ArenaTD Wiki Farewell Letter

Recently, I finished watching a new anime series, “Irina: The Vampire Cosmonaut”. 

The story is a sci-fi style reimagining of the Cold War-era space race between the USSR and USA, with the added element of vampires mixed in. It's an amazing story that follows historical events extremely accurately, and is definitely worth a watch. 

Beyond the anime and the novel, the show got me interested about all the technological advancements mentioned, historical events cited, and space in general. It isn't easy to comb through old archives, government websites and news articles though, especially considering how secretive the Soviets were back during the cold war. So how does one read up and learn about all these events? Through Wikipedia of course! 

Each mention of a rocket, explosion, scientist, engineer or cosmonaut had such interesting stories behind them, all readable through Wikipedia. 

60 years ago, the first human was sent up to space. It's truly amazing that there are websites out there today where you can easily read all about the efforts of these cosmonauts, astronauts, engineers and scientists easily and for free through Wikipedia. Today, the knowledge and research of random people around the world can be shared with anyone curious enough to look things up. 

As a reader, wikis are an important medium we can use to help us better understand the world. As an editor or an expert, a wiki is one of the most accessible and wide-reaching methods to share your knowledge on a topic and help people learn more. 

In many ways, large wikis resemble libraries: vast repositories of knowledge, housing tons of information. But unlike their brick-and-mortar counterparts, each wiki has a community backing it.

Editors constantly refine and create new articles, staff members dedicate their time to maintaining the site, and readers share the wiki's contents with others helping a wiki grow. We’ve seen this right here in ArenaDev, with a small but amazing community of active editors, wiki users, event participants and game staff contributing each in their own way.  

Wikis are such an important part of how knowledge is shared in our world today, and I'm really happy to have been given this opportunity to run one. Even though we were small, the Arena: Tower Defense Wiki has been an amazing opportunity I will never take for granted.

We started nearly 5 years ago, under the care of SlasherZA who founded the wiki, and I’d never have thought I’d get so invested in wikis and its sort. I took over once SlasherZA left in February 2022, and have been running the show ever since. This wiki was one of my first experiences on the MediaWiki CMS, and I learned everything I had to from scratch. Wikitext, CSS and JS were all so new to me!

This project has given me a chance to work on so many other cool projects like the Tower Defense Simulator (TDS) Wiki, the Dovedale Railway Wiki as well as the Independent Roblox Wiki Alliance (IRWA).

The TDS Wiki is one of the most popular Roblox wikis on Fandom, and was one of the wikis of which we sought lots of inspiration on how a wiki ought to look like when we were first starting out. The Dovedale Railway Wiki is one of the only truly independent Roblox wikis out there, not running on any wiki farm. The wiki runs everything in house, from the back end systems to the front end ones, and the IRWA is an organisation that I help run that supports and help independent wikis, working with some big names like the Fischipedia and the PHIGHTING! Wiki.

Over these 5 years, we’ve had so many people who helped us get to where we are today, and I’d like to say thank you to a few of them:

• To all my wiki staff, past and present, thank you so much for taking the time to work with me. Be it styling our wiki, researching for the game, or taking photos and editing them, we couldn't have made this resource without you. Most edits are still staff edits, and we wouldn’t be here without your hard work. I've recently re-read some of your staff applications and the questions and answers you replied really brought me back :D
• Especially to Uchu, thank you for contributing so much of your time on this project, especially while things were quiet. I really appreciate your initiative to come and work on the wiki, despite not having any experience on MediaWiki, and I'm glad to see that our wiki has also been the stepping stone for you to have worked on other cool wiki projects too. 
• To Billie and Deadox, thank you for creating such an amazing game, and assisting us when we needed help. A truly successful wiki can only be one with the support of its developers. I've noticed one unique characteristic of our wiki when compared to other tower defense style wikis — many people come to read about the lore of the game and its characters. Writing and directing a game with a well written story takes time and effort, and I'm glad that ArenaTD was one of them. It was a joy to work with you!
• Thank you to all our supporters who donated to our project. We've used these funds to give back a little to our staff, as well as to cover domain costs for the past few years.
• I'd also like to thank all the artists who graciously let us use and display your artwork on our site. Seeing such cool and pretty art on the website really made it so much better!
• And lastly, to all our readers, thank you for using our wiki. I periodically check the site statistics, and seeing all our visitors makes me happy to know that people are finding our site useful.

We’ll continue building for the public good, and working on even better wikis in the future. 

As we bring this chapter of ArenaDev & ArenaWiki to a close, I’d like to thank you for editing and reading with us. We’ll be back soon, and we hope you will be too. 

With love, 
@enews01 
Wiki Manager, ArenaWiki