Multiversal Omnipedia:About
The Multiversal Omnipedia (MOA) is intended to, in the end, be a complete catalog of all the people, places, items, events, and other things in science fiction, fantasy fiction, horror fiction, action/adventure fiction, and mystery fiction.
Site History
Jeb: The Multiversal Omnipedia began as the Multiversal Omnipedia-Atlas in 1999 as a way to entertain myself. Just for the heck of it, I started writing out random entries, from memory, of various fictional things from A to Z. (This was the policy early on- every update had to add one entry for each letter of the alphabet. In addition, I included some personal fictional creations and silly stuff- these were removed after the audience grew.) I mentioned the slowly growing document (yes, it was one long page) to some friends of mine. Since they were interested, I e-mailed it around to those friends- including Dracandros, Greg Bishansky and Robby Bevard.
Eventually, by early 2001, I decided to put the document online, and sent out e-mail messages when it was updated. At my friend A Fan's suggestion, I broke up the huge document into individual pages, interlinked them, and made a full-fledged Web site out of it. I also added pictures, which vastly improved MOA's look, and opened it up to submissions (although my friends had already added a few entries by this time). At this point, I also included The Gargoyles Saga as a continuity alongside other universes.
Growth was slow but steady, although there were periods where I lost interest in regular updates. The entry count was over 700 entries by the end of 2001. Midway through 2002, I changed my policy again, and excluded fan-made material entirely (although I preserved the pre-existing TGS entries). The site broke the 1000-entry mark in May 2003, but there were now longer and longer multi-month spans between my updates. (It was kind of a hassle to regularly update large HTML files, even files as straightforward as MOA's, so I tended to avoid it.)
By March 2004, I was looking for something better, and I found it in a spreading concept- the wiki. I'd loved Wikipedia since I first discovered it, and I was pleased to learn that a ton of open-source wiki engines were available on the Web. Thanks to Dracandros, a PhpWiki was put online, and MOA was reborn. It took a few months to move over all the existing entries, but now the site was better than ever!
However, there were some performance problems- our old web provider wasn't equipped to handle PhpWiki very well. So, we moved to a new provider, and Dracandros took it upon himself to install the latest version of ~PhpWiki while he was at it. After a short period of recopying the entries, we arrive at the modern Multiversal Omnipedia-Atlas, open for anyone to add things. Thanks to like-minded and prolific people like Kooshmeister and Greg Bishansky, the site has nearly tripled in size since it became a wiki.
In October 2005, due to issues with our second web provider, we were forced to move MOA to a new location. I took the opportunity to recreate MOA afresh, changing the name slightly (Multiversal Omnipedia) and, with Dracandros' help, it became a Mediawiki just like Wikipedia! My dream is that MOA will become the ultimate encyclopediac reference for science fiction, horror, fantasy and adventure fiction- the sort of site I would love to visit.
For More Information
See the FAQ.
Pages That Link to MOA
- 901 West
- The 2001: A Space Odyssey Collectibles Exhibit
- Andorus's Pirates of Dark Water Page
- BigScaryDave's Journal
- The Captain's Unofficial Justice League Homepage
- The Dark Tower
- Distractions
- Gifted Vampire
- Jeff Provine
- Lightning Strike's Super-Huge List of Marvel & DC Comic Book Fansite Links
- MazeworksII
- Noise in my Brain
- Parr's Journal
- Reference Desk
- The SK Zone
- Welcome Taylor!
- Wikipedia - User:Phil Sandifer/Wold Newton
- Wold-Newtonry: Theory and Methodology for the Literary Archeology of the Wold Newton Universe
