Wowpedia:About

Wowpedia is a wiki dedicated to cataloging Blizzard Entertainment's Warcraft universe (with a focus, though not priority, on World of Warcraft); covering the entire Warcraft series of games, RPG reference books, strategy guides, novels, comics (manga and otherwise), and other sources.

About Wowpedia


The wiki is a flexible, user-editable web-based database of information made up entirely of user contributions, and uses MediaWiki software. All the text in the wiki is released under the Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license and to be able to edit the articles, visitors must register with the website.

So why a Warcraft wiki? As you are going through looking for information, if you see something that is incorrect, you can correct it. If you see any information that is missing, you can add it. This way, the information here should be as up to date as possible, instead of having to wait for a small group of people to update the information as the world changes. The more people that use Wowpedia, the more up-to-date the information will be!


 * Wowpedia is not a copy of Wikipedia — we do many things differently.
 * The WoW community often uses slang terms, which is in part reflected here. In addition, you may occasionally find information here on some articles that is decidedly not NPOV.
 * Wiki is not a religion here, it is a way of editing.
 * We strive to be as "lore-neutral" as possible. We do not decide what is "official" and what is not — that is Blizzard's job. We record the known information and try to present all sides of any valid controversy. Check our lore policy for further details.
 * We do not always flag spoilers — if new information has come out it will be added to the wiki.
 * We aim to produce easily navigated, high quality articles.

History and background


WoWWiki.com was launched on 24 November 2004 by Rustak, in conjunction with AlexanderYoshi, as a source of information pertaining to World of Warcraft and the interface modification suite Cosmos.

Since the launch, the wiki has expanded massively to cover the entirety of the Warcraft universe, including the RTS games, novels, the RPG reference books, manga, and other written sources, along with the WoW expansion packs, World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade, World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King and World of Warcraft: Cataclysm.

It is also a primary and popular source for World of Warcraft interface customization and addon information (such as Cosmos) as Blizzard Entertainment themselves do not release documentation on the programming interface.

On 2 May 2007, it was announced that WoWWiki would be moving to Wikia. This move occurred two weeks later.

On 29 September 2010, discussion began on whether to leave Wikia, due to irreconcilable differences with the administration. However, it was discovered that Wikia owned the domain name wowwiki.com and intended to keep a copy of the site running even if it moved. As a result of that discussion, a fork of WoWWiki was created as Wowpedia (wowpedia.org), with the new site being hosted by Curse and the new wiki becoming usable on 17 October 2010.

On 4 December 2010, the new World of Warcraft community site was announced on Battle.net including mention that direct links to Wowpedia would appear on many pages along with Wowhead links.

See also Ownership and administration below.

Wowpedia currently runs on MediaWiki.

See Special:Version for further details and a list of our installed extensions.

IRC channel
For all-talk Wowpedia, come and idle on the official IRC channel, set up solely for your WoW + wiki needs! Many admins frequent the channel and you are cordially invited to chat, discuss wiki issues, notify us of important developments, and just generally make yourself at home! Once you have an IRC client, join us on: chat.freenode.net, #wowpedia.

Twitter
Wowpedia has an official Twitter! Come follow us! We'll respond to suggestions there, as well as broadcast the occasional really cool fact of Warcraft.

Trivia

 * The name is a portmanteau of the acronym WoW (for World of Warcraft) and encyclopedia.

Wowpedia and WoWWiki in the media

 * WoWWIki was frequently cited as a source on the popular WoW blog, WoW Insider, which has now started citing Wowpedia.
 * We are integrated and linked (along with Wowhead) to the official Battle.net community site: EU &bull; US

Statistics

 * Wowpedia has:
 *  content pages.
 *  files.

You can check out the latest statistics here on Wowpedia and (approximate) popularity statistics on Alexa or QuantCast.

Ownership and administration
Wowpedia is hosted by Curse and ably supported by its admin staff.

The administrators:
 * AlexanderYoshi
 * Baggins
 * Coobra
 * Schmidt
 * Foxlit
 * Gourra
 * Gryphon
 * Hobinheim
 * Howbizr
 * Kaydeethree
 * Mikk
 * Montag
 * Pcj
 * Ragestorm
 * Sandwichman2448
 * Sky2042
 * Teomyr
 * Tekkub
 * TherasTaneel
 * Varghedin