Today I decided to look through our old articles, especially those we created ourselves from scratch, not copied from Wikipedia. This cracked me up, and the immediately following revision even more so.
And so I thought it would be a great idea to dig through the old community portal and old talk pages, to remember how Wookieepedia (at that time, still the Star Wars Wiki) came to be. This is what the Community Portal itself used to be, by the way, before I reshaped it into a prototype of its modern form, with colored boxes. Nothing of that page remains: even "Star Wars:Copying from Wikipedia", where I moved most of the old content, was eventually remade into something completely different — Wookieepedia:Information from Wikipedia.
Wikipedia preserves a screenshot of our old main page, but even that is not what it used to be. ID was only started in August 2005 by Imperialles, and FA was launched in September with ad-hoc, more permissive rules - basically a simple majority vote. Had you visited the Main Page before that, you would see a less promising picture... The old Main Page was deleted when a vandal moved it to [Redacted by administration], I've just restored it; this was the first revision], and this is how it used to look like just before ID was added. Not exactly like this - there was no contents box - but you get the idea.
I remember how much controversy there was around the proposal to merge Darth Sidious with Palpatine — something that, had it been decided today, wouldn't have stood a chance to have them kept separate. Both Darth Sidious and Palpatine were in truly pitiful state just before the merge, and after I performed the merge, the resulting article was sloppy to say the least. I think some parts of this revision still remain! Luckily, thanks to our other contributors, most prominently Starkeiller (whom I personally saw at first as "just another annoying noob who can't even sign"), it became our longest article in no time.
I remember how I hand-picked the first FA candidates to get it rolling - I simply listed all the articles that had gone through ID at that point. They included Leia Organa Solo, Luke Skywalker — the first wasn't featured until much later, and the second still isn't — and Obi-Wan Kenobi. The latter seemed a clear winner, but then Palpatine got nominated and quickly gained support, becoming our first FA — followed by Obi-Wan. We were playing with the FA template, looking for the best way to squeeze in the picture and the blurb, and that pretty much defined the current layout of this section of the main page.
And the "popular pages" link stopped working ever since Wikia (then Wikicities) disabled view counting. I remember how the view count was reset after the Main Page got moved... but hey, we were all a little careless those days, weren't we?
(Sorry for mostly talking about stuff I did... that's simply because it's what I'm more familiar with. Most of our old-timers did much, much more than I can ever hope to.) - Sikon 19:59, 14 February 2007 (UTC)
- Before I even had an account (forgive my anonymous beginnings) I remember the main page being moved to [Redacted by administration]. I didn't know that the Main Page had been deleted in that case though. :P I'm sure there's quite a bit of history from the first year of expansion. Cull Tremayne 20:11, 14 February 2007 (UTC)
- I remember when the website switched from starwars.wikicities.com to starwars.wikia.com. At the time, I was still pretty new, and needless to say, very confused as to what happened :P ah...the good ol' days. —Xwing328(Talk) 20:38, 14 February 2007 (UTC)
- And then there was the disaster that was the Great Edit War on Palpatine, where the page had to be locked for several weeks. Ah, good times. -- SFH 21:23, 14 February 2007 (UTC)
- I've only been here under a year. Many articles have been expanded and improved greatly in that time. See Leia and Lando for examples. -03:41, 15 February 2007 (UTC)
- Well, we have made somewhat of an impact. Abel Peña has mentioned us a couple of times in his blog and Pablo Hidalgo has referred to the Wook as "darned impressive". We still have problems with vandals who are evil like the Sith, users whose egos are to big for this solar system, petty edit wars, misunderstandings and most other things that are symptomatic of a wiki, but in all, I think we've done a good job with the Wook. KEJ 10:35, 15 February 2007 (UTC)
- Now that Wookieepedia is quickly approaching its 2nd Anniversary, we should talk to SW authors to see if anyone wants to write a blurb about us, like Abel's last year. —Xwing328(Talk) 17:37, 15 February 2007 (UTC)
- Very funny--Soviet*Union 17:52, 15 February 2007 (UTC)
- Now that Wookieepedia is quickly approaching its 2nd Anniversary, we should talk to SW authors to see if anyone wants to write a blurb about us, like Abel's last year. —Xwing328(Talk) 17:37, 15 February 2007 (UTC)