HRWiki:A History
From Homestar Runner Wiki
The history of the Homestar Runner Wiki.
Contents |
Overview
The beginnings and early days
In November 2002, a mutual friend emailed Joey Day and Stu Wilde a link to Strong Bad email #51, website, knowing they would enjoy it since they are both web-design hobbyists. This was the first time they had experienced Homestar Runner, and both of them were immediately hooked.
Nearly a year later in September 2003, Joey stumbled across Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. He immediately fell in love with the concept and decided to start a wiki of his own. After researching the various wiki platforms available at the time, he settled on one called WikiTikkiTavi because it used a MySQL database and produced valid XHTML markup. He hadn't given much thought to scalability at the time, preferring something light and snappy over the larger and more stable platforms like Twiki, Moin Moin, or MediaWiki.
After installing the software on October 7, 2003, Joey decided he needed a topic. It didn't take him long to decide it should be a Homestar Runner knowledge base. After Googling to make sure no one had already set up such a thing, he promptly called his wiki the Homestar Runner Wiki.
In the first couple weeks Joey transcribed a few emails, starting with mile, but then life crept in and he was unable to do much more. It took nearly two months for anyone else to discover the Wiki, but slowly and surely people began shuffling in. hawk and Maz were the first users to create UserSpaces, and when Stu heard there were people on the Wiki he decided to set up his own UserSpace. JamesGecko was the first user to contribute significant content.
"I remember when there was nothing here but a transcript for the Strong Bad Email Mile, done by none other than yours truly. I about fell off my chair when I opened up StrongBadEmail one day to find that every email had been listed with a link to its own page. I about fell off my chair again when I opened it up a month later to discover that every email had been transcribed!" — Joey Day (WikiChat/OldTimersClub).
The start of year two
The start of year three
Goals for the future
Important additions
STUFF
First attempt
Overhaul
Featured articles
Da Basement
Da Basement is a place for administrators and sysops to congregate and discuss important issues that involve the wiki. These discussions range from new page ideas to formating and template changes to the content of the wiki. Although Da Basement is intended for sysops, anyone is allowed to contribute.
The page originaly started out with the name "Sysop water-cooler". Several users posted ideas for new titles. The title Da Basement, posted by FireBird, became the new name. This originated from Arcade Game.
The Stick
The Stick is the community center of the wiki. It has links to all the commitees, the community projects, and more, and it's the best place to go if you want to help the wiki, vote on STUFF'd articles, etc.
Recent changes patrol
Recent changes patrol is a HRWiki committee that searches Recent Changes for red exlamation points (!). This crew patrols the wiki every time an edit has been made. This patrol is the Wiki's first line of defense. If anyone were to make an edit that is false, mispelled, or malicous, a user from the Recent Changes Patrol will revert that edit. Although any logged-in user is allowed to patrol, they are encouraged to join the committee if they do.
Welcoming committee
The Welcoming committee is a group of users who welcome new users to the Wiki. These messages are added to the new user's talk page. These messages are meant not only to help the new user out as they get started, but to also make them feel more at home. Generally, welcome messages tend to include links to several helpful articles and pages, including the "Help" section and the MediaWiki user's guide. Anyone is allowed to join the committee.
The Welcoming committee was created on October 7, 2004 by FireBird after a (brief) discussion with Tom.
Important upgrades
Wiki Tiki Tavi
MediaWiki 1.3
Around June 2004, it was becoming apparent that 'Tavi would no longer be able to handle the amount of traffic the Wiki was experiencing, and the admin team begain researching alternatives. On July 16, 2004, MediaWiki 1.3 was installed on the server at beta.hrwiki.org. It was secretly developed under the name "Experimental Wiki" for nearly two months and released in late August, 2004.
MediaWiki 1.4
The Wiki was upgraded to MediaWiki 1.4 on April 3, 2005.
MediaWiki 1.5
On 9 October 2005, the wiki upgraded to MediaWiki 1.5. This added many new options to the wiki, not the least of which was the Move Log, which lists all the pages that have been moved. This addition was particularly useful for combatting the page-move vandal Willy on Wheels.
However, the 1.5 upgrade also had a few bugs in it. One disabled all usernames starting with a lowercase initial. Such users then had to change their name formally to continue editing the wiki. Another bug is one that automatically adds a user's talk page to their watchlist, thus causing a permanent stay of the "New Messages" alert. Neither of these issues have been resolved as of yet.
Administration and maintenance
Early administration
The 'Tavi software didn't have much in the way of administrative features. There was password-protected admin area that allowed a user to lock and unlock pages and block and unblock IPs. At first JoeyDay was the only one with access to that page, but Stu was given access sometime in late 2003. Before the Wiki was upgraded to MediaWiki, Tom and InterruptorJones were also given administrator access.
When the Wiki was upgraded to MediaWiki 1.3 on July 16, 2004, the original group of bureaucrats/sysops consisted of InterruptorJones, JoeyDay, Stu, Tom. The Wiki continued to grow, and on (or just before) December 21, 2004, AgentSeethroo, who had contributed greatly to the migration, was given bureaucrat/sysop privileges.
On February 5, 2005, the decision was made to begin utilizing the tiered permissions system of the MediaWiki software. On that date, Drhaggis and FortyTwo were given sysop priveleges, but they weren't given bureaucrat privileges or made part of the Admin Team.
April 2005 sysop nominations
In April 2005, the Wiki held its first sysop nominations. The nomination process was simple: once a nomination was made, several users posted their thoughts on who would be the best choice, though all the final decisions were made by the Admin Team. On April 25, 2005, the following users were accepted and given sysop privileges: FireBird, Furrykef, Jay, Kilroy, and Thunderbird L17. Additionally, The Paper became a sysop on April 27 and Homestar Coder on April 29.
Later additions
On September 9, 2005, two other sysops were added: BazookaJoe and It's dot com. On November 16 of the same year, two bots, GrapeNuts and Valerie (owned by JoeyDay and Tom respectively), were made sysops for purposes of convenience, and It's dot com was made a bureaucrat and a part of the Admin Team on November 21.
Infamous vandals
Willy on Wheels
Willy on Wheels, or WoW for short, is a single or several persistent vandals. He began attacking the English Wikipedia, and then moved on to most of the rest of the languages, as well as other wikis. The vast majority of his efforts center on Wikipedia and, to a lesser extent, the Wikimedia sister projects. The only non Wikimedia wikis that WoW has ever attacked and reported are Wiki Cities, Travel Wiki, the Uncyclopedia, Wiki Info, and the heaviest hit, the HRWiki. His tactics are not similar to those of most other trolls and vandals, in that he uses only high-speed page move vandalism as his weapon. He first attacked the wiki in the summer of 2005, and has popped up somewhat frequently ever since. His method involved registering a username, opening a random page in several tabbed browsers, setting them up to move, and then rapidly executing the move before the username is blocked. It's impossible to know whether this is the work of one person or several copycats, but our WoW seems to originate with an AOL account. His vandalism is serious, but it's mostly just annoying compared to the more recent threat, NSMC.
NSMC
NSMC is a vandalbot that has caused widespread damage to several wikis. Its method of operation exploits various access points available to anonymous users. As a result, these access points have been temporarily disabled. In its first attack, it anonymously and randomly vandalized by replacing their contents with "N— stole my bike" and later "N— stole my cow". To avoid being blocked, the bot uses a vast amount of Internet proxies so that it can appear to originate from hundreds of IP addresses. The number of pages affected was in such a small amount of time that it created a denial of service. Later, when anonymous editing had been disabled, the bot created hundreds of random usernames with "NSMC" plus a number, each with one edit, so new-user registration was taken offline. After the knowlegde base was hit, then it moved to the Fanstuff. The usernames eventually became just random numbers approximately 20 characters in length, and the content of the vandalism changed from something static that we could search for to various bits of actual content. In the latest attack, the "email new password" feature of the user login page was abused, sending thousands of emails to various users. The identity of the vandal is not currently known, nor is the motive.
Spinoffs
Forum
Fanstuff
The Fanstuff wiki was created on November 24, 2004. Originally, when the old wiki was still around, the fanstuff articles and the knowledge base articles were kept on the same wiki. As the wiki grew, however, it became obvious that the Fanstuff needed its own space.
The Fanstuff wiki is for storing fanstuff users have created. They can write Other Character Emails, provide links to fanstuff animations they've done, or even write adventure stories about certain characters.
The Fanstuff, unlike the knowledge base, will let people create new pages, as long as they're related to Homestar Runner somehow. Naturally, seeing as the sky's the limit, the fanstuff has many more articles then the knowledge base. However, the knowledge base has more users; about 3000 more than the fanstuff.
IRC channel
The HRWiki Internet Relay Chat channel was created on 18 May 2005 by Tom Preuss, as nickname Tom39. Although its name, #hrwiki, and parent wiki both suggest that the topic would be kept strictly to Homestar related material, the atmosphere is calm and friendly. Language is kept at a PG level and personal attacks are not tolerated to keep the chat channel this way. Currently, this channel is kept in check by five of the six members of the Admin Team, JoeyDay, Tom, Stu, InterruptorJones, and It's dot com. On 7 September 2005, the Fanstuff wiki IRC channel, #hrwiki-fanstuff, was founded. This is a sightly looser and less constructed atmosphere for those who choose it, just as its parent wiki.
The IRC channel is a faster, more group-oriented, yet still annonymous way to communicate with fellow wiki users, as opposed to using talk pages.
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