Yu-Gi-Oh!:A History of the Wikia

The following is a history of how the Yu-Gi-Oh! Wikia came into being. Included are the sites original goals, examples of what our first content was, and how we have evolved at every turn into the undeniable encyclopedia here now.

''This is written from the perspective of the Founder of this Wikia, TwoTailedFox. Thus, please excuse the first-person narrative.''

The Idea
Originally, there were seven sources of information that Yu-Gi-Oh! players had to use to get the data they wanted to. There were Upper Deck Entertainment, Netrep, Ideal808, Janime, Manjyome Thunder, Shreik, and the Pojo forums. Originally, the idea was to be clone of Netrep, that had the potential to be updated quicker and easier than having to rely on the still-used Netrep API. However, since then, the Wikia has come together to include information from all the above sources (as well as others), into one central resource, with the advantage of everything being linked.

The First Year
May 2005 - April 2006

This was undoubtedly the hardest time the Wikia went through. It was completely dead, not even with activity on my part, for the first six months, owing to "Real Life" issues. The first content that went up really was bare basics, just the lore and the card title were the initial contents of pages. As you can see for [|Double Snare], it was barely an article.

The Main Page stayed basic for a long time. As you can see in [|January 2007], basic was an apt word compared to now. later that month [|here], implementation of a table format began. This was reverse-engineered from Memory Alpha.

Now, with this way of entering data, it's no big surprise that work went slowly. It was around this time I was paying more attention to Wikia's ways of making data more presentable. The first incarnations were the Templates, began in September 2005. As you can see [|here], it was extremely basic.

In February 2006, it soon became apparent that, while we had a good system of data representation for cards, the Wikia lacked a good system for creating Articles quickly. That changed with Template preloads. Like [|this example], we were able to use the new-at-the-time Infobox MediaWiki extension to our advantage, we suddenly had much less code to write.

It's worth noting at this point, however, I was still the sole major contributor to the Wikia. All that changes in our second year.

The Second Year
May 2006 - April 2007

The second year is when we had our first three major contributors join the team, Vyse24, Narchibald84, and Pcouw. Between the four of us, we changed several major goals:


 * We were not no longer solely going to write about the TCG. It was here we started to branch off to cover OCG cards, although priority as still given to completion of the TCG section.
 * We decided to include Card Images, and subsequently, we developed our Image Policy, which has stood firm two years later, albeit with a few modifications.

Vyse24 and I focused our efforts on creating card articles, while Narchibald84, and Pcouw focused on OCG Cards and Card Images. We also had AnnaV arrive, and this began our listings of Card Errata changes. Deus Ex Machina and Van Ludwig also arrived in our second year, and they began our documentation of Anime, Manga, and Video Game cards.

At this point, I experimented with a community-driven approach to getting the community involved with creating articles. I embedded each card article with a Gallery, Tips, Trivia, Anime/Manga, and Errata link that was tied to the parent card. This proved, in hindsight, to be enormously successful in attracting editors to the community.

Towards the latter end of the year, we started including Icon images in card articles,

It was this year that saw the vast majority of our TCG and OCG articles completed. April 2007 also saw us as the Featured Wikia for that month. At that point, we had 7,000 articles.

The Third Year
May 2007 - Present

We are currently into our third year, and at time of writing, we have 15,000 articles, which is more than double what we had 6 months ago. Deltaneos and Huajun Chen also become regular contributors early that year, Deltaneos lending his hands to code and article maintenance, while Huajun Chen has lend her hands to improving our Anime card listings.

Work has recently begun on a [|Cross-Reference List], and we are curretly in the process of moving all our our articles to a new and improved, Master Card Table, to replace the 20+ Card Templates we originally designed and used.

But, that's my side of the story. I'm sure the other editors have their own tales tell....