On June 15, 2006, members from the Philotic Web community founded the Orson Scott Card Wiki, called the Ansible Wiki for short. The Philotic Web used to have an encyclopedia, documenting various things from the Enderverse. At the time, Wikia itself was only a year old, and the platform looked completely different from how it does today, ten years later. However, due to reasons unknown to me the encyclopedia was shut down, and the community moved the old pages to this wiki. At first, enthusiasm for this wiki was high, and many different contributors added pages to kick-start the community. However, soon the founders and admins lost interest, and left the wiki to fend for itself.
Let's take a look back at the history of this wiki, spanning across ten years.
2006[]
A few months after its founding, the main page of the Orson Scott Card Wiki looked like this. As you can see, Wikia's platform was totally different from how it looks today. Around this time, the short story "Pretty Boy" had just been released, and Card's non-enderverse novel Empire was set to be out in November.
Also, gotta love that mint-green color scheme.
2008[]
Here we can see, in around 2008, when Wikia updated to sort of the current page formatting we have today. At this time, the wiki had already been abandoned by the admins, but there were still lots of helpful contributors attempting to keep the wiki up to date; however, this would not last for much longer.
As you can see, the wiki has over 400 pages! This is much more than we have currently - why, you ask? At this time, the wiki still had content from Card's other stories. Later on when the wiki was converted into the Ender's Game Wiki, this content was deleted and the wiki was left with around 300 pages.
2013[]
2013, the time when Ender's Game popularity was at its peak. There were big changes to the main page's layout at this point - the upcoming film's release brought in many new contributors, who breathed new life into the wiki. Some of Wikia's own staff were writing blogs here about new movie news - imagine that now. This is the layout that many of the older contributors recognize, as it stayed roughly the same up until the beginning of 2016.
2016[]
This was the main page shortly after I adopted the wiki and actually put the theme designer to use. As you can see, the wiki was still the Orson Scott Card Wiki, but I had some new logos made from Wikia's design team to suit the new color scheme. I kept some of the main page's structure, but moved them into the formatting boxes I borrowed from the Corpse Party Wiki.
And here we are. Ten years later. A decade ago, someone created this wiki as a pet project, and it still is around today.
I made lots of stupid decisions when I first adopted the wiki, like deleting half the pages we still needed and combining some (not realizing that more pages = more page views = more contributors). As it stands, the only real community we have is me and the other admins, only one of which is regularly online. Now that the wiki is mostly stable and no catastrophic changes are going on, hopefully a community will begin to develop once more.
Here's to hoping this wiki survives another ten years.