Equestripedia

Equestripedia is a MediaWiki-based website founded on December 31st, 2017 by Jordan "Darkanine" DeHart. The site was originally founded on August 20th, 2017 on Wikia as "MLP IDW Wiki" and later moved to new domain on December 31st, 2017, renamed to "Equestripedia". The site runs MediaWiki 1.31 and currently runs extensions used to help emulate Wikia's functionality.

As of 2019, the wiki currently has over 6,000 articles dedicated to all manner of subjects about My Little Pony and related series.

Origins
Equestripedia was originally founded on FANDOM Wikia under the title "MLP IDW Comics 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 to finish 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, however. For the first few months of its creation, Equestripedia was notably disorganized with shabby infrastructure and content.

Revamp
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. Infoboxes were slimmed down. 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.

Domain shift
In 2018, Equestripedia moved to a different domain in order to work out problems caused with a bad installation. The new domain currently runs a slightly older build of MediaWiki (1.29) in order to allow older functioning skins incomparable with the newest models to work. The new domain currently supports the "Social Tools" suite of software, allowing it to emulate several functions akin to Wikia's farming software.

Content
Equestripedia intends to be an encyclopedia of the My Little Pony brand and thus tries to include articles, or at least sections of articles, dedicated to every subject, no matter how minor. To a lesser extent, Equestripedia attempts to be a knowledge bank of real world information regarding the people who work on My Little Pony and other Hasbro and IDW properties that have some connection to the series, such as crossovers or other loose connections.

Style
Equestripedia articles are, for the most part, written in a in-universe perspective, similarly to Memory Alpha or Scoobypedia. However, given the many inconsistencies and debates over what is and isn't canon within the series (see canon policy), the use of out-of-universe writing to potentially clear up or describe these problems can be used.

Canon policy
Given how big and long-lasting the Friendship is Magic and Equestria Girls series are, many pieces of merchandise have popped up over the years, such as comics, manga, and books. As more and more of these secondary and tertiary stories are published, the more murky the canon to Friendship is Magic tends to be, with some stories even retelling others, but changing events dramatically (such as Leave the Dresses to Rarity! and The Best Night Ever!).

Because of this, Equestripedia's policy towards canon is that it doesn't really matter. Works that contradict other storylines, such as the Canterlot High Stories series of novels and various IDW storyline (most notably stories like neigh anything... and The Fall of Sunset Shimmer) are still "counted" as sources for information, but information that contradicts the main series are noted as such.

Equestripedia for the most part goes off the idea that the IDW comics are their own parallel continuity to excuse the various differences, similar to how tfwiki.net uses "continuity families" to explain why some series are similar, but not the same. The wiki also goes off the notion that My Little Pony, or at least the comics, are probably canon to the Hasbro universe, given a small handful of crossovers and several references.

Achievements
As of February 2019, Equestripedia has over 2,700 articles, though a bug involving a botched content import makes it appear to be over 3,100. This makes Equestripedia the third largest known My Little Pony wiki in terms of article count. In terms of content size, it is likely considerably lower. It has two active editors.

Stories
Story articles, such as episodes, comics, books, etc are generally organized in the following format:
 * Publishers summary: For books and comics, used exclusively for official summaries by publishers
 * Story: A section dedicated to the plot of the episode.
 * Appearances: A comprehensive list of all the subjects that appear in a story, such as characters, places, objects, etc.
 * World building: A section for continuity and lore introduced or expanded upon.
 * Music: A list of songs featured in the story.
 * Notes: Notes and minor facts that don't fit anywhere else.
 * References: A list of references.

Characters
Character articles tend to be organized as such:
 * History: A history of the character, written in-universe.
 * Personal life: Information regarding how the character lives.
 * Personality: The characters personality, hobbies, traits, interests, etc.
 * Abilities: A list of their skills, powers, abilities and talents
 * Behind the scenes: Real world information regarding them.
 * Appearances: A list of their appearances in stories
 * References: A list of references.

Characters use whatever designation editors can find for them, such as their names, nicknames, titles or even fan names if they have no official name.

This style is repeated for most in-universe subjects, such as places, objects, species, etc.

Characters are often split among the continuities they appear within, so for example, a character who appears in the cartoon, IDW comic books and Pucchigummi manga series gets three articles for each of their incarnations. This also goes for cross-generational characters, so Tirek in Rescue at Midnight Castle has a different article than Tirek in Friendship is Magic.

People
As information for some people is sparse, person articles rarely follow a particular format and are often just a small amount of information or a mini-biography along with credited works or why they're notable for the franchise, such as writing pieces on the series.

Social media
Equestripedia has an Twitter account and a Tumblr account. The latter is intended for news updates regarding the state of the site while the latter tends to be more lighthearted and tongue-in-cheek. It is planned to eventually start up a YouTube channel that discusses aspects of the Pony universe.

Spin-off sites
In the early days, Equestripedia attempted to launch a spin-off based off the Friendship is Magic the comic series, but it was quickly abandoned and absorbed into Equestripedia proper. A planned spin-off was known as "Derpypedia", which was to be a fanon wiki but the idea was tossed due to being redundant with the presence of the My Little Pony Fan Wiki.

In the December of 2018, Equestripedia launched its first spin-off site, Hildapedia, a wiki dedicated to the Hilda franchise.

In the June of 2019, Equestripedia founded CIWA, or Cartoon Independent Wiki Alliance, which is intended to be a series of wikis akin to NIWANetwork, though no real progress has been made.