Camera-wiki.org:History

A summary of Camera-Wiki.org's Origins and History.

2004 Founding of Camerapedia: Camerapedia.org (Camerapedia) was founded in 2004 by User:Lbstone as a strictly noncommercial, Mediawiki-based camera encyclopedia.

2006 December Progress: satisfactory: more and more people run into this camera wiki when they search information about cameras. Some add new interesting links or make corrections of articles, or offer new images to the project Flickr image pool, or even become authors of new articles or article sections. But still some cameras and other topics need (more) description inside the encyclopedia. But a great variety of article composition styles should give authors enough inspiration to add all the missing information. The objective to become a main web-resource about cameras is on the way to be reached. (U. Kulick, 3 December 2006)

2008 December Progress: Since some todos got done and lots of cameras and companies got a page. The site has become one that gives a wide overview over the world of cameras from 1839 to 2008, listing or explaining lots of details about many cameras, companies, accessories and people. Some articles just give a link or just show an image. Some of these deserve to be expanded with more information. U. Kulick 18:19, 27 December 2008 (EST)

2011 January Wikia Takeover: It was revealed that the commercial wiki farm, Wikia, had purchased our domain. This happened without consultation of anyone in the Camerapedia community. After lengthy discussions, the community as a whole decided to abandon the Camerapedia domain. Rather that convert to a commercial, ad-supported camera encyclopedia controlled by the Wikia corporation, the admins and editors chose to fork (duplicate) the content and continue under a new name. Camera-Wiki was chosen as the new name and this site was created in January of 2011.

2011 February 7 Camera-Wiki.org launched: The site was publicly launched on 7 February 2011. Wikia continued with the takeover of the Camerapedia domain, effectively creating two copies of the camera encyclopedia: one a for-profit site controlled by Wikia with no administrators and almost no editors, the other a non-profit site pursuing the original goals with most of the original admins and many old and new editors. The sites began to diverge almost immediately.

2011 February 10: It's almost clear that www.camera-wiki.org is the legal successor of www.camerapedia.org . camerapedia.wikia.com has just won one new main author, while camera-wiki-org has won several new authors and some of the old ones. In the discussions around the launch of both sites the project community showed a strong preference to keep the project running as noncommercial wiki. Voxphoto and Steevithak did the first steps and supported the new wiki technologically and with a good lot of good communication. We already have some new articles and some tidy-up of categorization. Much was done for the Wiki move todo, especially regarding a main concern that made the community feeling uncomfortable with a move to wikia's wiki copy - the image rights. Steevithak found an API interface and used it to get license info about the Flickr images used in the wiki. Many copyright-protected wiki image contribs could be regained for the project by request to copyright owners, request for offering the images thru our Flickr image pool.U. Kulick 13:40, 10 February 2011 (PST)

2011 August: Camera-wiki.org has added more than 850 article pages in the months since the fork, and our Flickr pool includes more than 37,000 images. Thanks to much hard work by contributors User:Tkmedia, User:Hanskerensky and User:Dustin McAmera we have almost completed confirming and adding proper photo rights and credits to every image in the wiki. (The exception is a few thumbnail-sized images, which typically appear properly credited on another page.)

The remnant of Camerapedia hosted by Wikia has had hundreds of photos withdrawn; it has no active admins and only one serious contributor (who duplicates most of his work here also); it is increasingly damaged by spam and irrelevant entries.

2012 June 20:Camera-wiki.org continues to grow steadily. We now have a social media presence on Facebook, Google+, and Twitter. We publish occasional Blog posts on camera history. The camera-wiki flickr group is approaching 50,000 photos. We've gained many new editors over the last year and now 6,766 articles vs 5,831 on Wikia's copy of Camerapedia. And many other existing articles have been substantially improved and expanded over the last year. Google search results still favor Wikia's site on many of the older pages due to their control of the original domain name but Camera-wiki.org is seeing continual improvement in search placement and we have overtaken the older versions of many of the articles hosted at Wikia.
Steevithak 19:04, 20 June 2012 (PDT)

2016 Feb 7 Camera-wiki.org reaches its 5th birthday with an increasing number of article contributors. The total count of content pages has reached 8,123, representing nearly 54% growth since the fork from Camerapedia. (Recent contributions to the Wikia-hosted Camerapedia are often spam or vandalism.) Admin Steevithak has overseen a transfer to a much more robust hosting platform, greatly reducing site downtime. However the added costs of this make it all the more vital that frequent site visitors help out camera-wiki.org with a donation.

A longer-term concern is the wiki's dependence on Flickr for image hosting, as its struggling corporate parent Yahoo reduces Flickr's resources, while perhaps considering an outright sale. --Vox (talk) 09:37, 7 February 2016 (CST)

See Also

• About Camera-Wiki.org - general information about this site and how to use it
• Camerapedia - a detailed account of the Wikia takeover and loss of the Camerapedia name.