D&D Wiki:About
From D&D Wiki
About D&D Wiki:
"It seems that many creative and original ideas that are posted on the Wizards of the Coast's D&D Message Boards are lost forever. An excellent idea that is refined through all the posts is soon lost as it is moved down the list because it does not need to be changed anymore. The Message Boards are also not ideal for editing an idea, because sometimes only people that have read the idea from the beginning will bother to read down to the newest post. This site was created so that new ideas for Classes, Equipment, Feats, Monsters, etc, are not lost forever, and can easily be changed by anyone. If someone thinks something is overpowered or underpowered they can change it, and make it exactly as they see it would work best. Your choice. Be creative." --The original about page for D&D Wiki.
D&D Wiki was created on February 4th, 2006 by Green Dragon with the help of Blue Dragon. Green Dragon enjoyed participating on Wizards of the Coast message boards but noticed that wonderful homebrew content became lost there. 3.5e Homebrew was the first page created.
Early in that first year, major projects began such as the compiling of the System Reference Document that Wizards of the Coast allowed the site to have posted, and a project which moved over some documented and well-loved homebrew material from the WotC forums. As the wiki began to grow users continued to add content directly to D&D Wiki. A faster server, a new logo, and a custom skin improved D&D Wiki and it enjoyed additional administrators and Requests for Adminship.
D20 Modern content was added that same year, and a tradition began of including OGL content for every game included on this website.
By D&D Wiki's first birthday in February of 2007 the site ran a successful fundraiser to improve the equipment the site ran on– a much needed improvement as the site was growing daily. The year also featured a growing base of users, preparations to have the site ready for the announced fourth edition, and a chat room named The Tavern opened this year and enjoyed a rotating cast of characters assisting users.
4th Edition content, and a new forum-style discussion section was added to the wiki in 2007
New layouts and a new logo greeted D&D Wiki for its second birthday in 2008. The wiki also implemented the Semantic Wiki extension, giving the site many more wonderful abilities and features. A featured article system was implemented, showcasing great items that users had placed on the site.
The Tavern was closed in 2009 due to server limitations, and a general lack of both moderators and activity. As a result, all discussion on the wiki moved to talk pages and the discussion section.
In 2011, the D&D Wiki Facebook page was created in secrecy by a shadowy order of to-this-day unnamed users, and passed down in silence until 2016, when management was handed over to a decidedly less-shadowy order of D&D Wiki administrators.
A complex series of social conflicts in 2012 resulted in a factioning of the community, followed by the rise of multiple competing spinoff wikis, splintering the wiki-based D&D homebrewing community on the internet forever. D&D Wiki, as the largest and most active of this type of website, remains the top search result when seeking D&D homebrew on the internet, even on multiple search engines, and even outcompeting the official WotC Dungeon Master's Guild, which offers its users the opportunity to make a profit off of their work!
Content for Pathfinder and 5th edition were introduced in 2014.
In 2015, the WotC message boards, the hotbed of creativity which spawned this very wiki, were shut down by WotC. This action occurred because it became apparent that other communities on the internet had exceeded their capacity to discuss the subject of Dungeons and Dragons effectively, and that maintaining what amounted to a link-hub to other websites was not cost-effective. It is entirely possible that D&D Wiki, along with other communities like it, may have contributed to this unfortunate event. This was followed a few months later by the opening of the Dungeon Master's Guild.
In 2016, D&D Wiki saw a massive outpouring of negative opinions on the D&D reddit community. This came from a general decline in article quality, as established users moved on to do other things with their lives, leaving the wiki with too small of a community to effectively manage itself. In the wake of this event, several users began a series of projects to bring in more users, and make the wiki an easier place to do great things. Among other things, standardized design guides were made for each type of content for every edition, unwritten rules were written, and the help portal and help pages were revised to be clear, organized, and useful.
D&D Wiki Wiki has over 50,000 pages. The sites success is shown in the fact that its been viewed over 75 million times, and the wiki is considered one of the top 75 thousand American websites by Alexa. The dandiki community is composed of over 6,000 registered users. High profile gamers such as Wil Wheaton, Vin Diesel, and Kevin Smith have all linked to articles on D&D Wiki while discussing gaming.
Like all communities, D&D Wiki has seen its share of ups and downs, but has always pulled through as one of the pivot-points of the online D&D homebrewing community. The future is always impossible to predict, but D&D Wiki is still striving to provide a place where gamers may come to learn about the game, find material for their games, submit their own creations, or to be a part of a community of gaming enthusiasts.
