History of the Official Feed The Beast Wiki

This page is about the history of the Official Feed The Beast Wiki. For the history of the Unofficial Feed The Beast Wiki, see Unofficial Feed The Beast Wiki#History.

The history of the Official Feed The Beast Wiki begins with its inception in late 2012, and continues to today.

Inception

Jadedcat21, who was a part of the FTB Team at the time, suggested the creation of an official wiki for FTB. Although Slowpoke was originally not fond of her idea, he let her do it as long as she took control, in order to make her happy. She recruited Tahg to lead the team and they recruited several staff members, including editors, template and skin maintainers, and translators. The Official FTB Wiki was launched on November 14th, 2012.

The FTB Wiki formally began as a restricted knowledge base for the 1.2.5 Feed the Beast modpacks at the url wiki.feed-the-beast.com. Lead by Tahg, wiki staff editors, such as Arkangyl8 from the IndustrialCraft 2 wiki, Enoch5, Freightrain6, and Nibbin, focused on creating new content. Other users, now divided into different teams, worked on their own aspect of the wiki. Denkbert4 created many of the templates still used by the wiki today. FunshineX7 maintained the wiki's skin, giving it a polished look appealing to many of its users.

Many of the editors at the time showed no contributions, because at the time of their membership, the wiki was restricted. Before Jinbobo's leadership, the wiki was only allowed to be edited by a few members. Everyone else who desired to contribute were required to private message their edits to wiki staff members on the FTB Forums. This was done to stop spam bots and malicious edits from compromising the wiki—which was a major issue—but it also substantially stunted the wiki's early growth.

Due to Tahg's lack of commitment to the wiki, and lack of understanding of the MediaWiki software, Jadedcat took over as team lead. She recruited many new editors and fired inactive/unproductive ones.

Opening up

Over time, the wiki's content grew, however, its community did not. Jadedcat desired for the wiki to be a locked project from the community, in order to prevent malicious editing and to work out all of the bugs in the system. Eventually, however, in January of 2013, the wiki started working towards becoming open to user contributions. This was completed in July 2013, allowing for users to create accounts and edit the wiki. However, this was done too late, as several wiki contributors were fragmented between the unofficial and the official wiki. Although a merge had been discussed, no agreement could be made.

At the start of August 2013, Jadedcat left the team and gave her responsibilities to Jinbobo, who at the time was part of the template, organization, and translation teams, so that she could focus primarily on modpack development.

Over the course of Jinbobo's leadership, many large changes were made to the wiki. The translation extension was installed, allowing for translations to be simpler to do and easier to maintain, although it limited what pages could be translated. Jinbobo also developed two of the wiki's main extensions: Tilesheets and OreDict.

In June 2014, GregTech 5 was released. Due to GregTech 4's Wikispace wiki being taken down and the large amount of changes to GregTech 5, the GregTech community decided to make the Official FTB Wiki their future site for GregTech documentation after persuasion from Retep998. This resulted in a fairly significant amount of users joining and content being made.

Eventually, Jinbobo grew tired of the lack of attention that the wiki received from the core FTB team, and declared that he would quit if the FTB core team did not actively promote the wiki on social media and the forums. In August 2014, Jinbobo left the community as the core team failed to meet his request. He left the wiki with the Tilesheets extension broken such that most pages would never load, edit saving was unreliable, and the server would crash frequently. The wiki was left in this broken state for months. However, he left behind SatanicSanta (aka TheSatanicSanta) and Retep998 as admins, and as a result of his departure, there was no longer a lead editor but a small group of staff that made decisions democratically.

In August 2014, editor and staff member RealSketch was demoted and banned due to various inappropriate comments made, including transphobia towards Vazkii and attacking the Unofficial FTB Wiki, harassment of fellow FTB Wiki staff, and refusing to comply with the consequences set in place due to these acts. It was sparked by transphobic comments—intentional misgendering and refusing to acknowledge their gender identity—made towards Vazkii on the FTB Forums. He was banned from the Forums and removed from the Wiki Team at a higher level than the Wiki, with an emergency meeting between Jadedcat and SatanicSanta. Jadedcat asserted, in agreement with SatanicSanta, that RealSketch and anyone else who exhibits discriminatory behavior is not to be officially involved with Feed The Beast, but that he could remain as a standard contributor to the wiki (as the conduct occurred on the Forums rather than the wiki). Soon enough, the conduct carried over to the wiki, where RealSketch refused to acknowledge and accept the consequences for these actions, and engaged in harassment of staff members. He attempted to circumvent his ban by creating an alternative account, PurpleDragon, but the consistency in tone, persona (RealSketch had a love for the color purple, as demonstrated on his userpage), and eventually private messages sent to SatanicSanta and other wiki members via the Minecraft Forums exposed him.

Move to Gamepedia and continued growth

In late 2014, as a result of the Feed The Beast–Curse partnership, the Official Feed The Beast Wiki was moved onto Gamepedia and its URL was changed to ftb.gamepedia.com. Following the pushing of the extensions onto GitHub, Retep998 fixed the issue in Tilesheets, allowing the wiki to usable again. Gamepedia also allowed anonymous users to contribute to the wiki as per their global standards. The previous URL did not properly redirect to the new URL, which broke all links to the wiki and essentially forced the wiki to restart in the search results, but with time it was restored to its previous position.

From December 31st, 2014 to January 1st, 2015, editor Xbony2 decided to spend the night (and the rest of the year by extension) documenting The Mists of RioV. After enjoying himself, the next year he decided to create a formal "editathon" called the 2015-2016 Marathon, in which participants were to document mods until it was 2016 in the editor's timezone. Xbony2 has hosted regular editathons since, all with different themes and rules. Different editathons have had varying successes; the 200k Editathon, held to celebrate the wiki reaching 200,000 edits had 17 participants, including several new editors, with many edits (over 3,000) made. Other editathons have had less, usually due to a lack of advertising or unappealing themes.

In 2015, the template {{G}} was replaced by {{Gc}}, as the template {{G}} was twice as slow and often showed incorrect items. In order to replace it, wiki staff made about 5,000 manual edits. Often speed improvements were introduced, including the usage of Scribunto Lua modules in core templates and the creation of "lazy-loaded" navboxes, which were inspired by GregTech 5's navbox as it took a long time to load. At this time staff member Xbony2 became a translation administrator, creating an influx of new translatable pages and translations. Editor PaladinAHOne represented the FTB Wiki staff in BetterThanMinecon 2015, doing a Q/A panel discussing wiki editing and starting a tradition of FTB Wiki presence in future BetterThanMinecons.

In 2016, a few developer-appointed curators were appointed to document Reika's mods, TheDragonTeam's mods, ScottKillen's, Bdew's mods, and a few others, although most of these curators did not become particularly active. PaladinAHOne represented in the FTB Wiki in BetterThanMinecon 2016, doing another Q/A panel. Later that year 3tusk and Xbony2 represented the wiki in BTM16 2.0, with 3tusk doing a panel on the Chinese modded Minecraft community and translation (including translation of the FTB Wiki), and Xbony2 creating a Jungle-themed booth with trivia about the wiki to advertise it.

Modern era

After much debate, in late 2016 through 2017, the staff system was replaced by a more directly democratic system. The "staff" user group was replaced by an "editor" user group, which had most of the same of rights but was given more leniently and didn't require a commitment.

Due to Xbony2 and other editors focusing on the documentation of Minecraft 1.8 and other newer versions, the Official FTB Wiki has recently sometimes been described as the most updated major wiki. With new editors such as Hubry, SirMoogle and Lykrast (the latter who originally joined to document his mod, Defiled Lands) joining the wiki, it has continued to grow.

Various improvements (both internal and external) to the Tilesheets and OreDict extensions were made by SatanicSanta. SatanicSanta was also hired by Gamepedia as a wiki manager. He became wiki manager of the FTB Wiki (and more than a hundred other Gamepedia wikis), although the majority of his paid work is for other wikis.

Editors Xbony2 and ImmortalPharaoh7 sponsored Modoff on behalf of the FTB Wiki, to creating documentation for the top three mods in the competition (Wearables, Skillable and Augmented Interactions). Xbony2 represented the wiki in BTM Moon, creating a booth to advertise the wiki with a broken "hunting simulation" game. However, it may have received a limited amount of visitors due to it being in a corner of the convention and BTM Moon having a complex layout.