Two Years
From Zelda Wiki.org
--Jase 17:57, 16 April 2007 (PDT)
After two years of being around, Zelda Wiki.org has gone from site project to the project of many sites. It has become, supposedly, the foremost Zelda Wiki on the internet, and has over 2000 articles and over 800 users. Quite hard to believe it's turned into this!
So, around two years ago, this wiki was just the brainchild of myself and Yami, one of my friends on the Zelda Universe boards who is largely responsible for me knowing graphic arts knowhow and such. Back then, I was just ZU's content monkey (this was, obviously, before Lars took his leave), constantly writing articles, mostly Minish Cap content. However, I did have quite a bit of jurisdiction over the site itself, and when I had some spare time, I discussed with Yami about creating a wiki. He said that he'd been thinking the same thing. I spoke with Lars about it, and then it was done - we had a brand new MediaWiki installation. Because I was staff, I was allowed one subdomain (this was my personal rule - I'm sure Lars would have given me as many as I liked). I used up that one subdomain to create the wiki, henceforth known as wiki.zeldauniverse.net.
Lars's personal dream for the wiki was to see it replace the whithered old Zelda Encyclopedia with more in-depth information, while I intended it to be more of a fun community hub that also wrote great Zelda content. It was a great strategy to improving Zelda Universe's already vast amount of content and, me being the content monkey and loving to write, couldn't help but be attracted to what the wiki turned into. People played on it for a while, but it eventually became the Zelda-central encyclopedia Lars wanted to see. He joked about seeing 1000 articles one day, and when that day finally came, he seemed pretty excited! It confirmed that the project had been a success. One community had come together and enthusiastically combined their knowledge of a game into one place.
This was much over a year ago.
Obviously, I don't do much for Zelda Universe anymore. I became webmaster, continued to watch over the wiki, and after some disputes with the server managers and new owners, took my leave after about seven months in that position. I requested to be able to keep power over the wiki and on the chat room, but the chat room is irrelevant. Not long after I left, the wiki crashed, and went largely unattended for some time. I completely neglected it, and since I was one of the only staff (or former staff) members who had ever looked at it and kept it nice, it fell into disrepair.
I saw it that way after a large attack from 4chan.org - luckily, the wiki was in such disrepair that there was an odd ghost copy on the server. The people from 4chan hadn't actually attacked the real wiki, but the ghost copy. So, while people were freaking out, I was talking to Scott, getting a backup of the real wiki. I installed it on my own hosting account, and begged for permission to remake the wiki as I saw fit, to give it more of a cause, and bring it out of its constant neglect. I was shot down, but refused to give up - sneaky me, I told him that the wiki was hosted on my own personal subdomain that Lars had given me. Okay, that didn't convince him at all, but Scott and I were always prone to having arguments like that, then tossing them aside and not caring in the end. That's the beauty of being friends, isn't it?
So, the wiki was "revamped" into something called "The Zelda Effect," a spinoff of my own blog's title, The Jason Effect, where the wiki was hosted at zelda.thejasoneffect.net. That URL, though out-of-date, still redirects to the wiki.
Right now in the timeline, we're mid-to-late 2006, and the wiki had around 1200 articles, which wasn't changing from month to month. I had promised the ZU staff that the wiki would remain ZU's property, but also said I had some plans in store. I saw that a lot of Zelda sites, over the year and a half the wiki had accumulated articles, had attempted wikis of their own. Some of them were rousing successes, like the Zelda Legends wiki, which gathered a great amount of short articles, while others were complete failures, gathering from five to one hundred. Something about me didn't like that. I thought it was like trying to manage usernames and passwords for a million sites - having tons of jumbled wikis seemed... inefficient. So I cooked up the plan to give ZU's wiki away, and create a big, merged wiki with all the other large Zelda sites I was already friends with, and in turn attract the smaller and the larger ones I was not friendly with.
Zelda Central's Mr. Wiggles, a long time ZU affiliate and friend, was the first to accept my invitation to sign up and get the ball rolling. Some others followed, such as Fury Three from HTLOZ II. I especially wanted Nathan of Zelda Domain to join up, he being one of the greatest affiliates I've had in my experience as a webmaster, but his site was down and he was experiencing issues getting it back up. On top of that, he just plain wasn't around. Eventually, the wiki got sixteen sites hooked up to it, and I decided to revamp the place again.
Going by Lars's suggestion, I bought the domain ZeldaWiki.org, to make it seem like an organization - which it was - and to make it seem like an official, real Zelda Wiki worth being the competitor of other, not-a-collaboration-between-awesome-Zelda-sites wikis.
So, here we are, two years into the wiki's history, and we've doubled the amount of articles Lars originally intended to see, and amassed over 800 users! I never thought I'd see myself looking down at a large website again, and I keep trying to convince myself that this wiki is still a small website like it used to be, but I can't deny it anymore - you guys who make the articles and work so hard to give accurate and interesting data are awesome. I can't think of another word, except perhaps astounding, incredible, and deserving of some sort of award (yes, that isn't a word). And that's why, just a couple days ago, when the wiki was almost lost due to corrupted backups, I nearly cried; because this place has amounted to so much more than I, or anyone else for that matter, ever thought possible. And it's not because of me (I just kept it around on a server and made a skin for it), but because of the people who create and edit articles.
Two years and you guys haven't stopped going! How long will you be able to go for? God knows, but I hope that I live to see the day when the wiki grows even larger, when the Zelda sites who run it actually come and collaborate inside the wiki, and when I'm older and have moved on to other things, that some trustworthy person can take the site off my hands and continue it on. I think the strongest type of site is one that can live through several webmasters, that doesn't need its founder to continue on. ZU, I think, is a site like that - Lars left, then I left, then Lee left, and now they have a new man at the helm, Yusuf. And the site has kept on running, despite years of thoughts about internet-armageddon and whatnot.
So, when Lars left and people said the site would die, and Scott and I took over and it didn't die, and when I left and people said the site would die, but Scott and Lee took over and it didn't die; that's my next dream for the site. I already know it will keep getting bigger, but can it become... self-sustaining?
This should be already possible, because there should be at least thirteen other webmasters besides myself running this place. ;)
What are some plans for the future? Obviously the wiki needs at least one upgrade! I made a comment above about how much I hate remembering usernames and passwords, which is why I'm working hard to implement OpenID into ZW.org. If you don't know what the heck that is, in short it's a system that gives a person one username and password for the entire internet. Your information is kept on one website, and when you go to an OpenID login box, you type in the URL of your OpenID. Mine is my own website, thejasoneffect.net, so when I see an OpenID login box, I type in that URL. It then takes me to a screen asking if I want to allow this site to log me in, etc, and I hit okay - then I'm logged into the site!
So, if all goes well, not only will people with OpenID's be able to login to ZW.org, but ZW.org will itself be an OpenID provider - that is, everyone's user page will be their very own OpenID. And just in case you have a website of your own that you want to be your OpenID, but don't want to set up an OpenID server, we'll provide instructions on how to set it up so that typing in your own site's URL uses your OpenID on the wiki.
That said, I'm not entirely sure if this can be done, but I'm researching it and have been testing some things out and tweaking with some extensions and programs. So, with any luck, you'll see this around soon.
Here's to two more years! Thanks a bunch, everyone,
