Avatar Wiki:About

From Avatar Wiki, the Avatar: The Last Airbender database

Avatar Wiki
Website information
Owner	Wikia, Inc.
Formed	15 July 2005
Purpose	An information source on Avatar: The Last Airbender A site for fans to enjoy
Admins	(Active): Energybender Joeyaa Omnibender Thailog The 888th Avatar

Avatar Wiki is a wiki dedicated to Avatar: The Last Airbender, the live-action movies based on that series, and any possible series of Avatar in the future.

The goals of Avatar Wiki are:

1. To cover every character, location, bending art, creature and event in the Avatar world in an encyclopedic way. Real world subjects such as voice actors for Avatar characters and the movie trilogy are also covered. Everyone is encouraged to help and add everything they know. This is a wiki, and all wikis can be edited by anyone. You can help out now!
2. To create a site where fans can come together and share their views and their theories on the Avatar shows and movies. The exact nature of this goal is currently under heavy development and discussion. We have however expanded the forums for this purpose.

Contents 1 History 2 Who Can I Ask For Help? 3 Useful Links 4 Navigation

[edit] History

Avatar Wiki was founded on the 15th of July, 2005, by Howabout1. In its early days, as with most other wikis, Avatar Wiki lacked technical expertise, meaning that there were very few templates and images available, resulting in largely disorganized pages that lacked infoboxes, messages and screenshots from the show. The wiki also did not have large editing base, resulting in a abnormally large amount of vandalism. Until October 2007, more than two years after the wiki's founding, there were never more than ten users who had edited in any given month.

Even so, there were a few users who gave the wiki its foundation in content, such as Firelord Sunny, and later Greekpimp, the latter of which soon became the largest contributor to the wiki at the time.

Until 2007, The only bureaucrat was Howabout, and there were only two administrators, Howabout himself and Wack'd About Wiki (the promotion of whom has always been subject to a great deal of confusion and controversy due to his meager 45 edits), and there was no need for more due to the small editing base. However, because Howabout was largely inactive, he appointed a second administrator to oversee Avatar Wiki, choosing Greekpimp to fulfil this role. Howabout later also promoted Greekpimp to the position of bureaucrat in addition to his administrative position.

By the end of 2007, however, the wiki was experiencing a rapid growth in users. (Interestingly, this coincided with the beginning of the third season, though there is no evidence that this had any effect.) In the last three months of 2007, the number of users more than quadrupled. This had a beneficial impact on the wiki, and the number of articles doubled in the same period.

In the first half of 2008, Avatar Wiki underwent drastic changes as the wiki's editing base expanded rapidly. Zero2001 created a large series of navigation templates. The main page had a complete visual overhaul, courtesy of the work of ChaosMaster16. The number of template messages and infoboxes increased rapidly, and relatively new users such as TLane, Puragus and Omnibender made thousands of contributions altogether to the content of the wiki.

As a result of the wiki's continual expansion (and Greekpimp's gradual decline into inactivity), the newly active Howabout decided to appoint new administrators, initially promoting Omnibender and opening a page, Project:Requests for Adminship to allow users to apply so that he could appoint further admins. As a result of this opening, Howabout appointed a total of five admins, who aside from Omnibender were Zero2001, Felinoel, Avatar Sanders and Puragus.

As editing declined after the series finale in July 2008, infighting began to occur among users on the wiki. Heated arguments over decisions and policy broke out between two administrators, Zero and Felinoel, resulting in a ban on posting on each other's discussions, enforced by Howabout. However, the most notable spat occurred between Kevin5593 (later "KevinAvatar") and other users, who rightfully accused him of disruption, vandalism and an inability to stay quiet, resulting in his infinite ban from editing in September, which was discussed here. At the same time, there was a considerable uproar as two users attempted to create wikis for Avatar movies and for further Avatar series, which would essentially be duplicates. The duplicates were redirected here after discussion.

A small spike of renewed growth occurred in the last two months of 2008, with the joining of a few new users and the end of a period of infighting. Howabout decided that he would enter a long spell of inactivity, and appointed Omnibender to be the wiki's third bureaucrat. At the end of January 2009, rollback rights were issued for the first time, to four users. However, at the same time, a number of administrators became inactive, necessitating the opening of Requests for Adminship in February 2009. This resulted in the appointment of a further three new administrators, The 888th Avatar, Energybender and Joeyaa.

At the same time, Avatar Wiki underwent another visual overhaul, and a new skin, created by Thailog has been applied to the wiki. Shortly after this, quote pages and userboxes became allowed on the site for the first time. A new quality standard of articles, A-class Articles, was introduced, and large content contributors such as Dcasawang1, Vaznock and SuperFlash101 were some of the first members of its Council. Later on, the wiki experienced large amounts of vandalism and Requests for Rollback were opened, increasing the number of Rollback users. Towards the end of April 2009, user blogs were released to the wiki. Coinciding with the release of user blogs, a newspaper containing information on both the series and the wiki itself was created, and The 888th Avatar, SuperFlash101, and Vaznock became the paper's editors.

Over the course of May 2009, an initial complaint over admin conduct spilled over into several large discussions about the wiki's policy regarding admins: how they are chosen, where they are allowed to interact and guidelines regarding their conduct. These large discussions resulted in sweeping changes. Admins would be elected by the community, with final promotion at the discretion of a bureaucrat. The admin-only talk page would be abolished. Guidelines for admin conduct were written. A related discussion was about how featured articles were chosen. This quickly resulted in a resolution to have a monthly vote to choose featured articles.

Large changes continued on into June, with the creation of the Arbitration Committee, and the election of two users to join the bureaucrat on the committee. On a forum, a decision was made to desysop all inactive admins, leaving only Energybender, Joeyaa, Omnibender, Puragus and The 888th Avatar with admin rights. Taking this into consideration, Requests for Bureaucratship was opened for the first time, with The 888th Avatar elected as a bureaucrat.

Another change - arguably the biggest in Avatar Wiki history - occured at the end of June, when it was decided through an exhaustive forum and continual lobbying that Avatar Wiki and Avatar Fanon Wiki would merge by creating a custom user rights group, "fanonadmin", and placing all fanon on one particular namespace, "Fanon:", which would be complimented by a new skin for the fanon namespace to mark the two sides of the site visually. This merger started on 26 June and was refined over the next month.

Thailog and Joeyaa became an admin and a bureaucrat respectively in early August.

[edit] Who Can I Ask For Help?

The following users are active or semi-active (they have edited recently) and hold positions of rollback or above. They are experienced and can be consulted if you need help.

Bureaucrats: Joeyaa (talk · contribs · editcount · logs · block log) Omnibender (talk · contribs · editcount · logs · block log) The 888th Avatar (talk · contribs · editcount · logs · block log) Administrators: Energybender (talk · contribs · editcount · logs · block log) Thailog (talk · contribs · editcount · logs · block log) Fanon Administrators: SuperFlash101 (talk · contribs · editcount · logs · block log) Vaznock (talk · contribs · editcount · logs · block log) Waterkai (talk · contribs · editcount · logs · block log) Zukofan123 (talk · contribs · editcount · logs · block log)

Rollback: Avatar Junky (talk · contribs · editcount · logs · block log) Dcasawang1 (talk · contribs · editcount · logs · block log) Mattkenn3 (talk · contribs · editcount · logs · block log) Puragus (talk · contribs · editcount · logs · block log) The avatar (talk · contribs · editcount · logs · block log) The Bos (talk · contribs · editcount · logs · block log) Twilitlink (talk · contribs · editcount · logs · block log)

[edit] Useful Links

About Us | Community Portal | Forums | Current Votes | Newsletter | Recent Changes | New Pages | Policy | Admins | Images | Categories | Templates | Blogs | Help