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Pandora's Tale Wiki officially launched three years ago today.
A lot has happened in the past year. In some ways, this was the slowest year of Pandora's Tale Wiki. There were no new chapters of the comic, leaving us with very little new content to add to the wiki. We added some information about the new official Spanish translation of Pandora's Tale, but I cannot read Spanish, so there are limits to how much I can cover changes to the text.
On the technical side, however, we have seen massive changes. I began the process of converting the wiki from MediaWiki to git and gemtext, codenamed Project: Texts About Pandora. This transition is still ongoing. It requires changing every page in the wiki, but I think the change is necessary. I believe that, in an age of increasing censorship, a wiki about queerness and fighting fascism should be easier to edit and view offline.
Additionally, I believe this change will make the wiki easier to maintain. When Xan ultimately releases Chapter 12, I will use the new chapter to see which wiki is easier to update. Until then, both the old and new wikis will coexist.
Let's have a great Year 4.
Today, Pandora's Tale Wiki reaches an important milestone.
When I first created the wiki in 2022, the very first page I created was "Things to Do." I stated the article was a to-do list of things we needed to make the wiki a "minimum viable reference for Pandora's Tale." The original version of the to-do list featured six items, one of which was a joke.
As the wiki grew, I kept adding things to list of things to do. The following January, I edited the lead sentence to say it was the list of things we needed to make a good reference, rather than a minimum viable reference.
In August 2023, Pandora's Tale Wiki cleared two major hurdles. First, we migrated from Fandom to Miraheze. At the same time, we completed the last of the original five tasks from the things to do list. I checked off the final item on August 24, 2023.
For me, that moment was when the wiki stopped feeling like an unfinished draft, and started to feel like a finished set of documents. It wasn't truly complete: there were many Things To Do added to the list after the wiki's founding, but we had reached a major milestone. If the wiki were a software project, then August 24 2023 would be when we left beta and had our 1.0 release.
At the time of the big milestone, the Things To Do list was separated into three sections. There were six tasks that would only need to be completed once. There were another six tasks that will need to be redone every time a new chapter of the comic is released. Finally, there were three tasks that can never truly be completed and require ongoing effort.
Today, we have reached the second major milestone. All six of the one-time tasks from August 2023 have been completed. All of the once-per-chapter tasks are done at least through Chapter 8, which was the latest chapter in August 2023. Most of them are done through the current chapter.
If the previous milestone was a version 1.0 release, then today we have reached Pandora's Tale Wiki 2.0.
I struggle to say positive things about my own writing, so let me push myself to say the following: Pandora's Tale Wiki is a good reference for Pandora's Tale. We achieved all of our initial goals.
What comes next? As you can see from the current version of the list of things to do, there are currently 11 outstanding one-time tasks, and 14 once-per-chapter tasks. Once we have completed all of them through Chapter 11 (the current chapter as of this writing), we will have another milestone. The next milestone seems a long way off, and like I might never get there, but I didn't expect to make it to either of the first two milestones. When we do reach the third milestone, I hope I will feel comfortable calling Pandora's Tale Wiki a great reference.
Two years ago, I founded Pandora's Tale Wiki. At the time, I didn't know if I would maintain it for two months, let alone two years.
In our first year, there was almost no new Pandora's Tale content: just six single-panel preview images. In our second year, Xan has given us three entire new chapters. Hence, I had the pleasure of updating the wiki with new content as it was released.
Aside from the new content, a lot has happened in the past year. Shortly after our previous anniversary, we moved from a subdomain of Miraheze to our own domain: https://pandorastale.wiki, while remaining with Miraheze as a host. Fandom also removed the abandoned copy of our wiki that they hosted.
In November, we co-founded the Webcomic Independent Wiki List, a list of independent and ethically-hosted wikis about webcomics. The list has since moved to its own page separate from the wiki. We currently list eight awesome wikis about webcomics, including Rainverse Wiki , which I am also involved with.
In January, we participated in the inaugural Indie Wiki Jam, organized by Square Enix Independent Wiki Alliance. The event saw us get an all-time record of four unique editors in a single month, breaking our previous record of three unique editors in September 2022. While our wiki remains small and I remain the most active contributor, I am thrilled to see newcomers make their first edits.
Around the time of the jam, Mojeek and Stract search engines both indexed our main page. Both search engines found our site organically, as neither accepts site submissions.
What comes next? Aside from coverage of new canon content, the home page of our wiki will soon(ish) have polls. Also, stay tuned for more information about the Pandora's Tale Character Tournament 2. We also have plenty of refactoring and article revamping to do.
Thanks to everymany who visited or edited the wiki in the past two years, and special thanks to Xan , without whom none of this would be possible.
Let's have a great Year 3.
Today is the one year anniversary of Pandora's Tale Wiki!
I started this project as a way to more easily update the list of characters, in the hope that I could eventually use it for a Volume 2 Character Tournament. The list of characters was the first article I created.
In the past year, PTW has grown to include 64 main-namespace articles, and 431 pages in total. Just in the past two weeks, we broke free of Fandom.
What comes next for Pandora's Tale Wiki? There are always more tasks to complet to make PTW a better reference.
Currently Miraheze works as a host, and they are much better than Fandom ever was. However, there is still some uncertainty regarding their future. Miraheze is in the process of transitioning to a new board and a new organization. I will be monitoring the situation to see if we will need to move again. I hope any future moves will be easier, since we are now using stock MediaWiki.
Beyond changes to the wiki content and host, I will be considering when and if it will be best to get our own domain.
There has been almost no new Pandora's Tale canon content in the past year: the only new source material since the wiki launched are six one-panel previews Xan posted on her social media, handily collected on the article for Chapter Nine.
The lack of new canon puts us in a position a little bit like that of WikiBound, which was founded in 2010 and has had no new Earthbound canon since then. However, we have much less material to document than the WikiBound editors. Hence, continued expansion of Pandora's Tale Wiki will depend partly on whether Xan provides us with Chapter Nine and beyond.
And as always, Pandora's Tale Wiki is a wiki that anyone can edit. If you're a fan, you are welcome to contribute.
Let's have a great year two!