User blog:Cosmicsilver/History of the Dark Souls Wiki

Hey all, I was bored, so I decided I'd compile a blog detailing the history of this Wiki. This blog will not cover any drama that unfolded in chat, because that's just silly stuff. Instead it will cover the major times of the Wiki and what caused it to be the awesome thing it is today.

In the beginning, there was DS-Stooge who, unbeknownst to many, is the founder of this Wiki. He didn't do anything, and so the Wiki ended up how many Wikis do when they're abandoned by their founder: really bad. But then, there was fire! I mean, Fingyer. There was Fingyer, and with Fingyer came some good edits! Dark Souls references aside, Fingyer came by and found this Wiki, alone and Admin/Crat-less. So he went to the Community Central gods and asked to adopt the Wiki, and adopt it he did! Under Fingyer, stuff started getting done.

Our Dark Souls content started getting some character, and the page quality went up, especially with the addition to the Wiki in the form of Brainwasher5, who took the Wiki and really helped turn it around. After a while of Brain and Fingyer working together, an Orc came along from the far off land of The Elder Scrolls Wiki, a Patroller there at the time, and helped us create countless vital templates for our pages. His name was that of The Gourmet himself, Balagog gro-Nolob. Brain and Balagog made a pretty epic tag team, Brain taking page content and turning it around, and Balagog making the Wiki look fantastic. The Wiki took off from there, and soon enough, we were becoming a legitimate source of information for Dark Souls.

After about a year, new faces started arriving, and a community began fostering itself. In the span of 5 months, three new users showed up who would ultimately become Administrators for the Wiki, "calvary to the rescue" as described by Brain. Those people were, in order of arrival: Cosmicsilver, Volknur, and Daifukkatsu. Fun fact of trivia, all three of those users joined on the 17th of their respective month. Cosmic, Volknur, and Daifu all proved to be invaluable editors to the Wiki, helping the Admins at the time (Fingyer, Balagog, and Brain) to really bring our Dark Souls content up, and before we knew it, we hit 1000 pages on the Wiki, a huge milestone for a Wiki that had been totally barren just two years earlier.

In early 2013, the Wiki chat started being used by users, and it really helped in fostering this growing community. We saw a lot of users come and go, too many to name, but very few gave us trouble in the chat. Overall, the chat has always been an amazing place for people to hang out and discuss anything, not just Dark Souls. In mid 2013, we were hit with the announcement of Dark Souls II, which was a huge deal, since this Wiki was starting to reach a point where our Dark Souls content was really good, and we had the ability to start editing pages for the upcoming game. Major drama unfolded in the chat in early 2014, but that will not be discussed in detail here, it should just be said that it resulted in the Chat Rules being created by Cosmic.

With Dark Souls II coming out in just a couple months, the Wiki hit a jump in activity. Many new users who had heard about the Souls series through the announcement of Dark Souls II started joining the Wiki. In March 2014 when Dark Souls II came out, the Wiki saw the biggest jump in activity it had ever seen, unfortunately this did not last though. In the months after Dark Souls II released, activity staggered, and most of our Admins went inactive, leaving only Volknur for a while. Unfinished projects from Dark Souls stacked on top of countless projects from Dark Souls II and the structure of editors collapsed. We had a lot of people come through, make a couple edits, and leave. And we were stuck in this sort of a rut for a while, but then we hit a surge of editors. User:Zelron, User:Billy Ho XBL, and User:Jimeee to name a few.

The quality of edits increased in that time, however that did not last. In the past few months, most of our most dedicated editors have gone largely inactive. This does not mean that the Wiki is doomed to be stuck in this rut of inactivity, though, as it has always gotten out in the past. The activity of the community has not decreased, just the editing activity has. And so, that brings us to where we are today: An awesome Wiki with an awesome community of awesome people. Thank you ALL for being a part of it, big or small, and thank you for any contributions you make to the Wiki.