History of the Official Feed The Beast Wiki

Inception
The FTB Wiki began as a brainchild of Jadedcat, former FTB founding member and modpack developer, who now develops many of her own popular modpacks such as Agrarian Skies. Slowpoke, FTB leader and founder, was not fond of her idea, but let her do it as long as she took control, in order to make her happy. She recruited Tahg to lead the team, and together they recruited many staff members, including template and skin maintainers, editors, and translators.

The FTB Wiki formally began as a restricted knowledge base for the 1.2.5 Feed the Beast modpacks at wiki.feed-the-beast.com. Lead by Tahg, wiki staff editors, such as Arkangyl8 from the IndustrialCraft 2 wiki, Enoch5, Freightrain6, and Nibbin, focused on creating new content. Other users, now divided into different teams, worked on their own aspect of the wiki. Denkbert created many of the templates still used today. FunshineX7 maintained the wiki's skin, giving it a polished look appealing to many of its users.

Many of the editors at the time showed no contributions, because at the time of their membership, the wiki was restricted. Before Jinbobo's leadership, the wiki was only allowed to be edited by a few members. Everyone else who desired to contribute were required to private message their edits to wiki staff members on the FTB Forums.

Due to Tahg's lack of commitment to the wiki, and lack of understanding of the MediaWiki software, Jadedcat took over as team lead. She recruited many new editors and fired inactive/unproductive ones.

Opening up and the Jinbobo era
Over time, the wiki's content grew, however, its community did not. Jadedcat desired for the wiki to be a locked project from the community, in order to prevent malicious editing and to work out all of the bugs in the system. Eventually, however, in January of 2013, the wiki started working towards becoming open to user contributions. This was completed in July 2013, allowing for users to create accounts and edit the wiki.

At the start of August 2013, Jadedcat left the team and gave her responsibilities to Jinbobo, whom at the time was part of the template, organization, and translation teams, so that she could focus primarily on modpack development.

Over the course of Jinbobo's "reign of the kingdom of wikitopia", many large changes were made to the wiki. The translation extension was installed, and the moving of all old translations has been a lengthy process. He also developed two of the wiki's main extensions: Tilesheets and OreDictionary. The former eventually completely broke the wiki for months, causing most pages to never load, making edit saving unreliable, and causing the server to crash frequently. At the same time, Wikispaces changed their license, resulting in the shutdown of the GregTech Community Wiki. Under suggestion from Retep998, its staff chose to transfer to the FTB Wiki, resulting in large additions to the GregTech sections of the wiki.

Farewell, Jinbobo! Hello, Gamepedia!
Eventually, Jinbobo grew tired of the lack of attention that the wiki received from the core FTB team, and declared that he would quit if the FTB core team did not meet his desires for the wiki's direction. He left his extensions broken and without APIs to allow the bots of the wiki to interact with them. This left the wiki in a limbo. In late 2014, FTB teamed up with Curse, which resulted in the wiki being moved from FTB servers to Curse's "Gamepedia" wikifarm. A group of Gamepedia extension developers were able to fix the crippling bugs in our extensions, and the wiki became usable again.

With the move to Gamepedia, our community has grown, and the staff has changed drastically. We no longer have a specific staff lead, choosing democratic voting to be a better system than a dictatorship with some democracy. The availability of the wiki also changed, allowing anonymous users to freely edit most pages of the wiki, and the wiki has been growing bigger and better every day.

In 2017, the staff system was entirely removed. It was replaced by a more open and directly democratic system based on trust and consensus instead of representative democracy. Trusted members who needed specific rights would be given the editor right group instead of being "promoted" to staff. A new role system replaced staff categories, with roles being able to be appointed by others or by ones self.