History of the Official Feed The Beast Wiki

The history of the Official Feed The Beast Wiki begins with its inception in late 2012, and continues to today.

Inception
Jadedcat21, who was a part of the FTB Team at the time, suggested the creation of an official wiki for FTB. Although Slowpoke was originally not fond of her idea, he let her do it as long as she took control, in order to make her happy. She recruited Tahg to lead the team and they recruited several staff members, including editors, template and skin maintainers, and translators. The Official FTB Wiki was launched on November 14th, 2012.

The FTB Wiki formally began as a restricted knowledge base for the 1.2.5 Feed the Beast modpacks at the url wiki.feed-the-beast.com. Lead by Tahg, wiki staff editors, such as from the IndustrialCraft 2 wiki,, , and Nibbin, focused on creating new content. Other users, now divided into different teams, worked on their own aspect of the wiki. created many of the templates still used by the wiki today. 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 '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. This was done to stop spam bots and malicious edits from compromising the wiki—which was a major issue—but it also substantially stunted the wiki's early growth.

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
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. However, this was done too late, as several wiki contributors were fragmented between the unofficial and the official wiki. Although a merge had been discussed, no agreement could be made.

At the start of August 2013, Jadedcat left the team and gave her responsibilities to, who 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 leadership, many large changes were made to the wiki. The translation extension was installed, allowing for translations to be simpler to do and easier to maintain, although it limited what pages could be translated. Jinbobo also developed two of the wiki's main extensions: Tilesheets and OreDict.

In June 2014, GregTech 5 was released. Due to GregTech 4's Wikispace wiki being taken down and the large amount of changes to GregTech 5, the GregTech community decided to make the Official FTB Wiki their future site for GregTech documentation after persuasion from. This resulted in a fairly significant amount of users joining and content being made.

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 actively promote the wiki on social media and the forums. In August 2014, Jinbobo left the community as the core team failed to meet his request. He left the wiki with the Tilesheets extension broken such that most pages would never load, edit saving was unreliable, and the server would crash frequently. The wiki was left in this broken state for months. However, he left behind SatanicSanta (aka TheSatanicSanta) and as admins, and as a result of his departure, there was no longer a lead editor but a small group of staff that made decisions democratically.

In August 2014, editor and staff member was demoted and banned due to various inappropriate comments made, including transphobia towards Vazkii and attacking the Unofficial FTB Wiki, harassment of fellow FTB Wiki staff, and refusing to comply with the consequences set in place due to these acts. It was sparked by transphobic comments—intentional misgendering and refusing to acknowledge their gender identity—made towards Vazkii on the FTB Forums. He was banned from the Forums and removed from the Wiki Team at a higher level than the Wiki, with an emergency meeting between Jadedcat and SatanicSanta. Jadedcat asserted, in agreement with SatanicSanta, that RealSketch and anyone else who exhibits discriminatory behavior is not to be officially involved with Feed The Beast, but that he could remain as a standard contributor to the wiki (as the conduct occurred on the Forums rather than the wiki). Soon enough, the conduct carried over to the wiki, where RealSketch refused to acknowledge and accept the consequences for these actions, and engaged in harassment of staff members. He attempted to circumvent his ban by creating an alternative account, PurpleDragon, but the consistency in tone, persona (RealSketch had a love for the color purple, as demonstrated on his userpage), and eventually private messages sent to SatanicSanta and other wiki members via the Minecraft Forums exposed him.

Move to Gamepedia and continued growth
In late 2014, as a result of the Feed The Beast–Curse partnership, the Official Feed The Beast Wiki was moved onto Gamepedia and its URL was changed to ftb.gamepedia.com. Following the pushing of the extensions onto GitHub, Retep998 fixed the issue in Tilesheets, allowing the wiki to usable again. Gamepedia also allowed anonymous users to contribute to the wiki as per their global standards. The previous URL did not properly redirect to the new URL, which broke all links to the wiki and essentially forced the wiki to restart in the search results, but with time it was restored to its previous position.

In November 2014, the FTB Wiki reached 5,000 articles.

From December 31st, 2014 to January 1st, 2015, editor Xbony2 decided to spend the night (and the rest of the year by extension) documenting The Mists of RioV. After enjoying himself, the next year he decided to create a formal "editathon" called the 2015-2016 Marathon, in which participants were to document mods until it was 2016 in the editor's timezone. Xbony2 has hosted regular editathons since, all with different themes and rules.

In 2015, the template G was replaced by Gc, as the template G was twice as slow and often showed incorrect items. In order to replace it, wiki staff made about 5,000 manual edits. Around this time, some controversy rose around massive bot changes made by through her bot, which automatically removed the "dis" parameter of the Gc template , planning to either make automatic disambiguation redirects or have all articles use the disambiguated format to begin with. The controversy was over the fact that did she did not discuss the large, breaking changes with the rest of the staff before making them, except with Xbony2 and. The large amount of edits by Cblair91 and Xbony2 were also criticized for taking up too much space in/spamming the recent changes. After a fight in IRC, Cblair91 announced a break in wiki editing. The bot changes were undone through SatanicSanta's and a couple hundred manual changes. Cblair91 did not return to a serious level of wiki activity, although she sporadically helped fix the wiki's CSS and Javascript a few times later.

Often speed improvements were introduced, including the usage of Scribunto Lua modules in core templates and the creation of "lazy-loaded" navboxes, which were inspired by GregTech 5's navbox as it took a long time to load. At this time staff member Xbony2 became a translation administrator, creating an influx of new translatable pages and translations. Editor PaladinAHOne represented the FTB Wiki staff in BetterThanMinecon 2015, doing a Q/A panel discussing wiki editing and starting a tradition of FTB Wiki presence in future BetterThanMinecons.

In 2016, a few developer-appointed curators were appointed to document Reika's mods, TheDragonTeam's mods, ScottKillen's, Bdew's mods, and a few others, although most of these curators did not become particularly active. PaladinAHOne represented in the FTB Wiki in BetterThanMinecon 2016, doing another Q/A panel. Later that year and Xbony2 represented the wiki in BTM16 2.0, with 3tusk doing a panel on the Chinese modded Minecraft community and translation (including translation of the FTB Wiki), and Xbony2 creating a Jungle-themed booth with trivia about the wiki to advertise it.

In March 2016, the FTB Wiki reached 10,000 articles.

In July 2016, the WikiPack 1 and WikiPack 2 modpacks/servers were launched for wiki editors to enjoy themselves and test mods, and hopefully create documentation as they played. WikiPack 1 was managed by. It was built for Minecraft 1.7.10 and focused around GregTech 6. WikiPack 2 was managed by Xbony2, who built it for Minecraft 1.10 and made it more of a kitchensink modpack, but with a few mods to make it more difficult, such as The Spice of Life and Better With Mods. After FTB Infinity Lite's release, Xbony2 closed the inactive server in November and relaunched it with the new modpack.

Throughout 2016, the Ye ol' Editathon, the 200k Editathon the Puffy Pretty Pink Magic Editathon, and the 2016-2017 Marathon were held. The Ye ol' Editathon was held on Feed The Beast's 4-year anniversary and was focused on documenting older mods. It was considered pretty successful, although it had to be extended three days due to editathoners joining late. The 200k Editathon started when the wiki reached 200,000 edits and continued for a week. Unlikely other editathons, it was advertised on FTB's Twitter account and the site notice, bringing in many new editors. It also had a reward of a $20 Steam gift card, which the wiki staff voted to give to ImmortalPharaoh7 for his contributions towards Draconic Evolution and Arabic translations. It was considered very successful, with 17 participants (previous only had up to 4) and over 3,000 edits made in a week. The Puffy Pretty Pink Magic Editathon was held after it. Despite its colorful magic theme, it only had 3 participants, as it was not advertised very much. ImmortalPharaoh7, over SatanicSanta, was given another $20 Steam gift card for his contributions to Thaumcraft 4 and Thaumcraft 5. The 2016-2017 Marathon ended the year on a high note, with more participation than last year.

Modernization and greater popularity
After heated debate, in late 2016 through 2017, the staff system was replaced by a more directly democratic system. The "staff" user group was replaced by an "editor" user group, which had most of the same of rights but was given more leniently and didn't require a commitment. This also included other reforms, such as giving editors (the user group) the ability to mark pages for translation (which is required in order to update module-based navboxes) and the appointment of SatanicSanta as the FTB Core Team Representative, in charge of communicating between the FTB Team and the wiki community. Xbony2 was also voted in as administrator in January 2017.

In February 2017, the editors of the wiki discussed renaming and remarketing the "FTB Wiki" to the "Modded Minecraft Wiki," to better reflect the wiki as focusing more on mods than modpacks, and to appear more open to other modpacks and non-FTB mods (as the wiki is open to all mods and modpacks). Despite no opposition among the editors, this move was stopped by Slowpoke. Anticipation did however bring some documentation to Technic and ATLauncher on the wiki, which were documented to diversify the wiki.

Due to Xbony2 and other editors focusing on the documentation of Minecraft 1.8 and other newer versions, the Official FTB Wiki started to become described as the most updated major wiki. With new editors such as, , and  joining the wiki, it has continued to grow, especially with documentation for mods on the newer versions of Minecraft (mainly 1.12.2).

In April, Editors Xbony2 and sponsored Modoff on behalf of the FTB Wiki, creating documentation for the top three mods in the competition (Wearables, Skillable and Augmented Interactions), with some help from Hubry.

In July, Xbony2 launched the FTB Wiki Discord as an alternative to the FTB Wiki's IRC channel (both were bridged, so either could be used). The majority of wiki-related discussion occurs there.

Various improvements (both internal and external) to the Tilesheets and OreDict extensions were made by SatanicSanta throughout the year. In August 2017, SatanicSanta was also hired by Gamepedia as a wiki manager. He became wiki manager of the FTB Wiki (and more than a hundred other Gamepedia wikis), although the majority of his paid work is for the other wikis.

In late October, Xbony2 relaunched the WikiPack 2 server using a custom WikiPack 3 modpack for Minecraft 1.12.2. WikiPack 1 was not restarted, but it regained activity due to GregTech 6's continued growth in content and some friends joining the server.

In November, Xbony2 represented the wiki in BTM Moon, creating a booth to advertise the wiki with a broken "hunting simulation" game. However, it may have received a limited amount of visitors due to it being in a corner of the convention and BTM Moon having a complex layout.

Throughout 2017, the Let's Just Do It Editathon, the 2017 Ye ol Editathon, the Lazy Bunny Editathon, and the 2017-2018 Editathon were held. The Let's Just Do It Editathon was advertised on FTB's Twitter and /r/feedthebeast and so had many (15) participants. This editathon used a finalized, reformed set of rules that was considered by editathoners to be less flawed than the previous two editathons with rewards. These reformed rules included a 3-day voting deadline, requiring editathoners to vote in order to win, and only allowing participants with over 20 editathon-related edits to vote. SirMoogle was given the $20 Steam gift card over ImmortalPharaoh7 for his contributions towards Thaumcraft 4 and its addons. Although the Let's Just Do It Editathon had less participants than the 200k Editathon (15 compared to 17), it was considered as successful since it had about the same amount of edits (~3000) but with more active participants. The 2017 Ye ol Editathon was a renewed version of the 2016 Ye ol Editathon. Although it had 5 participants compared to the 4 participants of 2016, there was much less activity, owing to being too soon after the Let's Just Do It Editathon, a lack of interest in older mods, and the editathon being too long. The Lazy Bunny Editathon (named after Retep998) was conducted as a mini-editathon. It wasn't really advertised except in the FTB Wiki Discord, but it was considered fairly successful. 2017-2018 Editathon ended the year. It was considered quite successful, having 7 participants, with all of them but one (Xbony2) doing the end of year editathon for the first time.

Modern era
In early 2018, roughly from January to April, the FTB Wiki was haunted by a user named (or "Rusy"). In December, Rusy was indefinitely banned on the Russian Minecraft Wiki for trying to evade and excuse short-term bans made on him for using his account for vandalism and other disruptive activity. Continued disruption through IPs, proxies, and sockpuppet accounts (nicknamed "replicators," after Stargate SG-1) cemented this ban. Rusy claimed that his account and IPs were compromised by hackers or guests, despite sufficient evidence to the contrary. After Rusy's account was permanently blocked, replicator vandalism increased and spread from the Russian Minecraft Wiki to the English Minecraft Wiki. Xbony2, a member of the Gamepedia Rapid Anti-Spam Patrol (GRASP), worked to block and revert replicator vandalism on the English Minecraft Wiki. In response Rusy moved onto the FTB Wiki. Although he made a few genuine edits, most weren't constructive. One of Rusy's accounts, "," was accidentally welcomed by Xbony2 through him placing the Welcome template on his talk page. The template linked to the FTB Wiki Discord, and soon, Rusy and quickly-banned malicious sockpuppets joined the Discord. Xbony2 decided to not ban Rusy's main account from the Discord, since he found him entertaining, but other users found him disruptive, so Xbony2 conducted a poll on the matter. However, the poll became tied 8 to 8, so Xbony2 compromised by jokingly "excommunicating" (but not banning) Rusy from the Discord, but Xbony2 quickly changed his mind and banned Rusy on February 11th after Rusy claimed a replicator who joined the Discord was innocent. Xbony2 then promoted to Discord moderator for his expertise in dealing with Rusy on the Russian Minecraft Wiki. Rusy quickly retaliated, attacking the FTB Wiki. This attack fizzled out however, and an abuse filter was created to slow replicators. Rusy has however occasionally continued to attempt vandalism and contact admins and GRASP asking to be unbanned. On April 1st, Rusy was jokingly nominated for the "Editor" role.

In late January/February, Xbony2,, and ImmortalPharaoh7 sponsored Modoff 2: Reforged on behalf of the FTB Wiki, creating documentation for the top three mods in the competition (Glacidus, Gaspunk and E-Vaporate). They were documented somewhat slowly however due to real-life distractions and a bit of poor motivation.

In March, the WikiPack 1 server was restarted to try out the revamped GregTech 6 world generation. The WikiPack 3 server was not restarted, as Xbony2 decided to wait until Thaumcraft 6 was on Minecraft 1.12, as well as wanting it to be after an editathon was conducted, documentation of the top Modoff 2: Reforged mods, and a bit after WikiPack 1 activity died down, as he didn't want the players to be fragmented across two servers. Also in March, the Ladysnake modding team gave the gift of a Gas Grenade skin to members of the FTB Wiki Discord as a token of thanks.

On June 8th, the FTB Wiki reached 20,000 articles. During the summer of 2018, the WikiPack 3 server was restarted with WikiPack 3.2. The modpack's contents were chosen by its users, with each being able to select 2 major mods and 3 minor mods.

Throughout 2018, the 2018 Ye ol' Editathon and Modsummer Night's Dream editathon were held. The 2018 Ye ol' Editathon was a renewed version of the 2016 and 2017 Ye ol' Editathons. Its activity was relatively low despite advertising on FTB's Twitter, /r/feedthebeast, the site notice, and FTB Wiki Discord. The Modsummer Night's Dream editathon (named after A Midsummer Night's Dream, a play by William Shakespeare) was held in June. With some advertising help on /r/feedthebeast, the site notice, and the FTB Wiki Discord, it had 21 participants total, beating the previous record (made by the 200k Editathon with 17 participants total). was given the $20 Steam gift card for his contributions to Better With Mods, Practical Logistics 2, and the Spanish section of the wiki, as well as some translation markup.

In late 2018, FANDOM, also known as Wikia, bought Curse Media which owned the Gamepedia wiki. Despite mixed feelings of editors, this did not substantially change the FTB Wiki. , the Chinese (zh-cn ) translator and editor, cited this action as a reason for his departure from the wiki, although his main obstacle in the way of participation was his lack of time and enthusiasm.

Activity slowed through 2019, but there continued to be growth. The creation of another WikiPack was planned for the summer, but there was not enough mods and not enough stability for the most recent versions of Minecraft (1.13/1.14), and creating a server for 1.12.2 seemed too regressive.