User:Amelia Lonelyheart/sandbox

Equestripedia is a MediaWiki based website founded on December 31st, 2017 by Jordan "Darkanine" DeHart, though had its origins as far back as August 2017.

Origins
Equestripedia was originally founded on FANDOM Wikia under the title "MLP IDW wiki", as the name implied, it was originally intended to be exclusively geared towards the MLP IDW comics and stuff found within them such as story arcs, characters and locations. The concept of the wiki was inspired when Jordan began to re-read the IDW comics and realized the first handful of arcs aged wonderfully. Shortly later, the site was renamed to My Little Comic Database and expanded its scope to the non-IDW MLP comics published in Europe, the Manga series in Japan and Generation 1 comics. The site also grew to include books, novels and even magazines, but given the hard-to-find nature of some of these items, not much came of it.

Complications and a new identity
As time went on, complications grew. Realizing that the articles on the site wouldn't really make sense if they were just comic based, Jordan decided to expand the focus to also cover the cartoon series but later realized this complicated their scope greatly. After consideration, the name of the site was briefly changed to Encyclopedia Equestrianica as a reference to Encyclopedia Britannica but as this was hard to stuff in the logo, the much simpler Equestripedia was chosen, inspired by Wookiepedia, the Star Wars wiki. However, this caused somewhat of an identity crisis which lead to the creation of the short lived Ponypedia wiki and a brief attempt to migrate to the IDW wiki. However after a week, it was agreed to simply return to the wikia site and finishing what we started.

Going independent and moving pains
After a failed attempt at buying a pet Canary, Jordan decided to use his leftover funds to jumpstart his attempt at running Equestripedia as an independent wiki not bound by FANDOM wikia rules and regulations and as an attempt to try and stand out and not look like a potential copycat wiki. The new wiki was meant to be a clean skate of sorts, carrying over all the experiences he learned from running Equestripedia on Wikia while starting anew.

This didn't pan out as planned. After hosting the site, Jordan felt that he "bit off more than he could chew" and the site was left dormant in its first few days, only haing a small handful of articles and a logo made up. Not wanting to feel like he wasted money, Jordan still edited on the site out of obligation and the quality of his work showed. Articles were simply being imported and created without care to inflate the article number count to appear more impressive than it really was.

"Revival" and current days
In the March of 2018, an attempt to revitalize the wiki was put in place. Over 1,100 stub articles were deleted and what little articles remained were given much more care. Since then, the site grew from having a net total of just under 100 articles to having over 400 articles. Most features on the site were heavily revised as well, comic and episode navigation was made easier by utilizing a top navigation bar and infoboxes were heavily redesigned, going from big, bulky boxes to smaller, less buggy and easier to use boxes.

Several other concepts and features were updated in this time as well. The MediaWiki software was updated to 1.30 rather than the outdated 1.23 and several excessive articles were deleted to clean up the mainspace clog. As of April 2018, the last major feature added was a LUA based Tab system was implemented as well, which made switching between different versions of articles much easier, as well as made organization and planning easier for the editors.

Future plans
Outside of general expansion, Equestripedia doesn't have much in the game of plans for the future. Once an effort to finish basic articles on most notable characters is finished, the next major project planned is to fill out articles for the episodes, though this is slated to be a monumental task. In the distant future, it is planned to clean up the codebase of the site and to fix its script pathing issues, however doing this without causing problems has been difficult in the past.