User:Atvelonis/History

The Elder Scrolls Wiki is a free encyclopedia hosted by Wikia, Inc. which focuses on, a video game series developed by Bethesda Game Studios. While the wiki can be edited by anyone, it is organized by a group of volunteers collectively referred to as the staff.

The wiki has undergone a great number of leadership and content changes in the past decade as it has been expanded. By merging with various other The Elder Scrolls-related wikis, such as OblivioWiki, SkyrimWiki, and Wikiscrolls, it was able to become a prime source of information for many fans of the series.

The following archive attempts to document these changes in a neutral light for historical purposes, but is not infallible. Please contact Atvelonis if any part of the archive requires adjustment.

Early years
The Elder Scrolls Wiki was created on the 14th of June, 2006 by Kcaz64, around three months after 's release. However, Kcaz made no effort to contribute to the wiki, and in 2008 they were removed from their position due to their inactivity.

First adoption
On March 14th, 2008—almost two years after the founding of the wiki—KickAssJedi became the wiki's second administrator, and Game Lord followed him to become the third administrator on May 5th. The same day, Kcaz64 lost his administrative status due to not making a single edit since his founding of the wiki. On September 24th, KickAssJedi became bureaucrat, allowing him to edit user rights.

On April 21st, 2009, Michaeldsuarez became the wiki's fourth administrator. Xell Khaar became the fifth on June 24th, and JonusAngelus became the sixth on July 2nd. Arandil was appointed bureaucrat by KickAssJedi on the 11th of July 2009, but was removed from the position four days later. InfernalWarrior became the seventh administrator on July 6th, 2010, a position which he held until July 13th, 2012.

Mismanagement
The summer of 2009 saw a relatively unstable period for the wiki due to the lengthy absence of the most senior staff, specifically KickAssJedi. During his absence, Xell Khaar and Michaeldsuarez retained de facto control of the site. A feud developed between the two, with Michaeldsuarez being accused of tampering with Xell Khaar's edits, and Xell Khaar being accused of trying to usurp full control. Both commenced community votes for removal of the other. This situation was further complicated by the return of KAJ, who intended to hand down his rights as bureaucrat to a successor. Despite an influx of support for Michaeldsuarez coming in from external wikis, the community voted to remove him of his Bureaucrat rights on the 2nd of July. As agreed with KAJ, he was to hand in his resignation to a specified senior staff member at Wikia. At Michaeldsuarez's request, the specified staff member was changed to CatherineMunro. Despite objections to this change by Xell Khaar, who was suspicious as to its motives, Michaeldsuarez's rights were duly removed on the 4th of July. On the 11th of July, Bureaucrat rights were given to Xell Khaar and Arandil.

On the 14th of July, CatherineMunro removed the Bureaucrat and Admin rights of Xell Khaar and KickAssJedi, under the pretext of their "irresponsible stewardship" of the wiki. Arandil, who had been appointed bureaucrat by KickAssJedi just a few days prior, claimed that Xell Khaar and KAJ had been "wrongfully removed," and re-promoted them on the 15th. These actions were undone again by Wikia Staff, as was Arandil's initial promotion. JonusAngelus also lost his status as bureaucrat, however he remained an administrator until July 13th, 2012.

On October 16th, CatherineMunro restored Michaeldsuarez's rights as Admin and Bureaucrat. Michaeldsuarez adopted the wiki, and remained bureaucrat until July 13th, 2012. On that same day, InfernalWarrior and JonusAngelus were removed from their positions.

Revival
In March 2011, Timeoin took interest in the wiki "after seeing a lot of redlinks on the 'Featured Articles' page," and began to make content improvements; he has been doing so ever since. He became the wiki's eighth administrator on April 10th. Timeoin has worked on projects of virtually every sort since joining the wiki, and was largely responsible for bringing it back to life. Today, as a bureaucrat and with over eighty thousand edits to his name, he is the most senior administrator of the wiki. Timeoin has created thousands of articles, and is known to flood Recent Changes by rapidly make large numbers of edits. There is a badge (see below) named after him titled "As insane as Timeoin," received for adding 250 categories to articles, and every 250 after that.

was released in November of 2011, and the wiki quickly gathered a significant amount of attention from fans. A plethora of readers and editors flocked to the wiki with the intention of gathering or sharing information.

Achievements
In May, the Achievements system was introduced to encourage editing, especially among newer members. Editors would receive "badges" worth a certain number of points by making edits, and their points would be tallied on their profile and a leaderboard. Today, badges can be earned by editing various types of articles from most games in the series, and some have even been named after former or current administrators to honor their work.

Community features
Around this time, the wiki's personal IRC (Internet Relay Chat) was introduced, the first-ever IRC-only moderator being Blood Reaper. Prior to this, members of the wiki had primarily used talk pages to communicate. While the IRC is up and running to this day, it serves as a secondary method of communication among most members.

In September 2011, Anonnnomoose (formerly "Commander Faol") proposed a "Member of the Month" award system, in which one user per month would be elected by the community to receive an award which recognized their efforts in improving the wiki. This was completely separate from the achievements system until September 2015 when a badge which linked the two systems together was implemented. The award can only be earned once by any user. Due to a lack of candidates, however, the award was temporarily retired from August 2013 to August 2014, and again from December 2015 to December 2016, after which point it has continued on a per-monthly basis.

In November 2011, Jgjake2 began working on the Interactive Map of Skyrim, as well as many other templates such as Popup which are used in a variety of articles across the wiki, which dramatically improved the ability of editors to format content more appropriately for readers. For his invaluable contributions to the wiki he was permanently granted a unique username highlight, reminiscent of the slightly lighter Forum Moderator  highlight. At some point, his account was globally blocked by Wikia for unknown reasons.

Staff changes
On May 2nd, 2011, Lordsunflash and Kacj321 of SkyrimWiki (see below) became administrators, and twenty days later Mbjones90 of OblivioWiki (see below) also became administrator; he became bureaucrat on June 21st. Kacj321 was removed from his position on July 5th, 2012. Exactly a month later, Annonnimus became administrator.

On October 15th, Elchzard became administrator, and had implemented a bot by the name of Veetor-Bot III a few days prior. The bot was given a number of monotonous tasks such as deleting unused files; moving, merging, and removing categories; and moving templates, as well as various other assignments. The use of the bot for otherwise time-consuming projects meant that editors could focus on expansion rather than repetitive maintenance work. Several more bots would be added by various editors as time went on.

Also on the 15th, Zluhcs became administrator, a position he would retain until September 20th, 2014, during the staff re-evaluations (see below).

SOPA/PIPA
In January 2012, the wiki staged a "blackout" alongside other sites such as Wikipedia and Google in order to protest the SOPA/PIPA legislation in the US Congress, which would have severely limited internet freedoms such as fair use if it were passed. The protest was considered a major success among the community.

UESP conflicts
Around this time, some TESWikians began gathering information from other wikis rather than finding it from the games themselves. Under copy-left policy, content from the Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages (UESP) and other wikis was technically permitted when properly attributed, but many users felt that the TESWiki should not be relying on outside sites for images. It quickly became clear, however, that UESP did not appreciate users on the TESWiki uploading their content at all. As such, taking content from the UESP was discouraged over time. Relations with UESP have since been more or less neutral, albeit distant.

DwemerBot
On January 23rd, 2012, a bot called DwemerBot was set up by TombRaiser to make numerous minor edits which would otherwise be tedious for a human. DwemerBot created placeholder articles, removed overarching categories, made link fixes, and completed various other tasks. By the time of its official retirement in April 2015, the bot had amassed over 85,000 edits.

Content expansion
The Rim of the Sky joined the wiki in April 2012, and soon began uploading images and adding information to a wide variety of articles. Overall, he has at various times added a significant amount of content to articles about Arena, Daggerfall, Battlespire, Redguard, Online, Legends and lore, as well as—to a lesser degree—to articles about Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim. He was given patroller rights on February 1st, 2015, and is a patroller to this day.

Staff changes
On December 31st, 2011, Deyvid Petteys became administrator after having been a patroller for a little over a month. Deyvid helped created a large number of the help pages and style sheets present on the wiki today, as well as adding a significant amount of information to the mainspace. He became bureaucrat on March 4th, 2012, remaining in that position until the staff re-evaluations in September 2014.

Elchzard, an administrator, became a bureaucrat on January 6th, 2012 as a result of "overwhelming community support." HaLo2FrEeEk became administrator on February 27th. On the 2nd of March, Flightmare became administrator. Flightmare focuses on tasks requiring CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), and JS (JavaScript), such as working with templates and MediaWiki pages, and still operates as the wiki's primary source of help for technical issues.

On March 10th, TombRaiser was voted into the position of administrator after less than a month on the wiki. Despite this early promotion, she proved to be an excellent editor; she added "an insane quantity of images and everything else" to the wiki and participated actively with the community. Because of the huge numbers of images she added, a badge called "As Insane as TombRaiser" was named after her, received for adding 500 images to articles, and every 500 after that. TombRaiser was also the first recipient of the "Akatosh" badge, which requires making one or more edits for 365 consecutive days. She became a bureaucrat on November 14th, 2013, and stayed with the wiki until her resignation on January 16th, 2015.

On May 16th, 2012, Jimeee became an administrator. Jimeee's temperament was described by various users as either blunt or simply direct. Regardless, his editing skills far surpassed those of most other users on the wiki. He took on innumerable large-scale editing projects, such as standardizing and greatly expanding, , , and articles; working on large numbers of  articles; expanding huge amounts of lore articles; and creating many of the infobox templates which are used today. He also helped to eliminate plagiarized material from the wiki, and added a significant amount of character dialogue to articles. In mid-2014 (see below), a group of users began a consensus to remove Jimeee from his position, citing his aforementioned temperament and a series of unjust uses of his administrative tools. While some users saw his behavior as unacceptable, others believed that much of the evidence in it seemed to have been taken out of context or was simply irrelevant. Jimeee eventually resigned on August 11th of that year.

On August 23rd of 2012, GramsJ and Kennyannydenny both became administrators. GramsJ, however, was forced to leave the wiki only a couple of months later due to health concerns. Because of this, she was exempt from removal from her position until 2015 when it was decided that she was unlikely to return to the wiki (until that point, she was simply marked as "Inactive"). While she was an active member of the community, however, GramsJ worked on many different editing projects, and was an operator of DwemerBot alongside TombRaiser. As a beloved and productive editor, she was honored with a special award of sorts to signify this. Kennyannydenny was known for his work on Skyrim character and creature articles, as well as on and Oblivion articles. He also expanded articles about various other games of the series such as, , and , and created over a thousand articles for the wiki in total.

Mobile app
On November 25th, 2013, Jalbor, a member of Wikia Staff, announced that the wiki would be given a free mobile app for Android and iOS. It would focus on accessing wiki articles from the ever-growing mobile platform, and allowed for significantly more traffic and casual browsing of the wiki.

Content expansion
In March 2013, Eganogard commenced work on the wiki's very bare-bones Morrowind articles. He primarily focused on adding pictures and information to pages about locations, items, and spells. Although he became inactive on the wiki after less than a year, his contributions to Morrowind articles were instrumental in the growth of the wiki.

Staff changes
On May 5th, Kroq-gar78 became an administrator. One of his notable projects was creating an interactive map of the province of Skyrim as it appears in The Elder Scrolls series' fifth installment. He also worked on numerous somewhat smaller projects, often involving templates and coding. However, he was removed during the staff re-evaluations in September 2014 due to a lack of activity.

EbonySkyrim was promoted to administrator on September 16th. Having amassed over 50,000 edits and 8,000 image uploads over her wiki career, she was among its most prolific and influential editors during her stay. She worked extensively on many of the "behind-the-scenes" jobs such as categorization (of files in particular) and deleting unused pages and files. Ebony uploaded swaths of images for Oblivion and Skyrim articles, and was responsible for expanding many of the articles from those games. When The Elder Scrolls Online was released in 2014, Ebony added innumerable articles and images pertaining to it, specifically those of characters. Because of this, a badge titled "As insane as EbonySkyrim" was named after her, awarded for making 500 edits on character articles from Online, and every 500 after that. On August 19th, 2014, she was promoted to bureaucrat. She remained in a staff position on the wiki until her resignation on January 16th, 2015 (see below).

A user by the name of ゆ (formerly UselessArgonianMage) began adding tidbits of content to the wiki in June 2013. He became a chat moderator on November 13th, 2013, and a forum moderator a month later, on December 1st. Although he retired from his position on November 20th, 2014, he was reinstated as chat moderator on June 9th, 2015, and remained a moderator until November 2nd of that year. UAM was also a member of the site-wide Volunteer Spam Task Force (VSTF). He was temporarily active on the mainspace once more in May of 2016. UAM single-handedly added almost all of the wiki's Shadowkey content over the course of several years, being one of the few editors who owned a physical copy of the game and a Nokia N-Gage on which to play it.

2014
By late 2014, the wiki had a total of around 28,000 articles. This number was soon boosted greatly, however, when several editors such as Louise 069, Timeoin, and Atvelonis began mass-creating articles for (see below). While the wiki had covered the game since well before its release in April of 2014, a lack of enthusiasm from editors and players had previously slowed progress.

KINMUNE
On the 16th of February, 2014, Flightmare created chat bot KINMUNE, named after the Kinetically-Interlinked Nirnian Multi-User Exoform, and continues to operate her to this day. Originally, KINMUNE mainly logged chat and acted as a chat moderator, carrying out some of their various duties. Early on, KINMUNE also censored swear words from being used in chat. However, since her reappearance in mid-2015 following her temporary retirement, this feature has not been in use. Today, she logs chat, greets users entering chat, and responds to certain phrases in an appropriate manner. In July 2016, KINMUNE's abilities were expanded to include edits; she primarily handles a large amount of Portable Infobox migration and various renames, fixes, and updates for templates. Additionally, she logs Discussions posts (see below) and edits from Recent Changes on the staff's Slack group (see below).

Content expansion
In May 2014, SeniorDiogo began working on the main quest walkthroughs for, a project which he completed in February 2015. He single-handedly wrote huge descriptions on everything necessary to complete the quests as efficiently as possible. He even included highly useful maps detailing exactly where to go in every dungeon to avoid becoming hopelessly lost. Considering Arena ' s poor level design, this was a monumental help to readers trying to play through the first game in the series. However, Diogo was largely alone in this endeavor, given the wiki's state of relative disrepair at the time (see below).

Staff changes
On February 15th, 2014, forum moderator Fire Wolf Pup became a patroller on the wiki. Having been created over a decade after the release of Daggerfall, the wiki was seriously lacking in information regarding it and its predecessor, Arena. Fire Wolf Pup created hundreds of articles about locations in Daggerfall and added location and map images to many of them. Up until this point, there was virtually no Daggerfall content on the wiki whatsoever. Outside events caused her to resign from her position on March 12th, 2015.

Dovahsebrom was promoted to forum moderator on April 18th, a position which he retains to this day. However, he is most well-known for his extensive work on the lore articles of the wiki. Dovahsebrom single-handedly rewrote multiple important lore articles, such as Alessian Empire, Enantiomorph, Reman Empire, Sload, and many others, which can be found on his userpage.

Ghost Anubis became an administrator on September 16th after having occupied several staff positions during the year. Ghost made a fairly large number of edits (just over 20,000) in a comparatively short period of time, and as such a badge titled, "As Insane as Ghost Anubis" was named after him, awarded for making 500 edits on articles, and every 500 edits after that. However, his time as administrator was short-lived, as he resigned on January 15th, 2015.

By September 2014, much of the staff had proven to be relatively or completely inactive. To combat this inactivity, staff re-evaluations ("re-evals") were held, and a number of formerly active staff members lost their positions by popular vote. While this likely decreased staff complacency in the long run, it contributed negatively to the state of the wiki in early 2015 (see below).

Drama
In mid-late June 2014, three staff members who frequented the Chat called for each other's demotions via consensus. These events ended up causing disputes between the chat moderators and users; to keep order in the Chat, Jimeee eventually attempted to try to control the issue by implementing new Chat rules. However, these rules were not without controversy, with some users demanding their abolition. Others were in complete support of said rules; as such, more feuds occurred between supporters and critics of the new rules. The drama eventually settled down in late July, but the entire situation caused much of the community to distrust the admins.

On August 8th 2014, a second consensus against Jimeee was created by SuperSajuuk (a first had been created in March, but was ultimately opposed). Though at first it received support—mostly from regulars in chat—a large amount of opposition came from patrollers, administrators, and other users. After days of arguing, and eventually the involvement of Wikia Staff, Jimeee left a final comment responding to all the criticism against him on the consensus. Immediately afterwards, he resigned. The community—already shaken from months of conflict—was poorly prepared for the disaster in January 2015 (see below).

Staff resignations
The first few months of 2015 were riddled with drama as a result of four of the six administrators at the time resigning within mere days of each other. Specifically, EbonySkyrim, TombRaiser, and Ghost Anubis resigned on the 16th, with Kennyannydenny following on the 18th. A combination of factors—such as a very restless past year and a declining interest in the wiki—led to this. Flightmare and Timeoin still held their positions, but were inactive during this time. With no active administrators, much commotion became of the situation.

On January 16th, SuperSajuuk nominated himself for administrator, citing the fact that there were currently no active administrators in order to justify him not fully meeting all of the requirements. It was very successful, garnering nine supporting votes and only one opposing vote within a day. However, his self-nomination was deleted by Kennyannydenny soon afterwards, who claimed that it infringed upon existing policies disallowing self-nominations. Sajuuk defended his position, saying that the policy was irrelevant in this situation. He also backed up his position by saying that another user, ShawnCognitionCP, had actually been the one to write the nomination, despite it being in first person and actually posted by Sajuuk.

In addition to deleting the nomination, Kenny also blocked Sajuuk for a period of two weeks. He faced criticism from Sajuuk's supporters for this, who claimed that he had done so out of bias against Sajuuk. Flightmare, who had until this point taken no part in the drama, reversed the block, claiming that it was invalid, but did not re-instate Sajuuk's self-nomination. Soon afterwards, Kenny resigned from his position, making him the fourth administrator to do so during this chain of events.

Reorganization
This period of relative disorganization ended when Cheatcodechamp, a long-standing patroller, gained administrative status on January 29th. Cheatcodechamp quickly instituted policies intended to bring the community and staff—especially the administrators—together. This helped mend the widening rift that had developed between the two groups over time, for the most part due to a lack of transparency and activity from administrators among the community. Cheatcodechamp addressed the community's concerns in this regard by forming a Weekly Update system by late February to keep regular members of the community informed on what was happening with the wiki on a weekly basis. He also restarted the Member of the Month award system, which had been temporarily retired in 2014.

On February 2nd, Cheatcodechamp, along with several other editors, initiated the now-defunct "Guilds Project," which aimed to divide the workload of current editors into smaller, more organized groups. The guilds were designed to help improve efficiency among editors and encourage teamwork. Six guilds (one for each game of the main series and Online) were implemented originally, with one more (Lore) being added in May. Membership in each guild ranged from three to eight, depending on each guild's popularity and requirements. Each guilds was supposed to be overseen by a guildmaster, although for much of the project's existence only four out of the seven guilds were active. The system was retired in July 2016 because progress from the guilds had been minimal; a lack of active leadership and editors prevented participants from making more than a small number of noteworthy content revisions.

Policy changes
The most important change that was made around this time was likely the switch from staff nominations to applications. Formerly, staff had to be nominated by someone of the position they wanted or higher, which made it exceedingly difficult for many users to gain staff positions. In late March, a consensus and a blog post on the topic brought to light many of its problems. Eventually, it was decided that anyone could apply for a staff position, as long as they met the requirements.

These new policy changes decreased the tension on the wiki, and many users applied for staff positions. For example, SuperSajuuk—who tended to help with coding and article maintenance—applied for administrator another time. His second application was not successful either (arguments against him cited his personality and demotion from chat moderator in 2014), but he was later granted patroller. He resigned from that position on May 2nd, 2015, and was later blocked for a year on account of sockpuppetry.

While at this point the community and staff had regained a fairly solid relationship, there was still the issue of who was making decisions; non-administrators had very little say in written policy before this time. To solve this lack of openness, Emperor Jarjarkine and Madman97 created a weekly meeting called a Moot on June 22nd. In said meeting, editors would bring up issues or concepts which would discussed by the community and the staff simultaneously. This allowed for an increased amount of feedback and involvement from a more representative portion of the wiki, rather than a small number of administrators designing policy pages bottom-up. Under this new system, the people who were primarily affected by these changes had an important role in shaping them. It was later changed to a monthly meeting due to a lack of issues to discuss.

Content expansion
Until early-mid 2015, the wiki had an enormous number of unusually short, imageless Morrowind articles on the wiki. However, Gaminomicon joined the wiki in January of 2015 and worked quickly to supplement these pages with information and files, adding well over two thousand over the course of a few months. His work did not go unnoticed, as he became the guildmaster of the Morrowind Guild during the Guild's creation, and was elected patroller on May 14th. However, his activity since then has declined due to unforeseen real-life issues, and his patroller tools have since been removed.

In the four-year period from 2011 to 2015, the wiki's article count increased greatly, from around 1,000 articles to over 40,000. It now encompasses virtually all topics related to series, and has continued to grow at a rapid pace.

Staff changes
Atvelonis became administrator on March 2nd after a relatively short time as patroller. Alongside Cheatcodechamp, he worked with both the current staff and the community to address much of the user drama prevalent on the wiki at the time, rewriting several outdated policies on the wiki. Atvelonis also created a number of Online articles, added large amounts of Skyrim character dialogue to the wiki, and various other projects. He became a bureaucrat on February 27th, 2016, a position which he still holds today.

On September 9th, Emperor Jarjarkine (who was at the time a Wikia Helper, like Flightmare) gained sysop rights. Jarjarkine had been conducting interviews with both staff and non-staff to give the general populace a better perception of their personalities and goals. While he has since handed this job down to Madman97, his work in reconnecting the community and staff via interviews and general wiki news helped repair relations between the two groups.

Discussions
In December 2015, the community approved Wikia's proposed addition to the wiki's mobile app called Discussions, which was described as a more accessible mobile forum. While initially claiming that it would remain separate from the original Forums, they later admitted that they were secretly planning on merging the two at an unknown point in the future, leading to a certain level of displeasure from much of the community. Since its creation, Discussions has undergone slow expansion to allow for a greater number of readers and potential editors to talk about the series in detail on a casual, accessible platform.

However, Discussions has garnered a significant amount of criticism from both the community and staff of the wiki for a number of reasons. Firstly, Wikia had intentionally misled the community into believing that Discussions would exist alongside the Forums indefinitely, when in fact the Discussions would eventually replace the Forums. This was an issue because the feature was poorly suited for moderation; many believed that Wikia should not have rolled it out so soon, due to its lack of functionality. Additionally, its likeness to a social media platform was unpopular among the main wiki community, who favored the more organized, formal atmosphere of the Forums. This was partially alleviated with the introduction of features such as post categories (similar to Boards on the Forums) and tougher rules from the staff, but Discussions is still far from a traditional Forum, both socially and structurally.

AzuraKnight's resignation from the position of forum moderator in March 2015 (see below) led to a transition in moderation styles to a stricter approach, which led to outcry from many mobile users. However, this was generally a period of light moderation, as the Discussions community was entirely unaccustomed to the stricter guidelines present on the Forums. However, it was made clear that due to the upcoming merge, the rules would only continue to be tightened. After several waves of small riots, the Discussions settled down and now operates without a significant amount of drama.

Over time, the staff began appointing members of the Discussions community to moderator positions, in order to handle the increased amount of activity on the platform. Although users are free to apply for moderator, democratic votes are not held as they are with other positions. Instead, the staff privately chooses users who are best suited for the position, as the casual nature of Discussions prevents most serious conversation related to policy and staff matters.

NumidiumBot
In March 2016, Community Central administrator Cörey finished setting up NumidiumBot, which would help with tedious editing tasks such as updating template names and making minor article formatting fixes. Numidium would serve as the wiki's only active editing bot until the introduction of KINMUNE's editing functionality in July.

Staff changes
By 2016, the wiki was experiencing very little drama and began to focus more on content and staff activity. Due to an increasing number of inactive staff members, another staff re-evaluation was held. Some staff members resigned pre-emptively, such as Cheatcodechamp and Emperor Jarjarkine on March 1st. Others were removed during the re-evaluations, which occurred in early March.

AzuraKnight, who had single-handedly moderated the entirety of both the Forums and Discussions, resigned on March 1st for reasons unrelated to the re-evals. This resulted in the promotion of several other moderators and a greater focus of all staff members towards the Forums and Discussions.

Content expansion
Yumyum36 commenced work on the articles of the wiki in April 2016, creating hundreds of articles and uploading just as many images for said articles, and was instrumental in the early development of almost all Legends content on the wiki alongside a few other editors such as The Rim of the Sky.

Image additions
2016 proved to be a productive year in terms of image uploads. Bronkiin, now a patroller, began uploading a large number of images from The Elder Scrolls Online starting in late August 2015, and continued these uploads in the following year, totaling over 2,000 image uploads by the end of 2016. In February 2016, new editors such as Rupuzioks and Vitgar began uploading massive numbers of images, primarily for The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind and The Elder Scrolls Online. This drastically reduced the number of pages from those games with missing images.

CarloV3r was promoted to the position of Forum Moderator on April 26th, 2016 and helped to quell the complaints of disgruntled mobile users alongside his fellow moderators Ottoman Hold and Khaleesi Zhavorsa (formerly "~*LilithRayn*~"). Carlo later uploaded hundreds of missing images to the wiki, mainly of various item images from and. Starting in July 2016, he also uploaded numerous audio files to the wiki. On August 25th, 2016, largely as a result of his efforts in the field of images and audio, Carlo was promoted to patroller. Three months later, he was promoted to administrator.

Around the same time, AgentOfMara took an interest in making large-scale edits to Morrowind articles as well as uploading many of the remaining missing images mainly for characters, locations, and quests. Their combined efforts have dramatically reduced the number of Morrowind articles missing images.

Slack
It was becoming increasingly clear that the staff required a faster method of communication than what was presently available on the wiki. Talk pages were relatively slow, and the Chat was riddled with bugs, so alternative group chats were attempted on sites such as Facebook and Kik. Unfortunately, these platforms each presented their own range of issues. On September 5th, 2016, Atvelonis founded the TESWiki Staff Slack, which is used by staff members for fast communication. Slack was chosen because it offered mobile and desktop support, multiple channels, and bot support, making it an ideal program for this type of activity. It has since been an essential aspect of collaboration between the staff.

Discussions MOTM
CarloV3r and Atvelonis proposed a "Discussions Member of the Month" award system in early 2017 in which the recipient would be voted upon by active members of the Discussions. This award is not linked to the Achievements system, as the award is separate from the original Member of the Month award, and is available exclusively to Discussions users. The award proved to be a success among the Discussions community, and continues to occur every month.

Content expansion
In January 2017, forum moderator Aramithius began restructuring and expanding many of the wiki's lore articles, which had largely fallen into a state of disrepair. At the time, Dovahesbrom was the only editor making significant changes to lore articles; with Aramithius' help, quite a few were revised to a much higher-quality state.

Merges
The wiki as it is known today is actually the result of several merges such as those with Wikiscrolls, the Daggerfall Wiki, the Skyrim Wiki, and OblivioWiki. These merges completely redefined the wiki as a source of information and a community, and greatly influenced its popularity.

Wikiscrolls
Wikiscrolls was an offshoot of rival wiki UESP created by Aristeo, an administrator of the UESP, and Hoggwild5, a co-founder, with the intention of "[making] an encyclopedia/guide and give it away for free." It was created largely because Aristeo felt that the UESP was heading in the wrong direction socially. To remedy this, he created an independent site called "Wikiscrolls" (wikiscrolls.org) on January 4th, 2007, as a separate encyclopedic wiki from the UESP. One of the primary complaints with the UESP at the time of Wikiscrolls' founding was the lack of collaboration and friendliness which had previously existed in the site. Wikiscrolls was merged with The Elder Scrolls Wiki in March of 2008, and had twenty-seven known contributors, all of whom are listed on its project page.

Daggerfall Wiki
Sometime before early 2011, The Elder Scrolls Wiki presumably absorbed a Daggerfall Wiki, the contents of which would have included purely information about the game Daggerfall. Almost nothing is known about this wiki, if it even actually existed, as evidence of it is very scarce. One obscure mention of it was noted on a now-defunct statistics page (this page used to be linked at the bottom of Special:Statistics, but has since been replaced with Special:Insights).

This statistics page primarily listed information about user and editor activity from prior years. However, a single tab of this page happened to include, among other things, the URL. This prompted speculation that there used to be a separate Daggerfall Wiki, which had at some point merged with The Elder Scrolls Wiki. However, this has yet to be confirmed.

Skyrim Wiki
May 2nd-4th, 2011

OblivioWiki
The OblivioWiki is confirmed to have existed on Wikia's network under the url since February 24th, 2006, with the oldest known revision being made a day later. According to Wikia employee BertH, the company's logs note that it was indeed added on 2006-02-24. However, former administrator Michaeldzuarez claims that it was originally created by Gravewit on May 7th, 2005, very likely on the  domain, and was incorporated under Wikia in September 2007. The user rights logs on OblivioWiki seem to indicate that Gravewit was indeed the founder, as he was the first to promote any other user to the position of administrator. Additionally, no logs show that he was ever promoted to bureaucrat, only that he was demoted from the position for inactivity on November 3rd, 2007, indicating that he had founded the wiki and was automatically given bureaucrat rights.

On June 21st, 2011, the OblivioWiki was merged with The Elder Scrolls Wiki, although maintenance regarding the merge continued for months afterwards. According to BertH, the  domain was created as a redirecting domain to   on 2011:06:21, with the original OblivioWiki presumably being renamed to.

Visual timeline
Code adapted from Wikipedia.

Administrators  = Patrollers      = Forum Moderators = Chat Moderators = All Staff       =

The visual appearance of the wiki since November 11th, 2006 can be observed in intervals from the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. It has changed significantly over the years, as both the local staff and Wikia as a whole adopted different visual styles for the wiki.

Misc
The Elder Scrolls Wiki:Requests for removal of user rights

List of Wikia domains redirecting to the TESWiki (provided by BertH):
 * daggerfall.wikia.com – Added on 2011:05:10
 * dawnguard.wikia.com – Added as a redirecting domain on 2012:08:13
 * elderscrolls.answers.wikia.com
 * elderscrolls.wikia.com
 * elderscrollsiv.wikia.com
 * elderscrollsonline.wikia.com
 * elderscrollsskyrim.wikia.com
 * eso.wikia.com
 * morrowind.wikia.com – Added as a domain on 2011:08:12
 * oblivion.gamewikis.org – Added on 2011:06:21
 * oblivion.wikia.com – Added on 2011:06:21
 * skyrim-old.wikia.com
 * skyrim.wikia.com – Added on 2011:05:04
 * tes.wikia.com
 * theelderscrolls.wikia.com

old.oblivion.wikia was apparently created on 2006-02-24.

Miscellaneous links

 * User blog:Ausir/Merger of Elder Scrolls wikis
 * Elder Scrolls Wiki 2011
 * Wikipedia Review Gravewit
 * Wikipedia Review Michaeldsuarez
 * Guildwiki (Gamepedia) Gravewit
 * Wikia Move (talk)
 * Donation Repayment
 * WHOIS