ZEM2POINT0: 169 Days: Countdown to the An Unlikely Fandom Premiere

169 days until the premiere of An Unlikely Fandom! So, in yesterday's post I mentioned that from the time I was 15 until I was 21, I was involved in the editing of the Thomas & Friends Wikia. I wanted to talk a little more about that in today's countdown post.

So having been a Thomas fan for 13 years in 2008, I'd been browsing all the sites with Thomas content for a couple years when I first created an account and made some edits on the site. As I mentioned in yesterday's post, it's basically Wikipedia for Thomas. (If you don't know what Wikis are at all, it's a collaborative encyclopedia edited by the public)

In those early days, there was very little accurate information on the site and most of the pages were filled with fan fiction and troll activity (it's the internet 🙄). The way these sites work, there is an administration/moderation hierarchy - but there were no active administrators when I began editing. Being one of the few constructive editors in those early days, I quickly convinced the host site (then called Wikia, now rebranded Fandom) to allow me to adopt the site and I was granted the top admin position (bureaucrat, which means I could make other people admins and such).

From there it really took off, I established law and order, got more people to edit the site (I literally went out and recruited people all over the net) and got Wikia to run an ad for our site on the other sites once we had enough activity to qualify. You might be browsing the Lost wiki or the Land Before Time wiki and there was an ad for Thomas Wiki! Very exciting times.

We created hundreds and hundreds of pages about episodes, characters, locations and crew members. (I also want to note that I met one of my best friends online through Thomas Wiki, and though we've never met in person, we've stayed in touch for 15 years as of this year.) It just grew and grew from there.

After a year or so, my personal life, very tumultuous and traumatic, took me away from my wiki editing activity and when I did spend time editing wikis, I became involved with other ones that didn't have the number of editors and traffic Thomas Wiki had. (There was a British dinosaur sci-fi one in particular).

Thomas Wiki continued on under the leadership of others that I had promoted, some more controversial than others, but the site's popularity only grew. I got the chance to interview the head writer of Thomas & Friends for the site and learned that he actually used our site for reference on character and location histories when writing new episodes. (We later learned that the animators were also using our site, to keep the visuals consistent and accurate.)

So, that's a little bit of backstory on one of the most popular online communities that I've ever been a part of, and I helped found it. In more recent years, I've been social media manager for the Thomas Wiki, but more on that another time. The image included is a current screenshot of the Thomas Wiki homepage, located here: ttte.fandom.com