Don't worry, this article doesn't cover the history of Wassies. That's deep and complex and there are many people better served to document that than me. This article studies the history of here! (And by 'here' I mean Wassiepedia).
Humble Beginnings
Wassiepedia started in 2021. Or maybe early 2022. To be honest, it's a bit hazy...
The first incarnation was a Wordpress site with a theme overlay called Wikipages. The idea was to look like Wikipedia, and also give everyone the ability to sign up for an editor account and add whatever they liked.
It looked like this:
And it worked OK...
People could, and did, sign up to become editors. And they added cool things and it was awesome. But in the attempt to look like Wikipedia things ended up a bit grey and washed out, so in 2023 we reskinned.
Wassiepedia v2
Wassiepedia v2 came out sometime in 2023 (as you can tell, we've kept exhaustive notes of all changes, ehem!).
The bulk of the changes were purely in terms of look and feel. In v2 Wassiepedia looked like this:
We also tried some usability changes for adding and editing articles. Which made things less usable.
The system also started groaning under the weight of spam (which users never saw, but oh my was it there).
The Great Migration
In late 2024 the site was down for a week or so as a result of a snafu with SSL (Derp, you are fired!). Once that was resolved we set about doing some spring cleaning and upgrading application versions. The net result being a significant amount of breakage. The simmering dissatisfaction with Wordpress broke into white hot annoyance and we embarked on the move to a ghost.org platform.
As part of this move we made a shift away from the Wikipedia layout imitation. The joy and colour of Wassies was lost in the document heavy format. Instead we embraced a new layout that better showcases the beautiful articles on the site.
Wassiepedia now looks like this:
Humble Futures
The new Wassiepedia still supports contributions from anyone, but now there is a manual step to setup peoples accounts.
We are also investigating ways to make it easier for people to get involved. Watch this space for news (maybe start a free subscription?).
