Halopedia:History

Beginnings: 2004-2005
Halopedia, originally known simply as "Halo Wiki," began on November 4, 2004 as a project of user AgentSeethroo, with the help of Porplemontage. Built as an offshoot of his then clan, the BlackBoxRepublic, it quickly attracted a small following of users.

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

Becoming ambitious, AgentSeethroo and Porplemontage created Gamer Focus: a wiki network/gaming site. Because of the recent creation of Halowiki.net, the wiki's name was changed to "Halopedia," and moved to www.halopedia.org, where it became part of the wiki network alongside a Cheats wiki, an overall Video Games wiki, and a Super Mario wiki.

Due to lack of interest, the Cheats wiki and the Video Games wiki closed and the wiki network eventually shut down, leaving the remaining sites, including Halopedia, as stand-alone sites. Throughout 2005, the site continued to grow as the user list expanded to a little over 150.

Notability: Early 2006
The site began to be recognized in early 2006; it was mentioned in a section of the Tahlequah Daily Press newspaper of Tahlequah, Oklahoma on February 20, 2006 (article).

Perhaps Halopedia's best recognition to date was on the front page of the Bungie.net website on February 14, 2006. A fan submitted article about Halopedia appeared on the front page of the website, prompting Halopedia's membership to increase by 300 percent over several weeks.

Still, notability is not something Halopedia has acquired in a major sense; Halopedia's article was deleted from Wikipedia because the site is not considered notable enough to pass the site's notability standard. A Wikipedian user and a Halopedia user, Aranho, added Halopedia back into Wikipedia. However, it was once again deleted.

Server Problems: Mid 2006
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 down, until it finally went offline for several weeks. Eventually, Halopedia was merged with halo.wikia.com, a formerly rival wiki that did not have the same issues. Despite the painstaking process of having to copy every article from the original Halopedia (referred to as old.Halopedia due to its temporary filename), the site ultimately benefited with several new active users. You can actually read what lead to the migration here.

Halo Wikia
Halo Wikia was started on 15 June, 2005 by Akashe. The user is no longer around to answer for his actions. It is unknown whether Akashe wanted to start a new site to compete against the old Halopedia or that he just didn't know of Halopedia's existence. Whatever the reason, without the support of other users, Halo.wikia.com slowly died out, with Akashe last posting on June 15, 2005. The site would remain a dead wikia until it was merged with, and became Halopedia.

Points System
In March of 2008 Halopedia was given a new skin and points system. This turned out to cause major problems with vandals and concern about the site's quality. When the points system was introduced it also caused a huge edit decline. As a result the administrators decided to change the points system so the only way to earn points was to sign up, upload the profiles 1st avatar, and edit. This caused a huge uproar amongst members, even causing some of them to leave the site entirely. Eventually most members got over it but, some (though very few) continue to complain.

New Wikia skin and move-off: Late 2010
In August 2010, Halopedia's hosting service, Wikia, announced a new mandatory skin change, to a new look nicknamed "Oasis". The new skin is described by Wikia as "sleek" and helpful to newer users. However, the skin change faced a lot of opposition from the majority of wikia's communities. Many older contributors express that it is hard to use and many of its features are unneeded and unwanted. As a result of the skin change, some users proposed to move their wikis to another wiki farm or independent domain. Halopedia being one of these wikis, successfully moved back to its independent domain on October 17th, 2010.

Current
Currently, Halopedia continues to grow in anticipation of many new projects planned for the Halo universe, such as Halo: Reach and Greg Bear's Forerunner Trilogy. Although Halopedia frowns on speculation in its articles, its talk pages have become a central place for speculation and discussion of the upcoming productions.

Halopedia currently works closely with several related sites, such as Halowiki.net, a wiki project devoted to the multiplayer aspects of the Halo 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.