Transformers Wiki (tfwiki.net): Difference between revisions
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Revision as of 04:34, 5 August 2011
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Description
TFWiki.net — Transformers Wiki is the largest, most ridiculously thorough reference for all things Transformers, from their beginnings in the early '80s to the latest cartoons, comics, toys, and movies. Naturally, the popular American series are exhaustively covered, but it's also got more than you'd ever want to know about the long-running anime & manga, the British comics, the Brazilian toys, the Japanese Beast-Wars-themed sausage, the names of all the classic characters in Hungarian… literally thousands of articles representing countless ill-spent man-hours of hundreds of fans. Let not their sacrifice go in vain!
| Wiki size: | 13,855 article pages see stats |
History
The Transformers Wiki was originally created by user Nova81426 in May 2005, as a part of the Wikicities (now Wikia) domain. Very little progress was made until March 2006, when it was found by comic artist David Willis. He brought it to the attention of the wider Transformers fan community, boosting membership and activity. An opportunity was seen to cover Transformers to a depth and breadth that Wikipedia never would. Transformers Wiki would also be distinctive in its use of humor in captions and, to a lesser extent, within article text. In 2007, members of the Wiki entered the Board Wars, a trivia contest for Transformers fan sites at the official Transformers convention BotCon. They won, and a year later repeated their success at BotCon 2008. The trivia contest was mysteriously discontinued.
The community experienced growing discontent with Wikia as changes in advertising and the new Monaco skin were imposed on them in mid-2008. The complaints, archived here, led to the administrators and community discussing taking the current database and setting up on a new server. On September 15th, they did just that. The new site was located on the same servers as Blank Label Comics which Willis had helped found, and used the TFWiki.net domain which had been pointing to the Wiki for some time prior. At this point, the wiki had just under 7000 articles.
The Transformers Wiki continued to grow on its new server, reaching 8000 articles on January 24, 2009. One coup for the Wiki was getting the opportunity to take part in Hasbro's bimonthly website Transformers Q&A sessions. Disaster struck, however, on March 15th, when an attempt to upgrade the software caused the corruption of the database and it came out that the regular backups had been failing. The most recent backup — dating from July 2008 — was restored to the site, along with a message linking to Wikia at the bottom of every article (Wikia had begun inserting this message into their database dumps during the discussion of the original move). This event became known as the Bookworm Crash. In an unfortunate piece of timing, this coincided with the premiere of a new season of the then-current cartoon "Transformers Animated".
What followed was a long process of recovering article text from Google, Yahoo and MSN caches, reuploading and reformatting them, all of this amid ongoing server problems manifesting as intermittent downtime. After several long months, the restoration was more or less complete. In late May of 2009, the Transformers Wiki was moved to another new server on Slicehost. Lingering teething problems were soon fixed, and the Wiki began preparing for the release of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen in cinemas. Despite downtime from the flood of traffic created by the movie, the wiki reached a total of 9000 articles just four days after the movie's opening.
On December 14, 2009, the Transformers Wiki celebrated reaching 10,000 articles. In February of 2010, members of the Wiki were invited to Hasbro's fan day at the 2010 Toy Fair. Not long after, an auction for a rare toy catalog from the 80s led the Wiki and fan site the AllSpark to cooperate in a fundraising drive to, not only raise the money to purchase the catalog, but to go on and donate money to Hasbro Children's Hospital. The pages of the toy catalog were subsequently placed online for all to enjoy. A similar feat was achieved in November when a number of behind-the-scenes documents from the 80s Transformers cartoon were similarly auctioned, and many of the documents were successfully secured, scanned and made available to all.