Forum:SH Archive/Our humble beginnings

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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 &mdash; 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 Pedophilia rules!, 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 &mdash; 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 &mdash; the first wasn't featured until much later, and the second still isn't &mdash; and Obi-Wan Kenobi. The latter seemed a clear winner, but then Palpatine got nominated and quickly gained support, becoming our first FA &mdash; 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)