Encyclopedia SpongeBobia has come a long way since its beginning 10 years ago today, April 25, 2007.
Although our foundation date on Fandom (Wikia) was 10 years ago, ESB's precursor, WikiProject SpongeBob SquarePants at Wikipedia, was active in building a SpongeBob SquarePants knowledge base going back to June 2006. As some believed that the content was too trivial for Wikipedia, the content was moved to Wikia, where we had more freedom. See more about ESB's history here.
Growth was slow the first couple of years, but as time went on, new contributors joined to help the project, we grew in activity, content quantity, and content quality. The wiki shifted from a solely editing-based community to both an editing and social community around 2012. We established guidelines for formatting and developed visually appealing articles and infoboxes, rich with detailed content, as well as technological functionality with use of templates and databases, and establishing many procedures and processes to allow for effective community discussions. In 2014, we adopted the name "Encyclopedia SpongeBobia" after a nearly two-year process. We have also established a network, SpongeBobia, and SpongeBob Captures gathers thousands of viewers per month with an average of about 200,000 page views per month.
Certainly there have been bumps in the road along the way, whether it was the failed SpongeBob Universe initiative, conflicts with other SpongeBob SquarePants fan sites, or internal conflicts amongst ourselves. As large and diverse of a community we are, this is to be expected and over time we have tried our best to tweak things so we can work things out better in the future and certainly the road ahead will be no different.
Take a look at our other statistics. We have had 1,143,515 edits, 12,288 articles, and 72,507 images. 60 people have served as an administrator, of which 9 are currently serving. 13 people have served as a bureaucrat, of which 3 are currently serving. 19 people have served as an assistant, of which 4 are currently serving. Numerous others have served as moderators and rollbacks. Our WAM (see here) is ranked #62 out of the top 5,000 Fandom wikis and ranked #16 among TV wikis.
What started out as a small wiki with a number of "exiled articles" from Wikipedia in 2007, ESB certainly has a long and colorful history with all kinds of improvements in article content, both formatting and actual content, discussions of ideas and proposals, contests, chat meetings, chat parties, chat games and forum games, external and internal conflicts, trial and error of different procedures, processes, ideas, and projects, as well as the development of many friendships, all of which resulted in the largest SpongeBob SquarePants knowledge base and fansite community on the Internet and certainly all of us have played a part to get ESB where it is today. If I listed all the things different people have done over the years for ESB, it would take a long time.
Happy 10th Birthday, Encyclopedia SpongeBobia, and here's to the next 10 years!