The Sonic News Network is a wiki with the goal of becoming the biggest and best source of knowledge about the Sonic the Hedgehog series produced by Sega. As a wiki, anyone can help build and improve it, and we encourage all Sonic fans to do so.
- Started: 11 September 2005
- Founder: Guess Who
- Main language: English
- URL: http://sonic.wikia.com/
- Number of articles: 20,128
History
Sonic News Network was founded on 11 September 2005 by Guess Who, who named it after a forum he had previously run. Guess Who made 16 edits in that month, primarily to the main page, then abandoned the wiki at the end of September after failing to get any additional users to the site. Almafeta joined the wiki shortly after this and successfully applied to adopt it, and was given sysop privileges by Angela Beesley, the co-founder of Wikia. Almafeta made over 70 edits in November 2005, expanding on existing pages and creating new ones, but again did not attract many new users and abandoned the wiki again. Over the next two years, users continued to arrive at the wiki, make a small number of edits, then depart.
In 2007, two users from the RuneScape Wiki, Navij11 and Sacre Fi, joined the wiki and quickly became its most active editors to date. They requested to adopt the largely abandoned wiki and were both granted admin privileges by Angela on 12 February 2007. Navij11 and Sacre Fi greatly expanded the wiki, initially by copying existing pages from Wikipedia and adapting them to suit SNN (e.g. by removing unnecessary links), as well as created an infrastructure and framework within which users could operate (some of which is still used today).
Over time, Navij11 and Sacre Fi started to edit articles less and less to focus more on administration, and Sacre Fi stopped editing entirely in August 2007. Fortunately, by this time new users had started to arrive, such as FerralMoonrender, among whose many contributions was the decision to move fan articles into userspace. In November, FerralMoonrender nominated Navij11 as a bureaucrat, and Angela appointed Navij11 as a bureaucrat a week later on 17 November 2007. Navij11's first act was to appoint FerralMoonrender as a sysop. For over a year Navij11 and FerralMoonrender were the only admins, overseeing an incredible expansion in the size of the wiki and the number of users that visited it.
In early 2009, Navij11 appointed two new users, Fairfieldfencer and SLJCOAAATR 1, as admins to cope with the increasing workload while FerralMoonrender took a wiki-break. On 19 February 2009, Navij11 further appointed Fairfieldfencer as a bureaucrat, allowing Navij11 to retire from the wiki. After Navij11's departure, Fairfieldfencer and SLJCOAAATR 1 instituted a clamp down on fanfiction articles and vandals, doing a great deal to clean up the wiki, and appointed several new rollbacks, as well as Molten Scandium and Mystic Monkey as admins. These new projects put the new admins at odds with FerralMoonrender, who decided to retire on 15 March 2009.
Eventually, on 11 July 2010, BlazeRocks55 created the Sonic Character Tournament. This idea was that the users and viewers of Sonic News Network would vote on a poll system that had the readers choose their favorite Sonic characters. Within 34 weeks, the final match, which was between Sonic the Hedgehog and Shadow the Hedgehog, was set up, as the former had won the tournament. It was the biggest event of Sonic News Network history!
On a blog comment on 2 September 2011, FreeSmudger had suggested a chat feature after seeing many users commenting on blogs to chat with other users. After an entire month, the chat feature was placed on Sonic News Network, and, by Bullet Francisco, five users, who were FreeSmudger, MetalShadow272, DarkFuture, SandraThePorcupine, and Knowall, were nominated and were promoted for chat moderator positions on October 2011.
By the release of Sonic Generations and the following year, many users quickly became promoted with their good skills online. Those users include Wkmeads1, SpyroSonic2000, Shadowunleashed, ModrenSonic, BlueSpeeder, and Le Solace. By 11 September, 2012, Genesjs had made a forum about stepping up vandalism. With this, many users supported and in no time, many pages were locked to be protected from vandal users.
With eighteen active administrators, thirteen current rollbacks, and eleven chat moderators, Sonic News Network has been growing community, and the website had finally began to settle down into its present form. Future admins were primarily appointed only after a discussion at the requests for adminship page. For a list of our current admins, see Sonic News Network:Administrators.
Sonic News Network continues to grow, but we are constantly pushing to improve and attract new users. If you know something we don't, why not add it, and help us make Sonic News Network the best Sonic resource there is!
Policy
Our policies, rules and guidelines are listed at Sonic News Network:Policy.
External Links
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