Wikia Gaming:History
From Wikia Gaming
This is the History of The Encyclopedia Gamia formerly Strategema.net. Encyclopedia Gamia was started in 2005 by Achernar while contributed to, at first, by members of the Penny Arcade forums. Disclaimer Not only is this not meant to be a serious article it is also not very accurate. I wasn't there in the beginning so I don't actually know who arrived when and from where and did what (even worse I've probably forgotten people entirely). You guys will have to fill that in. Also since I have been around I can't remember that much so you guys will have to help with that too. I'm also biased, there's a whole section based around me :). I'd also appreciate any help in actually improving my pathetic attempt at a joke article so it can actually end up being funny. I also need to add links to the other three gaming wikis and other internal linky things.
[edit] The Beginning
Twas a man named Achernar, and yea he spoketh unto himself "let there be an encyclopedia for gaming of all types, that spans all genres and all of time." That was the birth of Encyclopedia Gamia.
And Achernar drew followers for his creation from the holy place of Penny Arcade. He soon had a band of followers known to others as Echo, AlphaTwo, Ledneh, Mirkon, Warmaster129 and FyreWulff. These pioneers set off on the long and arduous journey to populate their God's new creation with the wisdom and knowledge of the greatest minds throughout the world.
Achernar gave unto his most trusted disciple Echo the title of Admin and granted him the power to deal with the basic day to day running of this distinguished project.
[edit] The Early Days
Word spread of this great new undertaking and new recruits started to arrive from many sources. First came Creepyguywithastick (CGWAS for short), followed by Porphyria Plan, Evisruc (known then by his less reverred name of Jfarer) Demandred82, AlphaTwo, and Oddity.
Unfortunately, soon after the influx of new followers, some of the older members began to lose faith in their leader's vision and started to drift away from the project. Many good contributors were lost in this way but, thanks to the few hardcore believers and bolstered by the enthusiasm of the newly converted, the Encyclopedia Gamia continued to grow steadily. During this time Porphyria Plan created the legendary Memory Box, which reigned for an inconceivable amount of time as the longest article ever created.
[edit] Futile and Folly
Although these early days were happy and filled with good, honest work, occasionally something would disturb the harmony of the daily update routine.
The biggest of these events occurred when Creepyguywithastick decided to make stub articles for all the Nintendo 64 games. This caused distress amongst some of his fellow team members as they felt obliged to help complete this enormous task, as they could not continue with their own self designated work whilst this monstrous void had appeared within their midst.
[edit] The Great Decline, (a.k.a. the Abandoning and Spamming and Gnashing of Teeth)
Then came the event that would shock the entire community. Achernar and Echo both abandoned the community due to commitments elsewhere. Many a tear was shed as the site had become unstable and with no way to contact the creator, who held the power of life and death for EG, the future looked very bleak indeed.
This coincided with the first visits of spammers to the site. And with no way to control them, these vile fiends ran unchecked through the pages, fouling the beautiful creations which were the result of much toil and loving care.
[edit] Technological Advances
Still the team soldiered on, and moments of relief were found as the users found they had now become veterans of the cause and their skills with the tools they used had blossomed under this hardship.
CGWAS created a logo and background to be applied to the wiki, but the pain of being impotent to make use of them is still to fresh to talk about. Evisruc, however, took this logo and background and crafted banner graphics to preach the joys of Encyclopedia Gamia to the far corners of the online gaming community. These new banners helped bring in a small number of visitors, the most notable was the new member Adan Aileron.
Also AlphaTwo had surpassed the other users in learning how to harness the power of the wiki. With his hands he fashioned the now legendary Navigation Template, among other amazing new advances which began to give shape and order to the amassed wealth of knowledge collected thus far.
[edit] We Are Not Alone
The most disturbing time was when news of three other similar projects arrived. Two of the project was still going strong (GamerWiki and GamingWiki), both had actually been started before EG, but it had less active members and it had less articles. Some users saw this encyclopedia as a threat, or competition to drive us to new levels of contributing. Some users suggested a merger as the stability of EG was still under question, and it would have brought both groups nearer towards their common goal. The leader of this other wiki did post on the EG message board, willing to enter negotiations, but, for good or for ill, nothing came of it.
[edit] Reordering to the Master Plan
An idea of Demandred82's to order the encyclopedia in a tree structure using one Master Category to branch out to every single article was being planned on the message boards. Eventually it reached a stage when it seemed ready to implement. Unfortunately it seemed only a partial success, as some articles were left out of the plan and these articles were proving difficult to categorize. The master category does still exist though, and gradually all article are slowly being altered to align with the master plan.
[edit] The Joyous Return
And then one day, a lone post on the messageboard brought forth exclamations of joy. Achernar had returned! He made Evisruc an Admin, followed later by AlphaTwo. Spammers once again learned to fear the wrath of the admin and the fatigued users were filled with a renewed vigour.
[edit] The Great Questioning
Followers of the Encyclopedia of All That Exists became aware such a project was blossoming in their midst and with stinging words questioned it. "A wiki that specializes in games? How can this be of any use? We, yes, we, are chronicling the world! And along with it, your precious games will be included. In fact, you seem to even agree! Look at how you take our information and use it for your own perverse purpose. Stop wasting your time.", they chortled not understanding the greatness and completeness that would come with such a wiki. AlphaTwo and Evisruc argued valiantly against these naysayers. Yet, alas, they simply could not understand. Persons representing both parties agreed to disagree and parted ways.
[edit] The Beginning of the Golden Age
With Achernar making a spectacular comeback he revamped both the project and the message boards. He then returned to the holy place (Penny Arcade) and recruited a plethora of new members (such as Kaosu Reido, Megane and Scooter) bringing on a new Golden Age of contributing. New features such as Userboxes have been added and the contributors to the encyclopedia have never experienced a greater sense of progress about the project.
[edit] The robots amoung us
Around late February 2006, AlphaTwo stumbled on to the idea of a bot for automating processes. AlphaBot was created and has begin his path of GLOBAL DESTRUCTION AND ENSLAVEMENT planting flowers and spreading joy.
[edit] Pack your bags
Achernar finally made the move from Strategema.net to egamia.com, but unfortunately things went mental. In his own words:
"An error in mySQL's handling of Unicode has rendered much of our database unusable and has necessitated re-starting development of the Encyclopedia. If you had previously registered a username, please re-register and begin edits as soon as you like. If you were a previous administrator, please contact the staff on the forums so that we can reactivate your account as an admin and let you get in and do some dirty work."
So a lot of 338 user accounts were lost (although they'd already disappeared for a long time), but on the plus side it was a chance to rebuild the structure of the Encyclopedia Gamia, and perhaps fix a few oversights along the way.
Moving was complete on June 17, 2006 and the old site had a total of 26,557 page view on the main page.
[edit] 2007-8 Merges
On January 21 we hit 1000 Unique game pages and the Encyclopedia Gamia page on Wikipedia was deleted on January 27. The result of the AfD (Articles for Deletion) debate can be seen here. On April 21 we surpassed 20,000 views on the main page. On April 30, 2007 Achernar granted sysop power to Adan Aileron and Cs california.
[edit] Merge
On November 20, 2007 Encyclopedia Gamia servers are announced to be moved to wikia. On November 30th Egamia merged with Gameinfo.wikia. Gameinfo wiki was launched on 28 February, 2005, following a merger of two previous Wikia; The Nintendo Wikia (which later reopened at nintendo.wikia.com) and the What was that game? wiki.
[edit] Merge CheatBase
CheatBase wiki started on July 1, 2005 was merged with the Encyclopedia Gamia's cheats section on December 14, 2007 by Wikia staff Angela. Cheat base wiki was recommended to be merged on December 10, 2007 and was voted by Encyclopedia Gamia users to be merged. The Cheat base wiki contains around 238 articles on cheats, secrets, and unlockables.
[edit] Merged Again
On April 2, 2008 Egamia Merged with Wikia Gaming and adopted Portal pages and a new gaming hub. The site also accepted the name Wikia Gaming and had a new logo remade.