Halopedia:History of Halo Nation

This page chronicles the history of Halo Nation prior to its merger with Halopedia.

Creation
A Halo-centric online encyclopedia then known as Halo Wiki was first founded under the wiki host Wikia.com by the user Akashe on 15 June, 2005. On the day following the wiki's creation, Akashe made a total of eleven edits, to the pages "Master chief", "Halo" and to the main page. However, following that, Akashe ceased contributing and the wiki was left mostly deserted and unused.

Halopedia merger
In mid-2006, a fellow Halo-centric wiki named Halopedia began experiencing difficulties hosting their website. Due to bills in excess of $150 monthly, the wiki's owners could no longer afford to keep the site running. To solve the problem, Halopedia merged into Halo Wiki, because the latter was hosted for free by Wikia (the company now known as FANDOM). Halo Wiki's content was replaced with Halopedia's, and the product of the merger kept the name Halopedia.

Halopedia split
The wiki remained as Halopedia same until late 2010, when Wikia announced a mandatory theme change for all wikis. In light of significant opposition to the change, Halopedia administrator Nicmavr initiated a community vote on whether Halopedia should move back to its old, independent domain, halopedian.com. On October 17, the vote ended with a majority voting in favor. However, some users were unwilling to leave, and in addition, Wikia staff did not want to lose such a large wiki.

The Halopedia staff, who still at the time retained administrative rights to the Wikia site, attempted to reach a compromise with Wikia and proposed that the wiki be re-focused primarily on community content, while the independently-hosted Halopedia would focus on canon and lore-related material. As such, the Halo wiki on Wikia.com was renamed "Halo Nation", which is a common term for the Halo community. As part of this change in focus, the Halopedia team proposed that in-depth lore articles on Halo Nation would be removed or abridged, with links provided to the corresponding articles on Halopedia. Wikia did not accept this compromise and insisted that Halo Nation retain all of its former content; however, the name "Halo Nation" stuck nonetheless.

As a result, the wiki's content was copied to halopedian.com but not removed from halo.wikia.com. In what has come to be known as "the Fork" or "the Split", the remaining users and content on halo.wikia.com became Halo Nation, while those that moved to halopedian.com retained the name Halopedia.

Post-split and merge with Halopedia
After the split, the users who chose to remain on Halo Nation continued its mission to document the Halo franchise to the best of its ability. For years, the communities of Halo Nation and Halopedia were largely separate, partly due to enmity over the actions of some individual users on both sides of the split. However, relations between the two communities gradually improved, and by 2018, the Halo Nation and Halopedia administration teams began negotiations to migrate the Halo Nation community to Halopedia in part due to longstanding dissatisfaction with Wikia (now FANDOM) as well as various changes introduced by the host company deemed detrimental for the wiki.

After a vote on both sites ending with both communities in favor of a merge, Halo Nation merged into Halopedia on February 4, 2019. Similar to the split in 2010, FANDOM retained the content of its Halo wiki, which was now renamed "Halo Alpha" with the migration of the Halo Nation community.