Half-Life Wiki:About



Combine OverWiki is a wiki encyclopedia dedicated to the Half-Life universe and its related subjects. Its main purpose is to treat the available content in an intelligent and analytical way, with emphasis on behind-the-scenes material when available. It was started as Half-Life Wiki on November 17, 2005, by Chuck182. However, after little time, it fell dormant, and into "Wikias for Adoption". On April 10, 2007, Donut THX 1138 did significant work, and the Wikia Staff member CatherineMunro instated him as bureaucrat of the Half-Life Wiki to restart progress on this wiki.

Name change
The name Half-Life Wiki was officially changed to Combine OverWiki on Friday, May 25, 2007. Donut THX 1138 thought the name Half-Life Wiki was kind of boring, so he started a forum post about possible wiki names. However, after almost a month and no responses, Donut decided to act on his own since no one seemed to care. He knew most gamers knew the Combine was a powerful Half-Life enemy faction, so he started playing with words trying to get "Combine" into the name (so gamers would know it is a Half-Life based wiki). Then came the idea of "Combine Overwatch", the name of the Earth-based Combine forces. After several more minutes in deep pondering, Donut was beaten in the face with brilliance: "Combine OverWiki" was finally coined.

Subsequent changes
The following year saw significant growth and contributor turnover, and it was in this time Donut THX 1138 and Relentless Recusant, the only two staff members, became inactive. This led to the wiki being adopted once again, this time by EVula, on February 15, 2008, whose leadership gave the improvement drive a boost.

The following months saw the appointment of two new sysops, MattyDienhoff (on February 22, 2008), and Coming Second (on April 12, 2008).

Today
EVula eventually ended up inactive like his predecessors, and Klow, appointed on December 14, 2008, took up the reins, while later he and MattyDienhoff were promoted bureaucrats by Wikia Staff member Uberfuzzy.

Klow established new policies, such as an improved Manual of Style, the creation of a layout guide the wiki lacked, an improved image management, and came up with a new design for the wiki in December 2008, by using Half-Life 2 texture files and updating the main logo. A new sysop, YabbaMyIcing, was then appointed on March 18, 2009.

The first true project undertaken by the newest staff was that of general, and badly needed, wiki cleanup. Articles and images were flagged for moving to a higher standard, and fanon and speculation finally started to be spotted and removed. Many new articles also came into existence, such as many behind-the-scenes articles, while the whole walkthrough section was removed, due to requiring a too high amount of fixing and completing for something already existing across the Internet in better written forms. A Steam group was also created on April 30, 2009, to help promote the wiki and gather more users.

On May 18, 2009, it was time to resurrect the Featured articles feature, opened by none other than our beloved Free Man. This wiki has now certified safe, good and featured articles, the featured ones being displayed weekly on the Main Page.

In June 2009, the first true community project was started. The goal of it was, and is, to take all of the many unused files on the wiki and put them into articles and galleries, or delete them. YabbaMyIcing spearheaded this project, and on July 6th the official projects page was created. It was designed to directly inform the community of any and all wiki wide projects that anybody could help out on.

In July 2009, the wiki got a Wikia Spotlight, which brought new contributors from the other video game wikis.

In September 2009, Darkman 4 got at last his sysops status, while he had been deserving it for a long time.

The bottom line is that there are still lots of improvements to do, but... we've come a very long way.

About the use of the Half-Life 2 Beta through the Combine OverWiki
As many Half-Life 2 fans know, a lot of material from the so-called Beta was stolen from Valve in 2003. Therefore, possessing these files is somehow illegal, although no clear statement by Valve has ever been made. Although the Combine OverWiki does not encourage piracy and does not provide any direct link to these files, the existence of this material cannot be ignored, as it constitutes a vital source for behind-the-scenes information for Half-Life 2.