From Halopedia, the Halo Wiki
About the Author
Hi, I'm Ryan, but I prefer to be called by my username, Dragonclaws. As the name may suggest, I'm somewhat of a fantasy geek. Although, right now I'd call myself a Halo geek. I am one the admins and I was one of the original users of Halopedia.I'm a weirdo and I take pleasure in the fact. I have a love of color, probably caused by my weak eyesight. The beauty of the world around me when I first got glasses was... staggering. You might notice many of my descriptions of things begin with color. I dream of ships as vibrant as sunset and people who change color expressively. Color... me like.
I frequently daydream of fantastic worlds. I tend to spend more time in my imagination than in real life, like Pan's Labyrinth without the freaky stuff. So, you know, nothing like Pan's Labyrinth. Maybe Bridge to Terabithia is a better example.
I am very often (like, every day) taken for a girl. This is likely due to my out-of-shape body's fat obscuring the edges of my face, as well as my use of jewelry (rings, necklace, bracelets) and long hair and fingernails. I also have very light, fine body hair and my voice never deepened that much, though I still can't replicate the Velociraptor screech like I used to. I don't really mind, though. Most guys would, but it occurs to me that they must not have a very high opinion of girls in general then.
I have been diagnosed with Asperger syndrome (high-functioning autism), a potential explanation for some of my weirdness.
Quote of the whenever:
"They wish to cure us, but I say, we are the cure!" --Magneto, X-Men: The Last Stand
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Remember, Remember
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The fourth of November. Today is an auspicious holiday. No, not Unity Day. Four years ago to the day, Halopedia (known then as Halo Wiki) was founded by AgentSeethroo five days before the release of Halo 2 as an offshoot of the website of his clan, the Black Box Republic. It’s come a long way since its first humble beginnings.
I first joined the site in early December, 2004 after seeing a link someone posted in Wikipedia’s Halo: Combat Evolved article’s external links section. Back then, the wiki was exceptionally bare, with only three real users: AgentSeethroo, Buz, and Porplemontage, of whom only AgentSeethroo seemed committed. I helped out as best as I could, becoming the first recurrent user who was not initially invited by the founder. Probably the best help the wiki had in the early days was given by a user named Wheresthebrain, who popped in just for a moment, declared the wiki in need of serious work, added help pages, and fixed up the stubs (before him, Master Chief was one line I wrote about him being born as John).
In the next few months, the wiki built up a shallow community of various people who would come in every so often to make a few edits and then come back in a week or so. AgentSeethroo viewed it as a successful and exciting project, and so decided to create a master wiki that would include absolutely everything about video games. Because he would be busy with the Video Game Wiki, he asked me in April, 2005 if I would help him out as a sysop on Halo Wiki. As my only experience thus far had been administrating “Nogard’s Pokémon Board”, I was kind of uncertain, but decided to give it a shot.
Though Halo Wiki wasn’t too poor in its user count, the average mainstream Halo sites had never heard of it. So, it happened that a user named PEZ came up with a very similar idea and created another wiki with the same name, albeit with a different focus. PEZ, however, had the foresight to submit an ad to his wiki on Bungie.net, prompting a great storm of members and establishing his wiki as the “Halo Wiki” everyone knew. In the wake of these events, AgentSeethroo renamed his wiki to “Halopedia”, based on “Wikipedia”, and moved it to www.halopedia.org. Later in February, 2006, I suggested that we post a similar ad on Bungie.net and had a user (who wishes to remain anonymous) write one up, which I then sent in, causing a new popularity we were barely able to deal with (in a good way). Ironically, several users assumed we were ripping off PEZ’s idea and sent us flames, when in actuality we had existed for over a year before his Halo Wiki (not that I’m bitter, no siree…).
Posting on Bungie.net was the thing to do. Six days later, the Tahlequah Daily Press published an article on the popularity of Halo 2 and included a brief mention of Halopedia. We were officially famous, if but for fifteen scarce minutes.
However, fame gave us our own problems. With the great number of users accessing the site daily, bandwidth became a serious issue. The site would constantly go down, sometimes for several days at a time. Halopedia needed money to support its server, as much as $150 per month. AgentSeethroo set up a donation doohickey on the site to help keep it afloat, but Halo fans are not the most generous with their generally limited funds and understandably provided no monetary support.
Our bandwidth problems, however, did not stop our traffic entirely. At certain times, Halopedia was easily accessible and proved a useful resource. After the release of the Halo 3 announcement trailer, we received fifteen more brief minutes in the spotlight. Navy Times, an online newspaper dedicated to the United States Navy, posted an article (which has, unfortunately, been consumed) on Halo 3, in which they urged their readers to check out Halopedia. We basked in the glow of fame once more… But we still had problems.
People wanted a stable resource, and so began copying articles off Halopedia and onto the rival site halo.wikia.com. Wikia’s Halo wiki (also called Halo Wiki) had been created on June 15th, 2005, by Akashe, who likely had no idea of Halopedia’s existence, but the site quickly faded into disuse before it could get far. Now in 2006, Esemono had restarted the site to serve as a replacement for failing Halopedia and was copying Halopedia articles to the mostly bare wiki.
We were fairly annoyed at this, and considered complaining. However, in late July, Halopedia imploded. That is, it went offline for weeks. Using the message board, hosted on a separate site, myself and other Halopedians communicated with Porplemontage, who was handling the technical side while AgentSeethroo was away dealing with his own life and not answering his email. Porplemontage contacted Esemono on Wikia and they came to an agreement to transfer the wiki and its community to Wikia. He brought the site back up under the temporary address of old.halopedia.org, and we set out to copy all the articles to our new home on Wikia. However, before we could transfer everything, AgentSeethroo, who must have misunderstood Porplemontage’s messages, deleted www.halopedia.org, forcing us to remake some pages.
As we recovered, our once animosity with our rival Halo Wiki ended with a blog post of theirs. When PEZ’s Halo Wiki first became popular, our Halo Wiki became nervous. Here was another wiki, a newbie, with exactly our name and tons more members than we ever had, and even got recognition from the greatest Halo fansite there is: halo.bungie.org. As far as we were concerned, it was an enemy to be fought with… more advertisement! Seriously though, it made us nervous because it threatened to undermine everything we had worked on for over a year and replace us in the Halo community.
That changed on July 31st, 2006, when Sigafoos, one of Halo Wiki’s members, posted a blog noting a brief mention of “the other Halo wiki” on their weekly podcast. He cleared up that Halo Wiki’s official position was in favor of Halopedia, noting that our respective aims are quite different. Halo Wiki serves as a “Halo multiplayer knowledge repository” while Halopedia acts as a “definitive source for Halo information”, one for improving gameplay skills and one for general knowledge with a focus on campaign. Soon after that, Halo Wiki and Halopedia were declared sister sites and linked to each other. Halopedians heaved a big sigh of relief.
Porplemontage’s last real act had been in moving Halopedia to Wikia, for which we were grateful, but he did not continue to maintain the wiki as an active administrator. AgentSeethroo had gone AWOL, same as the long gone Akashe, and Buz stopped posting way back in December, 2004, leaving only myself and the Wikia-appointed Esemono. I then sysoped the most active user we had – ED.
However, we were unusual in that we kept the weird caste system taken from old.halopedia, as the old site came to be called. Back then, AgentSeethroo was in charge. He paid the bills; he owned the site; he was the guy you followed. I, as an admin, was not so much a partner as a loyal follower. Having arrived in the freer Wikia, I was… out of my element.
I wasn’t sure who was in charge. Was it Porple? Was it Esemono? I thought it was Porple… but he never posted anymore. Esemono was the only active admin of halo.wikia.com when we merged into it, so I sort of assumed that he was the leader. The thought that we could be at an equal level had flitted through my brain a few times, but it didn’t catch root until much later. ED kind of followed my lead because I’d been active the longest, thus reinforcing the caste concept in my mind.
Caught in this caste concept, I kind of treated the sysoping of users in a manner different from other Wikias. So, when the ambitious user RelentlessRecusant (then RelentlessRogue; both referred to as RR) started asking me about becoming an admin, I responded in a way based on my experiences at old.halopedia, which may not have been quite appropriate. I gave him a list of requirements consistent with my own adminization: aprox. 150 edits, three months, loyal history, the current administration being ill equipped to handle the wiki currently. All of this was appropriate when AgentSeethroo gave me sysop powers (“Sysop powers activate!”), but I didn’t realize until a bit later that it was inappropriate with the community in its then present state. As I noticed RR wasn’t at the time using the “preview” button very much, I later amended this to a “reasonable amount of edits.”
Sometime later, RR approached the admins once more. However, the weird caste thing was in effect. ED was kind of following my lead, and I was following Esemono, who didn’t trust RR for various reasons I won’t get into here. RR went to Wikia staff, who advised him to create a forum to get a vote from the community on whether or not he should be an admin, and on March 25th, 2007 the first RFA was started.
RR’s RFA was a long, drawn out process that lasted several months. While it was going on, RR coordinated with the Wikia staff to produce an April Fools’ Day joke that would live in infamy. As April 1st rolled ‘round, users would come on to the website to see a notice that Halopedia was secretly run by an evil cabal. The Cabal, of course, was run by RelentlessRecusant, who had assassinated RelentlessRogue and stolen his identity, and managed by the admins. You are, by the way, reading an article written by the Director of Counterinsurgency… *cough* *cough* Anyway, the word Cabal has now come to be associated with the admins as a kind of Halopedia slang, an in-joke.
On May 26th, 2007, I left town to attend my uncle’s wedding in Hawaii (very romantic, BTW). When I returned, Esemono had apparently vanished. Out of a need for admins, ED and I concluded RR’s RFA and brought him into our loyal order. (Okay, enough Cabal jokes.)
On June 4th, 2007, our fame became 45 minutes old (15 x 3). The Seattle Times published an article on Halo 3 hype, in which the author briefly describes surfing Halopedia.
Seven days later, however, KillerCRS pointed us to a site remembering the life of Nathan David Buzdor (our Buz), September 11th, 1977 – July 19th, 2006. He died at age 28 after a three-year-long fight with cancer.
…
I now feel bad that I sockpuppeteered his account to make Cabal jokes.
…
*sigh* I didn’t know him very well. He wasn’t too invested in the wiki, but I’d seen him around. He was definitely friends with AgentSeethroo, and they shared a love of Homestar Runner.
…
Anyway… The Halopedian community greatly benefitted from RR’s admining. He helped revamp the site to great improvement, installing various systems based on those present at Wookieepedia, the successful Star Wars wiki, and making Halopedia a bit more in line with the general Wikia community. After RR came Guesty-Persony-Thingy, Manticore, CommanderTony, Specops306, HaloDude, Simon rjh, Subtank, and most recently EwCDnaudee419. I can definitely say that Halopedia would not be as good as it is without the additional admins gained through RFAs.
On July 13th, 2007, our fame grew to a full hour long. Joystiq, a gaming blog popular enough to have its own Wikipedia article, credited us for the source of an image of John-117 hefting a Gravity Hammer, which was used in one of their blog articles. Coolness.
A few weeks before the release of Halo 3, we started preparing a contest hosted by Wikia in which users would compete for the highest amount of Halo 3-related edits following the release. When the game came out, our users began furiously editing and giving Halopedia good articles like Installation 00 before other fansites. Two weeks later, the winners were announced and the prizes, Bungie schwag, were sent out. Then we just played the game for fun.
On November 5th, 2007, a day after our anniversary, our fame became an awesome length of one hour and fifteen minutes. Christian Science Monitor published an article written by Jane McGonigal, the brains behind ilovebees, in which she briefly mentions Halopedia by name. I am awed.
Four days later, on November 9th, 2007, on the anniversary of Halo 2’s release, our fame’s lifespan was boosted even more as Halopedia was integrated into popular gaming website GameSpot. Both the Halo 3 and Halo Wars sections of the site were given “wiki” sections in which leads to five Halopedia Featured Articles are posted beneath a Halopedia search bar. Should a user enter Halopedia from GameSpot, they would view the site with accompanying internal GameSpot ads as opposed to Wikia internal and commercial ads that a user entering the site from its traditional Wikia address would see (the GameSpot version can be found through http://halo-gamespot.wikia.com). Unfortunately, the code that was supposed to have the FAs cycled through never really worked and FAs have to be changed by hand, meaning that it really hasn’t changed for the past few months. I don’t think Kamal Zaman’s ever been featured on GameSpot…
Anyway, Halopedia was given a serious makeover in late February, 2008, when Wikia updated the site to make it more of a social network similar to MySpace or Facebook. The userpages were revamped and each user given the ability to upload an avatar that would identify them in various places around the site. Blogs, polls, and quizzes were also added as new facets to the site. In addition, a point game was implemented in which users would actively attempt to acquire points that would lead to the advancement of their rank, a designation based on the naval system in much the way as Halo’s Xbox Live ranking system to acknowledge gamer skill, through being active on the site.
The game immediately gave Halopedia a tremendous influx of new users, as points could be gained through the act of inviting people to join the site. I could literally sit around refreshing the Recent Changes page and see more and more users crop up. However, the whole thing did have its downsides.
For one, people would abuse the “invite your friends” deal by making a load of fake accounts (some of them obvious like Jake1, Jake2, etc.) and benefiting from the gained points, apparently unaware that could be seen by everyone. In addition, users were making most of their points from the polls, quizzes, and blog comments and leaving the encyclopedia portion of the site ignored. Some users even signed up and spent a few weeks participating in the social features without even realizing it was a wiki.
Eventually, the admins made the move of removing points from everything except editing the wiki and the simple acts of signing up and uploading an avatar. The greater Halopedia community, which had been transformed by new users to revolve around the new features, erupted into outrage. The controversy defined the new users, who felt they had lost hard work, and the users referred to as “veteran” users, who had been on Halopedia before the introduction of new features and mostly were unsatisfied with the changes. Though some left over the loss, many stayed and Halopedia continued.
Since the last several months, things have mostly settled down. The points have once more gone up for debate, this time for their complete removal. Whatever happens, though, I imagine that Halopedia will do pretty well. We’ve come a mighty long way since that first day four years ago, and the future ahead is bright.
Remember, remember
The fourth of November
A wiki for gameplay and plot
There exists no evidence
That the birth of our elegance
Should ever be forgot
- --A zany cabalist (aka Dragonclaws), referencing Guy Fawkes Night
