Se. C. has written me an email, asking “Could you tell me more about your work with wikis?”. Yes of course I could! I've been meaning to for some time already. Here's a brief timeline of my relationships with the wiki technology. Some events listed here are previously unknown details of what some people call Bouncepaw lore.
2011 I was introduced to Minecraft, a popular sandbox computer game, which I still play from time to time 13 years later, by my brother. I started with Beta 1.9 Pre-release 4, which was released in October 2011. The Release 1.0 was out in November. The game was young but already very popular. And there was this Minecraft wiki. I'm still unsure if it was an official wiki, or just a fan wiki that just got very big, but whatever. I spent a lot of time reading it, learning about the game.
Back then I thought that wiki meant a website with information dedicated to a specific topic. While it's very true for most wikis, this is not the definition I think should be used.
I'm not sure if I knew of Wikipedia back then. I probably did. Or maybe not. It doesn't really matter for the story, because Wikipedia wasn't important on my wiki way. I make anonymous typo edits from time to time though.
Around 2014 or 2015 the Pokémon fandom in Russia got bigger. The trading card game was released, and I was playing it. I played the FireRed game on a Gameboy Advance emulator on my smartphone, and that's basically how I learned English. I was reading a lot of Bulbapedia, the biggest Pokémon wiki. That's when I learned wikis are community-written.
I think I was also reading some Wikia wikis then. Not sure why. Maybe I liked some topic. I don't remember. Anyway, I knew that I can host a wiki on Wikia for free. And I did! Russian Pokémon wikis were (and still are) barely a thing, and I wanted to change that. Not willing to grasp the whole Pokéworld, I decided to devote my wiki to just one thing, the Russian edition of Pokémon TCG. Then I changed platforms because Wikia was too limited. I chose a different MediaWiki hoster.
I was writing my wiki fervently. I learned the MediaWiki markup. Then I learned CSS. Then I learned HTML (sic! the order was as written). I learned SublimeText and its macros thingy or whatever it's called. But the project didn't really catch attention from the people, and I abandoned it.
Around 2016 the second generation of Bionicle was happening. Some folks on the biggest Russian Bionicle forum wanted to make a good new wiki, comparable to Biosector01. I observed them. And then I just jumped in and shocked them with my awesome knowledge of MediaWiki templates and CSS. My cool infobox is still there, but the wiki is long inactive.
Then I forgot about wikis. I learned Ruby, then JavaScript, thus finally learning some programming. I was blogging.
2020 I felt a need. I was surrounded with a lot of artefacts (drawings, notes, publishings, etc) I made during the previous years. I wanted to sort them out. What was the perfect tech for that? A wiki. And I started learning more about wikis. The history, how they happened in the first place, different wiki engines. I tried several wiki engines. I thought settled down with MoinMoin. I was resisting the urge to write my own.
But it was obvious. I had to.
And thus the Mycorrhiza project was born. Yes, the ultimate goal of Mycorrhiza was to power my private personal wiki Cyberrachel. Everything else came as a bonus. I learned Go, I learned back-end web development, I learned many things. And I made a wiki engine which I consider to be the best.
End of 2020 I joined Community Wiki, an old wiki still holding the old spirit. You can read more about my Community Wiki journey on cw>Epoch 2020. It's back to being dead now, though. I got good acquaintances from there though.
I joined Agora. I'm taking part in its development, mostly indirectly, because I'm not signing that CLA.
Mycorrhiza was a successful project. For some people, it was the perfect choice. For individuals mostly, though. KlavaWiki, a Russian keyboard wiki, was the first community Mycorrhiza wiki. I won an award in an all-Russia contest with it. Some people think of me as the ‘Mycorrhiza guy’. I didn't get rich from it though.
2023, the Mycorrhiza development is mostly stagnant. I commit occasional fixes, I get occasional issues, but not much is happening. However, I use it daily. For example, this website is running Mycorrhiza. Cyberrachel, for which it was made in the first place, has three and a half thousand hyphae, which is much more than I anticipated three years ago.
I like to say that Mycorrhiza is complete or done. I wonder if it's true.
Now, I occasionally edit random wikis I come across. An edit here, and edit there, often under a different name. There are some very well-written articles out there written by me, and nobody will ever know I'm the author. I might even forget about their existence!
Let's see what the wiki future brings!