A New Year Brings a Fresh Start and an Old Wiki

Another year with Diablofans has drawn to a close, and with it comes the the beginning of a new year. The past twelve months have been very eventful, and we've seen many changes to the site. The site management changed as Sixen joined our site. We did a restructuring of the staff, resulting in the new News Reporters coming on to the team and working to give you constant updates on all things Diablo. We received a complete site redesign during Blizzcon.

But, most importantly (subject to bias), we received the most awesome change in the beginning of 2009: The Diablofans Wiki was launched.

In truth, it began in 2008, on the 1st of July. In this post, by an unknown user vrel. I liked the suggestion, took it and refined in a bit. The original plan became to create a sort of guide sub-forum where users could post lore info, character guides etc. It was Genesis who first suggested a wiki in the Moderator forum however.

Quote from Genesis »
How do wikipedias work? Are you sure that theres no way to have something like this

www.diablofans.com/wiki/"article name here"

I think that its in the realms of possibility. I'm sure a DiabloFans Wiki would surpass the other Diablowiki
(In retrospect, opting for a wiki rather than a forum proved to have immense benefits. So we made the right choice. Can you imagine having a thousand articles in a forum, sorted, searchable, and linking to each other? And getting that to work smoothly?)

After some discussing around, and Curse going with it, the wiki was actually created 21:13 on November 7th (GMT +1 I believe). And the very first article of all was written 0:50 a.m on November 8th, and fittingly, it was about Diablo himself. You can read the original Diablo (old) here, and the current article about DiabloWiki.com - Diablo Diablo here. Well, that is unless you count the main page as an article. Technically it was the first page to be created, but I don't know if anyone would call this an article :P

Although the wiki was set up in November, but was at the time only known of to the staff. It was publicly viewable however, so if anyone had entered wiki.diablofans.com in their URL bar, they would have been taken to it at that time. Not that there would have been much to see in it though; the wiki was bare, and the staff were tasked with adding a few articles to it before launch.

On January 12th, the wiki was launched. At the time we had only been able to create a few articles that had been previously written by staff, and few were any good. We were all stumbling in the dark, and no one really knew how to manage a wiki. The announcement itself was made amidst mixed reactions. Some were happy and expectant, others thought it was a dumb idea.

Progress was slow, or rapid, depending on how you see it in the following months. As early as April we already had a thousand articles.

But wait a minute now you say, that means 10 articles were created a day on average? Probably yes; however a lot of the early pages were imported from diablo.wikia, most by then-sysop Blackwing. However, the imports were quite sporadic and incomplete, for example a page might be imported, but the tables and images on it might not, resulting in a lot of broken, incomplete and generally ugly pages. So while we had gotten a lot of new pages really fast, the actual progress of the wiki as a whole might not have been as great.

The copying of pages didn't really help anyone and just made us into a copy of diablo.wikia, we stopped doing that shortly thereafter. Since then, there's been a slow but successive cleanup and structuring of the wiki, with lots of pages being merged together. This in turn has led to a not so large article-count, but with hopefully better pages. Here's an example of a merged page: DiabloWiki.com - Bows (Diablo II) Bows (Diablo II). It essentially carries 24 articles in it, if you consider each bow could have been a separate page.

During the year, we've also had a great many users who've helped out with the wiki, some of whom have been sysops. I'd like to give thanks to them, and all others who I know have contributed to the wiki. Unfortunately, or maybe I should say fortunately, you're too many to list :P

  • Dauroth, for his many edits and and contributions as a sysop
  • Lt. Venom, for his many edits and ability to put in a massive effort during crunch time
  • zhuge, for his continued sysop role and regular contributions
  • Yemen, for making lots of boring edits that needed to be done, and for indirectly giving birth to the current wiki design
  • Rousse, for his short but insightful edit period earlier this year
  • blood-doll, for taking the time to add depth to the wiki and not just numbers in tables
  • Seth, for his extensive guide and skill editing, and wiki support in the forum
  • Zhar, for his brief edit sysop period and for continuing to showcase the wiki.
  • skyknight, who just today making a lot of edits and is working towards expanding the Eastern Sun section of the wiki.
Thanks to all of you, to all of you who make the occasional spelling fix here and there, and for those anonymous users who also contribute. It's great day when one goes into Recent Changes and see the page filled up with wonderful edits.

The wiki continues to move on, and the following year will see a stronger development. We still have a long ways to go before it can even be considered remotely complete or full, but it's all achievable, and a lot has already been done in the previous year. I urge you all to take a closer look at what the wiki has to offer, but also what it lacks. Anyone can edit it, and it's supposed to be edited by anyone. So go ahead and start editing already :)

Comments

  • To post a comment, please or register a new account.
Posts Quoted:
Reply
Clear All Quotes