Founded in 2004 by Jimmy Wales (yes, the Wikipedia guy) and Angela Beesley Starling (a British web entrepreneur), Fandom (originally Wikicities, and later Wikia) was a new platform that built off the core technology powering Wikipedia in order to super serve the needs of an incredibly passionate set of customers: fans!

Fans couldn’t dive deep into the lore or world of their favorite TV show, movie or game. For example, fans who visited the Luke Skywalker page on Wikipedia would only learn about Mark Hamill. They wanted a place where they could learn more about Luke, the character, as if he were a real person (and dig into the rest of the Star Wars Universe while they were at it). If Wikipedia is the “encyclopedia”, then Fandom is the rest of the library – a deep repository of information about every fictional universe.

Speaking of Star Wars, one of our earliest wikis was Wookieepedia.

By 2007, Wookieepedia was home to over 50,000 articles. It was so complex and authoritative that the Star Wars creative team themselves began using it as a resource for their projects.

Today, the 167,000 articles on Wookieepedia make up one of the most trafficked fan communities on the internet. Now imagine that kind of depth of information across every fictional universe… ever, and you’re starting to get a handle on Fandom!