Minecraft Wiki:History

On June 16, 2009, a British player of Minecraft, known as citricsquid, created the Minecraft Forums. This was done in reaction to the large amount of spam on the official Minecraft forum created by Notch.^[1]

On the next day (June 17, 2009), Quatroking wrote a suggestion to the forums. In the suggestion, he proposed to create a wiki for Minecraft. citricsquid created the wiki as Quatroking suggested. Shortly after that, Quatroking became the wiki's first administrator.

In the early days of its operation, Minecraft Wiki was known as Minepedia^[2] and was hosted at minecraftwiki.net.^[3] There were many other wikis for Minecraft, both before and after Minepedia. It's thought that Minepedia's ties with Notch and the Minecraft Forums helped its popularity.

On August 3, 2009, the forums and wiki went offline because citricsquid was no longer able to pay for hosting. After 3 weeks, community member aera, known for creating the first ever custom server "myne!", offered to cover the costs. On August 28, 2009, the Minecraft Forums and Minepedia came back online.

Both the forums and the wiki resumed their growth after this outage. As the community for Minecraft itself grew, so did the forum and the wiki. During this period, the number of visitors to the two websites doubled approximately every 2 months.

In July 2010, the editors of Minepedia created a wiki page for Minecraft bugs. This unofficial bug tracker was how players reported bugs in practice back then. It is currently found at Minecraft Wiki:Issues.

On August 19, 2010, a backup failure caused the loss of all edits from August 3 to August 18.^[4] As a result, the community started discussing a new hosting plan. Community member WedTM offered more hardware to the wiki. However, despite this offer, the growth of the two websites kept causing further issues. Later in August 2010, editing from unregistered (anonymous) users was disabled due to the large amount of unconstructive activity coming from such users.

Over September, the two websites had a five-fold growth in daily views: from 200,000 to 1,000,000. Hosting costs reached $2,000 per month, and the hosting team asked the community for donations. In one week, $3,500 was raised, which was enough to rent better hardware. For a more stable income, the hosting team added ads shortly after that. These changes made it needed to create a legal entity responsible for the sites. On September 30, 2010, Redstone Wire Ltd was formed and incorporated.

During October, the wiki and the forum had regular technical issues due to their continued growth in terms of activity. By that time, the two sites together became almost as popular as Stack Overflow, and it was harder and harder to manage them.

In October, wiki editors made some major changes to how they discuss subjects related to the wiki. Originally, the talk page of the wiki's main page was used both to discuss the main page itself and to discuss the wiki in general. This made it harder to find relevant topics in archives. On October 14, wiki editors created the community portal page. Shortly after that, the community portal became a hub for links (to the forums and to Minecraft.net), and on October 20, it became the on-wiki forum for wiki discussion. The talk page for the main page had its content moved to the community portal the following week.

In the third quarter of 2010, the wiki space experienced one of the biggest events in its history. Up until then, the vast majority of non-Wikimedia Foundation wiki space (also known as Fan-wiki space) was dominated by the wiki platform Wikia (today known as Fandom). Wikia's newest fixed-width skin, Oasis, was met with strong disapproval by various wiki editors, which meant people had intentions to leave Wikia, which in turn was a good time for other companies to offer their own wiki services. One of those companies which took advantage of this was Curse.

Curse started as a database of World of Warcraft mods, but by 2009, they had expanded to other areas (such as forums for example). It was at that time Curse decided to host their first wiki. It wasn't their first interaction with wiki space either. In 2007, they had a short-lived partnership with Wikia, which lasted for just 5 months,^[5] but it was enough for them to realize that there was a space for something like a wiki farm. After seeing decent success with the wikis they were hosting, they decided to expand. The process was still very slow, as by the end of October 2010, Curse had just 7 wikis. However, at the same time, there was drama surrounding Wikia and so Curse took the stage - they began looking for more wikis to host.

At the beginning of November 2010, content director at Curse, Donovan Duncan^[6], reached out to citricsquid and the team. The deal was that Curse would acquire sites under "Redstone Wire Ltd" and would hire citricsquid, aera and WedTM. By November 15, 2010, the site was owned by Curse.

A few weeks later in December 2010, "Minepedia" had to be renamed to "Minecraft Wiki", since the owners of the domain "minepedia.net" faced a legal issue, which concluded that the wiki could no longer be named as "Minepedia". However, the transition was very slow, and references were still being changed throughout 2011.^[7]

In the following months, the Minecraft Wiki improved its management pages. In late December 2010, the community portal was transformed to be a more useful page for users^[8], followed by the creation of the Admin noticeboard in early January 2011.

The excessive use of images on the wiki had been stressing the hosting server for some time. This resulted in the idea of using a single image: a stylesheet added through CSS with all blocks and items on the bitmap. This would display parts of this one image. This became a template known as {{Sprite}}.^[9]

In June 2011, the Minecraft Wiki community raised concerns regarding Curse for the first time.^[10] This was due to Curse adding a sidebar for some promotional materials and later ads. Despite the protests from community members, the sidebar remained until early 2013, when the wiki migrated to the Gamepedia platform.

On September 6, 2011, anonymous editing was re-enabled after the implementation of additional administrative tools, such as the Abuse Filter, to help counter unconstructive edits.^[11] September 2011 also marked the closure of minepedia.net^[12]. Since then, the Minecraft Wiki has been the biggest wiki about Minecraft, with no significant competition to challenge it.

In August 2012, a decision was made by the user base for the Minecraft Wiki to change its wiki logo and header.^[13] The header was implemented right away, but it took a year for the logo to be changed, finally being replaced on September 24, 2013.^[14]

With the number of wikis Curse was hosting rising rapidly, more and more problems came along with upgrading them. Since all of the wikis ran on their own MediaWiki instances, updating them caused their technical issues to last for longer periods of time. Additionally, due to how each wiki was on its own URL, features like site-wide logging could not exist, and SEO was per-wiki, which was not ideal if somebody wanted to compete with Wikia.

These issues were the inspiration of the Gamepedia wiki farm, powered by the "Hydra" wiki engine. It introduced a single MediaWiki core, easily manageable extensions, and site-wide logging. This also made Gamepedia wikis stronger in SEO. The move was completed on September 19th, 2013.^[15] Additionally, Curse decided to remove the controversial right sidebar that the user base of the wiki had been hating for a long period of time.

In May 2013, the wiki had been experiencing server issues, with the proposal being to remove images from {{Blocks}} and {{Items}}.^[16] As most of the editors had not agreed, the alternative was to use {{LoadPage}}. At that time, that template was used very rarely, but the server issues still caused a lot of navigation boxes to be converted into these pages. This improved the performance of the wiki. Meanwhile, the creation of new namespaces​^{[more information needed]} was requested, although it was not agreed on.

A few days later, there was a proposal about the wiki header's color and the agreed conclusion was to change its text color to white.^[17] There was another discussion to change its background color, but it stayed on
 #729fcf (until 2021).

In September 2013, "Minetip" tooltips were officially introduced.^[18]

Until late 2013, all versions of an edition were hosted on a single page. This started to become a problem during Java Edition 1.7's development in October 2013,^[19] due to the massive amount of additions and changes in that version. The first page was for Java Edition 1.8, at that time called "1.8". To make sure users will be able to navigate from a one version to an another one with ease, a navbox was created^[20] It was also decided "Pocket Edition" and Legacy Console Edition versions would also use their own prefix, and while Pocket Edition started to use this system in 2015, it took 6 more years for Console Editions, long after version pages had taken over the wiki.

On May 7, 2014, Curse introduced Curse Profiles, an integrated social media system in Gamepedia offering a wide range of features. It was meant to be an alternative for user pages and user talk pages, which would display the same information across the entire network.

In late 2014, the Official Feed the Beast Wiki migrated to Gamepedia. Therefore, a logical question began circulating on wikis about the future of Mods on this wiki, but it took a few years for the editors to make a decision on it.

In October 2014, it had been suggested to create a namespace alias. Since then, MCW: and MCT: are aliases for "Minecraft Wiki" and "Minecraft Wiki talk" namespaces respectively.^[21]

On March 14, 2015, the talk page guidelines were introduced.^[22][23]

In January 2016, a mobile app finally launched for the Minecraft Wiki. The mobile app was one of the most requested features from both readers and editors since at least 2011. However, the excitement around it did not last long, since it was met with lot of criticism, mostly concerning its lack of features and technical issues, like its inability to edit pages, read other namespaces or just reading other languages.^[24] While there were plans to add offline mode, add other languages and other features, it didn't take too long for the app to be abandoned. The last update was released in August 2016, and since then the app has been crashing for everybody, until it was withdrawn from online app stores sometime in 2017.

On July 18, 2016 at 14:19 UTC, Minecraft Wiki surpassed 1 million edits, with the 1-millionth edit being done by Meeples10.

On August 26, 2016, Curse was acquired by Amazon through its subsidiary Twitch Interactive. After the acquisition, Amazon's influence was becoming increasingly stronger, with Twitch streams as a new type of advertisement starting to appear at the bottom of the pages not long after the acquisition. On November 24, 2017, Minecraft Wiki was moved to Amazon Web Services.^[25]

On May 1 and May 8, 2017, the wiki agreed on and introduced icons for Curse Staff and ex-Mojang employees.^[26]

In 2017, Gamepedia announced an end to its Gamepedia PRO paid service, being replaced by free Gamepedia PRO which could be earned by editing regularly on Gamepedia wikis.

As instant messaging services were becoming more and more common, there was a growing need for a wiki Discord. Around May 2018, the Discord server was created by a Minecraft Wiki user. It was eventually transferred to director ownership^[27] and officially launched on June 15, 2018.

In early June 2018, a wiki project for refactoring version labels was created. After a discussion, the second custom wiki role, patrollers, was created on July 12, 2018,^[28] which was followed by the now-defunct Patroller requests page, which was a place for verifying edits.

On December 12, 2018, it was announced that Gamepedia had been acquired by Fandom (formerly known as Wikia), including the Minecraft Wiki. In a short time, user accounts were moved onto Fandom servers, and the Curse brand had been officially discontinued.

Until March 9, 2019, the wiki primarily focused on Java Edition. After all, this was the original version of Minecraft, while the other editions were created long after. However, in 2017, this started to change.

On June 13, 2017, a topic was opened on the community portal, discussing the orientation of the wiki,^[29] which resulted in a wiki project called "Renaming". The goal of it was simple; "focus on other editions of Minecraft". This project had been influential to the Minecraft community as a whole ever since its introduction. On June 17, 2017, the term Bedrock Edition was coined by users of the wiki, which later became a de facto standard for the wiki and community as a whole and in the end was officially adopted by Mojang and became the official name of the edition, starting June 7, 2022. On June 23, 2017, HelenAngel, Mojang's community manager and wiki editor at the time, stepped in and tried to discuss her stance and how it has been referred at Mojang. While the argument for why Bedrock Edition shouldn't be named as "Bedrock Edition" did not convince the rest of the wiki editors, her comment about the Console Edition rename did. Therefore, the wiki came to the agreement, that since Console Edition no longer includes all editions of Minecraft released on console, the edition name should be suffixed by the word "Legacy"; thus, Console Edition became Legacy Console Edition.

After Bedrock Edition 1.2.0 came though, the discussion staled, as the proposal to begin the move failed^[30]. After the discussion was revived in January 2019, the wiki agreed on prefixing versions.^[31] Pages started to focus more on all editions of the game. All Java Edition articles have received a "Java Edition" prefix (for example, 1.12.2 became Java Edition 1.12.2) starting on March 9, 2019, while pages without a prefix were converted to disambiguations.

June 2019 was a very active month for the wiki. There was a discussion about if the wiki should continue to use videos from "mcspotlights", a channel founded by Curse, that employed two YouTubers to make videos about Minecraft for Minecraft Wiki and embed them into pages. Since 2015, the mcspotlights channel is no longer producing new videos; as time went by, the videos they produced were getting increasingly outdated, to the point where one wiki editor started to remove them. After being brought up on the community portal^[32], the discussion led to the creation of the "Wiki videos" project, where volunteer editors of the Minecraft Wiki would write scripts and record voice-overs and gameplay footage that would be incorporated into YouTube videos. This project, while very ambitious, ended up as a flop a few years afterwards, due to the lack of activity.

Since September 11, 2019, unregistered users are no longer allowed to create new pages of the Minecraft Wiki. This restriction was introduced as a result of another discussion, which ran from June to September 2019.^[33] Before this date, unregistered users could create pages on the wiki; however, due to an abuse filter, they were only allowed to create redirects to existing pages.

In June 2019, a proposal to document Minecraft spin-offs (e.g. Minecraft Earth, Minecraft Dungeons, Minecraft: Story Mode) was made on the community portal. This discussion took several months, and the discussion turned into a disagreement about the scope of the wiki. Eventually, after the discussion was scheduled to close in early 2020, a decision was made to create a separate namespace for Minecraft Dungeons, while Minecraft Earth would remain in the main namespace. Since the content has been documented as subpages of wiki projects, the moving was progressing quickly.

Shortly after this event, however, it was realized that Minecraft Earth content had been conflicting with other pages in the main namespace; as a result, the movement of the pages was temporarily halted. Later, as a result of another discussion, it was decided that Minecraft Earth would also receive its own namespace.

As the wiki was becoming more complex and version histories were becoming longer, it became apparent that there may be a need for simplified guides. This was already fulfilled in late 2018 to early 2019, with guides about the Update Aquatic and Village & Pillage updates. In late 2019, links to the guides were added to {{Java Edition versions}}; this spawned a lot of interest into guides and together with {{Simple Guide table}}, all big major updates have had their guides created in the coming months.

During 2020, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the wiki activity increased significantly. This prompted much bigger projects, such as the creation of launcher versions, together with Legacy Console Edition versions. Until September 2020, all changelogs of Legacy Console Edition updates were listed in a single page, Legacy Console Edition version history, which was difficult to navigate for the average reader. Ultimately, it was decided that each version would be moved to its own page, with similar versions sharing one changelog from a special template.

On October 5, 2020, the wiki was moved to Fandom's Unified Community Platform (UCP), a new platform uniting Fandom and Gamepedia wikis. In early 2021, as part of Fandom's "UCX project", the wiki received a new mobile skin called "FandomMobile".

After the acquisition of Gamepedia by Fandom, some of the administrators from the original Fandom Minecraft Wiki (now located at minecraft-archive.fandom.com) joined the Gamepedia Minecraft Wiki Discord server to discuss cooperation with each other. Initially, users disagreed with each other, as many users thought that the Fandom wiki was "useless", citing the weird way of documenting versions and allowance of mod documentation. However, this started to change in early 2019, as "Project Crossover" was announced by both Fandom and Gamepedia. In late December 2019, a discussion was opened on the Minecraft Wiki Discord server about a potential merge with Fandom wiki. It was already clear that the Fandom wiki would merge to the Gamepedia wiki, since the latter was the official wiki at the time and also the one that had the most activity. However, there were some people who thought that the Fandom wiki would co-exist with the Gamepedia one (which, as was later proved, was not the case). As such, a "Minecraft Wikis Crossover" Discord server was created.

However, the discussion was not active at all. It was somewhat revived when the migration of Gamepedia wikis to the fandom.com domain was announced. While this spawned discussion about "3 Minecraft Wikis" and crossovers with other wikis, there wasn't real progress in talks. The discussion finally became active when the migration to fandom.com officially began. The process of resolving conflicting wikis would make Fandom wiki unsearchable in search results, so the process was sped up. Following a poll on Legacy Fandom Minecraft Wiki, with more than 53% of people supporting the crossover and cooperation between administrators, Fandom's original Minecraft Wiki was archived on March 9, 2021, and a banner was added directing people to the Gamepedia Minecraft Wiki.

During this time, the Gamepedia wiki was solving an issue preventing the crossover from happening. The Fandom Wiki had been using the Discussions system, which allowed a discussion about anything Minecraft- or wiki-related. It was decided that the Minecraft Wiki would not enable discussions.^[34] In the end, this didn't stop the crossover from happening. On March 22, 2021, this wiki was migrated to the fandom.com domain, while the archived wiki was moved to minecraft-archive.fandom.com.

Following this successful crossover, more crossovers happened. However, the Minecraft Story Mode Wiki was opposed. This prompted the "Minecraft Story Mode Wiki" wiki project to take off. On August 26, 2021, this project ended with the "Minecraft Story Mode" namespace being set-up.

Since July 2021, the wiki had been using FandomDesktop as its primary skin.

In early October 2021, it was announced that Microsoft has terminated an official wiki partnership^[35]. The wiki was forced to make changes to its main page and change its logo it had been using since 2013. Since then, Minecraft Wiki moved on towards becoming the most useful guide for everything related to Minecraft, even though activity on the wiki declined.

During the next 15 months, activity on the wiki decreased, with many active editors leaving the community. Additionally, due to changes in wiki's ownership, discussions regarding migrating the wiki to another wiki platform arose in the community as a result of many concerns in regards to reputation of Fandom.^[36] Ultimately those discussions died down as the move was considered too risky.

However, there were some decisions made. The wiki agreed on abandoning "Official pages"^[37] and decided to grant Amatulic and Magiczocker administrator rights, following a discussion.^[38]

On January 24, 2023, Fandom disabled all unregistered editing on the Minecraft Wiki^[39], as they determined it as a wiki "for kids". The change decreased the amount of vandalism the wiki experienced, as most vandalism was done by unregistered users. However, the change also decreased activity of the wiki, as unregistered editors made up a large portion of people that edited the wiki.

A new namespace for Minecraft Legends was created on January 30, 2023.

After approximately two years of inactivity, the wiki's English Twitter account became active again on March 10, 2023. Additionally, in July 2023, a Mastodon account was created for the wiki.

During 2023, the discussions about the wiki leaving Fandom started to become more prominent. Initially, these discussions took place on the Discord server, but later also on the community portal, where several frustrations with the status quo were voiced. With wiki hosts gradually reaching out and offering to host the Minecraft Wiki, on July 3, 2023, the first discussion about a potential fork was started on the wiki. This discussion resulted in a broad consensus about moving from Fandom, but not about which host to move to. However, it caught a lot of outside attention, including Weird Gloop's. They, as the host of the Runescape wikis, subsequently also offered their expertise in forking and hosting wikis and to host the Minecraft Wiki.

As Weird Gloop seemed like a promising option and the decision for where to move to was still unclear, the second discussion was started on July 31, 2023, which resulted in consensus about choosing Weird Gloop as a host. An interim board was set up, consisting of five volunteering directors, with the intent to organize the fork in a more centralized manner.

On September 24, 2023, the Minecraft Wiki moved from Fandom to its own independent site minecraft.wiki, hosted by Weird Gloop. The new wiki featured a similar skin to the one used on Gamepedia, but with a modernized design and a tweaked logo, both created by Oakar567, as well as a redesigned main page.

Subsequently, MarkusRost, who at the time was an administrator of the German Minecraft wiki and also previously was a Wiki Representative for the Minecraft Wikis for some time while the wiki was part of Fandom, became a new English administrator. Additionally, Nixinova, a bureaucrat who had left the wiki earlier in 2023 because of the Fandom migration, returned once again as a bureaucrat.

In mid-November 2023, the first round of language wikis moved from Fandom to *.minecraft.wiki as well. A second round of language wikis also followed in February 2024, and a third in October 2024.

On June 17, 2024, the wiki turned fifteen years old, and a dedicated page was created in celebration.

On September 13, 2024, the company Block & Quill Ltd was founded as the legal entity responsible for operating the Minecraft Wiki.

On September 24, 2024, the Minecraft Wiki celebrated its first year anniversary Minecraft Wiki:News/One year of the new wiki of forking from Fandom to Weird Gloop.

On November 29, 2024, the Minecraft Protocol wiki (wiki.vg) was shut down. After a discussion, work began on merging its contents into the Minecraft Wiki, with cooperation and support from previous wiki.vg editors and users.

On February 5, 2026, the wiki introduced a mascot per consensus on a community discussion: Minwi, with its design based on the colors and elements present in the Minecraft Wiki logo.

On April 20, 2026, the Hypixel SkyBlock Wiki moved to a subdomain of the Minecraft Wiki (hypixelskyblock.minecraft.wiki) after forking from Fandom.

This timeline only documents administrators of the English Minecraft Wiki. Timelines for other language wikis may be found on their respective history pages.