Halopedia:History

This page chronicles the history of Halopedia.

2004 to 2005: Beginnings
Halopedia, originally known simply as "Halo Wiki", began as an idea by the then clan, the BlackBoxRepublic to be the first Halo Wiki around October 28, 2004. and on November 4, 2004, AgentSeethroo, with the help of Porplemontage the site was formed with the URL "http://wiki.blackboxrepublic.com".

On April 5, AgentSeethroo thought about creating a wiki network/gaming site to which he suggested potentially importing the wiki onto it, deleting the wiki in the process. However the users went against the idea.

To help the growing wiki AgentSeethroo appointed several other administrators to assist in the maintenance of the site, namely Buz, and on April 7 Dragonclaws.

Because of the creation of Halowiki.net earlier in the year, on August 9 it was suggested the wiki was renamed to "Halopedia" as a riff on "Wikipedia", and on August 11 the wiki moved to www.halopedia.org, where it became part of the wiki network alongside a game cheats wiki, an general video game wiki, and the Super Mario Wiki.

2006 to 2007: Notability and Migration to Wikia
The site began to be recognized by the international community in early 2006; it was mentioned in a section of the Tahlequah Daily Press newspaper of Tahlequah, Oklahoma on February 20, 2006. The site eventually was recognized by Bungie as a reliable, yet unofficial source of Halo information for the Halo community. This recognition prompted Halopedia's membership to increase by 300 percent over several weeks.

Halopedia's growing community began to present a major problem for its creators; the site's growing size was producing a bill in excess of $150 a month for server usage. Throughout May, June, and July, the site would be sporadically offline, until it finally went offline for several straight weeks. AgentSeethroo had to admit that he could no longer host Halopedia himself.

The admins decided that Halopedia had to be merged with halo.wikia.com, a formerly rival wiki simply referred as Halo Wikia that did not have the same issues. Despite the process of having to manually import every article from the original Halopedia (now referred to as old.Halopedia due to its temporary filename during the transfer process), the site ultimately benefited with several new active users. This merger with Halo Wikia also brought Halopedia over 1,000 articles, and around September 2007 Halopedia hit 3000 articles.

Early 2008: Introduction of Wikia's social tools
In March 2008, Halopedia was one of the few wikis of Wikia having to experiment a social tools system and a new skin. Part of the reason behind these features was for Wikia to experiment with the extensions in question and finding out the accessibility and usefulness of the tools. The implementation of the social tools includes the point system, an editing system that rewards users points for editing, completing various steps to becoming an active community member, and participating in community activities.

At first, the social tools proved to be useful in Halopedia. A significant number of users enjoyed the features and were motivated to improve the wiki. However, the social tools created major problems with vandals and concern about the site's quality. The point system awarding equal value for both good and bad edits unfortunately encouraged most new users to contribute numerous edits of low beneficial value. These included adding random spaces and line breaks, fixing spellings one word for each revision, and unnecessary and redundant content. Users seeking a high point score without care for article quality caused an overall deterioration of quality in Halopedia.

The administration team sought to resolve the matter by limiting the rewards to only mainspace articles, uploading the first avatar to the user's profile, and for signing up to Halopedia. Though a significant number of the community were uncomfortable with these changes, they would later realize that the changes made were necessary to restore Halopedia to its quality state.

2008 to 2010: Themes
"Know your Halo history by studying Halopedia, and make sure you’ve finished all three games, and have played all the multiplayer maps a lot."

- Rob Adams

Halopedia experienced a great year in 2008, hitting 5,000 articles in August. While Special tools met some controversy in the past, the social tools motivated the Halo community to continue improving and expanding the Halo database. Eventually, those who opposed the implementation of the social tools adapted and enjoyed the features.

In late 2008, Halopedia moved back to the main Wikia codebase, which provided lots of software updates. Halopedia's skin was changed from the custom "Halopedia" skin to Wikia's then-default Monaco skin, which was customized to Halopedia's needs. From 2009 to 2010, Halopedia underwent multiple design changes whereby the site would alter its appearance to a specific theme. These changes made it possible for the site to pay tribute for the release of Halo 3: ODST and Halo: Reach.

In August of 2009 Halopedia started to expand outside the wiki on platforms like Facebook.

Late 2010 to 2015: Domain change and growth
In mid-August 2010, Halopedia's hosting service, Wikia, introduced a new mandatory skin change codenamed "Oasis" along with the removal of Monaco skin, and an update of the terms of use to the Wikia community. Declared by many to be a maintenance burden, Wikia defended its position for the removal of Monaco skin and offered the community a chance to experience the new skin. Though the skin is described by Wikia as "sleek" and helpful to newer users, it faced a lot of opposition from a significant amount of the Wikia community over what they saw as reduced accessibility and had unnecessary features. In addition, veteran contributors felt that Wikia's updated terms of use greatly restricted creativity and community freedom of each wiki, something the Wikia community had enjoyed when using older skins.

After a community consensus initiated by administrator Nicmavr, a majority voted to move back to its independent domain, halopedian.com, on October 17, 2010. This also caused the left over wiki to eventually turn into Halo Nation.

Halopedia was moved again to its original domain, halopedia.org, in summer 2012, and in July 2014, Halopedia adopted a special skin for mobile web-based browsers. On September 27, 2015, the site reached the 10,000 article mark.

Currently
Currently, Halopedia continues to grow in anticipation of many new projects planned for the Halo universe, such as the new Reclaimer Saga of games.

Halopedia has been regarded as relatively accurate and reliable among Halo fans and website forums, many of which cite Halopedia's articles as sources of information. Halopedia also thrives though its use of Facebook, Twitter, and Discord to interact with the community.