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 Feed The Beast Wiki and this one. 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. He 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.

Move to Gamepedia and continued growth
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 (The)SatanicSanta 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 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.

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. Different editathons have had varying successes; the 200k Editathon, held to celebrate the wiki reaching 200,000 edits had 17 participants, including several new editors, with many edits (over 3,000) made. Other editathons have had less, usually due to a lack of advertising or unappealing themes.

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. At this time staff member Xbony2 became a translation administrator, creating an influx of new translatable pages and translations.

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. In late 2016 through 2017, the staff system was replaced by a more directly democratic system. Due to Xbony2 and other editors focusing on the documentation of Minecraft 1.8 and other newer versions, the Official FTB Wiki has recently sometimes been described as the most updated major wiki.