactive". Slowly, Amazon's influence was becoming stronger, with Twitch streams as a new type of advertisement starting to appear at the bottom of the pages not long after. On November 24, 2017, Minecraft Wiki has been moved to Amazon Web Services^[23]

On May 1 and May 8, 2017, wiki agreed on icons for Curse Staff and ex-Mojang employees.^[24]

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.

As instant messaging services were becoming more and more common, there was a need for a wiki Discord. Around May 2018, the Discord server was created by a non-admin, eventually transferred to director ownership^[25] and officially launched on June 15, 2018.

In early June 2018, a wiki project for refactoring version labels was created. After a discussion, the second custom wiki role, patrollers, was created on July 12, 2018,^[26] which was followed by now defunct "Patroller requests" page, which was a place for verifying edits.

On December 12, 2018, it was announced that Fandom has bought the Gamepedia, including this wiki. In a short time, users were moved onto Fandom servers and Curse brand has been officially discontinued.

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.

On June 13, 2017, a topic was opened on community portal, talking about the orientation of the wiki,^[27] which resulted in a wiki project called "Renaming". 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, at that time Mojang's current Community manager and wiki editor, HelenAngel, stepped in and tried to discuss her stance and how it has been referred at Mojang. 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, as the proposal to begin the move failed^[28]. After the discussion was revived in January 2019, wiki agreed on prefixing versions.^[29] Pages started to focus more on all editions of the game. All Java Edition articles have received "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.

June 2019 was a very active month. There was a discussion about if the wiki should continue to use videos from "MCspotlights", a channel founded by Curse, that employed two YouTubers to make videos about Minecraft for Minecraft Wiki and embed them into pages. Since in 2015, the Curse decided to cancel mcspotlight project, as the time went by, the videos they produced were getting more and more outdated, to the point one wiki editor started to remove them. After being brought up on the community portal^[30], the discussion resulted into a creation of wiki project called "Wiki videos". This project, while very ambiguous, it ended up as a flop few years afterwards.

As a result of an another 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.^[31]

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 several months, and the discussion turned into fighting about the scope of the wiki. Eventually, after the discussion was scheduled to close in early 2020, the final decision was creation of a separate namespace for Minecraft Dungeons, while Minecraft Earth in main namespace. Since the content has been documented as subpages of wiki projects, the moving was progressing quickly.

However, in few days it was decided the Minecraft Earth information may be conflicting with the page and the movement of the pages was put on halt. 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 simplified guides. 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 the links to the pages 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. 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".

Project Crossover, 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, 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 a 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, and was somewhat revived, when the migration of Gamepedia wikis to Fandom domain was announced. While this spawned discussion about "3 Minecraft Wikis" and crossovers with other wikis, there wasn't a real progress in talks. The discussion finally became active, 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.^[32] In the end, this haven't stopped crossover from happening, and so 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, more crossovers happened. However, Minecraft Story Mode Wiki was the one which opposed, despite reapproaching several times. This prompted "Minecraft Story Mode Wiki" wiki project to take off. On August 26, 2021, this project ended up with "Minecraft Story Mode" namespace being set-up.

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

Being unofficial, anonymous editing disabling (October 2021 - December 2022)[]

In early October 2021, it was announced that Microsoft has terminated an official wiki partnership^[33]. 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.

During the next 15 months activity on the wiki decreased along with many active editors leaving the community. Additionally due to changes in wiki's ownership, discussions regarding moving wiki to another wiki platform arose in the community as a result of many concerns in regards to reputation of Fandom.^[34] Ultimately those discussions died down as the move was considered too risky.

However, there were some decisions made. The wiki agreed on abandoning "Official pages"^[35] and decided to grant Amatulic and Magiczocker admin rights, following a discussion^[36].

On January 24, 2023, Fandom disabled anonymous editing on the Minecraft Wiki^[37], as they determined it as a wiki "for kids". The change decreased the amount of vandalism the wiki experienced, as most vandalism was done by anonymous accounts. However, the change also decreased activity of the wiki, as anonymous editors made up a large portion of people that edited the wiki.

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

After a brief discussion in the wiki's discord server, the wiki's English Twitter account became active again on March 10, 2023 after just under two years of inactivity. Additionally in July 2023, a Minecraft Wiki Mastodon account was created.

Timeline of admins[]

References[]