User:Atvelonis/History

''Not in any way complete. Too much listing especially—needs more detail on how people mentioned affected the wiki and such, especially from 2006-2011.''

Early years
The Elder Scrolls Wiki was created on the 14th of June, 2006 by Kcaz64, around three months after 's release. However, they made no effort to contribute to the wiki, and by 2008 they had been 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 tumultuous and unstable period for the wiki due to the long term 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 a certain 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 that they were turning the wiki into a dictatorship. Arandil, who had been appointed bureaucrat by KickAssJedi just a few days previous, 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, amiable Australian Timeoin took interest in the wiki "after seeing a lot of redlinks on the 'Featured Articles' page," and began to make expansions and 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 responsible for essentially bringing it back to life. Today, as a bureaucrat and with over seventy thousand edits to his name, he is generally regarded as the head administrator of the wiki. Timeoin has created many 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.

Seven months later, was released, and the wiki quickly gathered a significant amount of attention. A plethora of readers and editors flocked to the wiki with the intention of gathering or contributing 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 Chat was introduced, the first-ever chat moderator being Blood Reaper. Prior to this, members of the wiki had primarily used the IRC (Internet Relay Chat) to talk in real time. 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 in December 2015.

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 granted a permanent, 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 numerous 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 large, 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).

DwemerBot
On January 23rd, 2012, a bot called DwemerBot was set up by TombRaiser in order to complete a large amount of minor edits that would otherwise be extremely tedious for a regular editor. DwemerBot created placeholder articles, removed overarching categories, made link fixes, and did various other tasks. By the time of its official retirement in April 2015, the bot had amassed over 85,000 edits.

Staff changes
December 31st, 2011 marked an important date in wiki history. It was on this day that 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 contributing significant amounts of information to the mainspace. He became bureaucrat on March 4th, 2012.

Elchzard, an administrator, became bureaucrat on January 6th, 2012 as a result of "overwhelming community support." HaLo2FrEeEk became administrator on February 27th. Four days later, on the 2nd of March, Flightmare became administrator. Flightmare has extensive knowledge of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), and JS (JavaScript), which are used to create and edit templates and MediaWiki pages. Flightmare continues to operate 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 rather quick 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. She stayed with the wiki until her resignation on January 16th, 2015.

On May 16th, 2012, another extremely impactful editor, Jimeee, became an administrator. While Jimeee's temperament was very to-the-point, his editing skills far surpassed those of most other users'. He took on innumerable large-scale editing projects, such as greatly expanding and standardizing, , , 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 prevent and remove plagiarized material, and added character dialogue to articles. In mid 2014 (see below), a group of users began a consensus to remove Jimeee from his position, their reasoning involving his aforementioned temperament and an series of unjust uses of his Administrator tools. While some users believed that much of the evidence in it seemed to have been taken out of context or was simply irrelevant, others thought his behavior was completely unacceptable and worthy of a demotion. 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 serious health concerns. Because of this, she was exempt from removal from her position until 2015, having simply been marked as "Inactive" until that point, when it was decided that she was unlikely to return. 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 did some work on various other games of the series such as, , and. He created over a thousand articles for the wiki.

2013
The year of 2013 proved an interesting one in terms of a surge in many prominent users who had and would continue to contribute to the wiki in large and long-lasting ways.

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.

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.

On September 16th, EbonySkyrim, one of the wiki's most prolific editors, was promoted to administrator. Ebony, having amassed over 50,000 edits over her wiki career, was among its most influential users during her stay. She worked very extensively on many of the "behind-the-scenes" jobs such as categorization (of files in particular) and deleting unused pages and files. Ebony uploaded massive swaths of images for Oblivion and Skyrim articles, and was responsible for much of the expansion of many of the articles from those games. When The Elder Scrolls Online was released in 2014, Ebony added many 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).

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, but 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.

Staff changes
On February 15th, 2014, forum moderator Fire Wolf Pup became a patroller on the wiki. The wiki, having been created over a decade after the release of Daggerfall, was seriously lacking in information regarding it and its predecessor. 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.

Ghost Anubis became an administrator on September 16th after having occupied several staff positions during the year already. 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," awarded for making 500 edits on articles, and every 500 edits after that, was named after him. However, his time as administrator was somewhat short-lived, as he resigned on January 15th, 2015.

By September 2015, 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.

Drama
In mid-late June 2014, three chat users had made consensuses against one another, calling for each other's demotions. This event ending up causing drama and disputes between the chat moderators and users. Jimeee eventually attempted to try and "control" the issue by implementing new rules to keep order in the chat. However, some of these rules were fairly controversial, with some users demanding their abolition. Others were in complete support of said rules and more feuds occurred between supporters and critics of them. 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 who agreed with Jimeee. After days of feuding, and eventually the involvement of Wikia Staff, Jimeee left a long, final comment responding to all the criticism against him on the consensus. Immediately after, he resigned. The community—already shaken from months of conflict—was poorly prepared for the disaster in January 2015 (see below).

The Exodus
The first few months of 2015 were riddled with instability and 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, the wiki struggled to lead itself forward, and much bickering and 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 support votes and only one oppose 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 alternatively 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 been inactive, reversed the block, claiming that it was invalid. 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 gained administrative status on January 29th. Cheatcodechamp very quickly instituted multiple policies intended to bring the community and staff—especially the administrators—together, as a widening rift 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 instantly took action to address many of the community's concerns, and formed 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 helped to improve efficiency among editors and encouraged teamwork. Six guilds (one for each game of the main series and Online) were implemented originally, with one (lore) more 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 are active. The system was retired in July 2016 because progress from the guilds had been minimal; a lack of active leadership and editors prevented the project from making more than a small number of 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, and eventually the decision was made to allow anyone to apply for a staff position as long as they met the requirements.

These new policy changes decreased the clear and present tension on the wiki, and many applied for staff positions. For example, SuperSajuuk, who tended to help with coding and article maintenance, applied for administrator for second time after a rejected self-nomination authored before the policy on the topic was addressed. His second application was not successful either (arguments against him cited his personality and demotion from chat moderator in 2014), although 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 making decisions; more specifically, who was making them. Non-bureaucrats had very little say in written policy before this time; to solve this lack of openness, Emperor Jarjarkine and Madman97 proposed and created a weekly meeting called a Moot on June 22nd. In said meeting, editors would bring up issues or ideas and they would be 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 couple of bureaucrats designing policy pages bottom up, the people who were mostly affected by these changes had a part in shaping them.

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

Staff changes
Atvelonis became administrator on March 2nd after a relatively short time as patroller. He participated actively in the community alongside Cheatcodechamp, regularly frequenting chat and working with both the current staff and the community to fix many long-overdue problems on a number of different levels. He settled much of the user drama prevalent in this period of time, and assisted in the rewriting of several ambiguous and outdated policies on the wiki. Atvelonis also started a number of very large-scale projects about Skyrim, Online, and general wiki maintenance, including the mass creation of Online articles, the addition of Skyrim character dialogue to the wiki, and various other productive endeavors. He became a bureaucrat on February 27th, 2016, a position which he still holds today.

On September 9th, Emperor Jarjarkine (a Wikia Helper, like Flightmare) gained sysop rights. Jarjarkine had been conducting interviews with both staff and non-staff to give the general populous 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 to mend the bonds between them which had been broken by events in the previous year.

In the four-year period from 2011 to 2015, the wiki grew at an astounding rate, from around 1000 articles to over 40,000. It now encompasses virtually all topics related to series, and has continued to grow at a rapid pace. The Staff is now comprised of several individuals working in varying positions to ensure that the wiki remains both a friendly and factually accurate place.

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 separated from the original Forum, they later admitted that they were 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, the feature has undergone rapid expansion and has allowed for a greater number of readers and potential editors to talk about the series in detail on a casual, accessible platform.

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

Staff changes
By 2016, the wiki was experiencing very little drama and began to focus more on content and staff activity. Due to an increasingly large number of inactive staff members, it was decided that another staff re-evaluation would occur. Some staff members resigned pre-emptively such as Cheatcodechamp and Emperor Jarjarkine, who did so 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, prompting the promotion of other moderators and a greater focus of all staff members on the Forums and Discussions. On Discussions, this led to a transition in moderation styles to a stricter approach, which led to outcry from many mobile users. However, it was made clear that due to the upcoming merge, the rules would only continue to be tightened. After a number of waves of small riots, the Discussions settled down and now operates efficiently and without a significant amount of drama.

Image additions
CarloV3r was promoted to the position of Forum Moderator on April 26th, 2016 and assisted in quelling the complaints of disgruntled mobile users alongside his fellow moderators Ottoman Hold and Khaleesi Zhavorsa (formerly "~*LilithRayn*~"). Carlo later began uploading 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.

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.

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
[Get some more info from KAJ/Angela/Aristeo's tp archives]

Wikiscrolls was actually 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." Its creation on January 4th, 2007 was due largely because Aristeo felt that the UESP was heading in the wrong direction socially, and subsequently created an independent site called "Wikiscrolls" (wikiscrolls.org) as a separate encyclopedic wiki from the UESP. One of the primary complaints with the UESP at the time of its founding was the lack of collaboration and friendliness which had previously existed in the site. It 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 made a merge with a Daggerfall Wiki, the contents of which included purely information about the game Daggerfall.

Skyrim Wiki
May 2nd-4th, 2011

OblivioWiki
June 21st, 2011

Visual timeline
Code adapted from Wikipedia.