Memory Alpha (website)

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This article is about the (Real-World This section of text has a real-world perspective! Click here for more information website. For the repository of cultural and technological knowledge of Federation members, see Memory Alpha.
Memory Alpha
Memory Alpha wordmark.png
Type of site
Wiki
OwnerCommunal
Created by
  • Dan Carlson
  • Harry Doddema
RevenueAdvertising
Websitememory-alpha.fandom.com
Alexa rankPositive decrease 17,499 (April 2014)[1]
CommercialYes
RegistrationOptional
LaunchedNovember 23, 2004; 20 years ago (2004-11-23) (official),
December 5, 2003; 21 years ago (2003-12-05) (actual (non-testsite); See below)
Content license
Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial license[2]

Memory Alpha is a wiki encyclopedia for topics related to the Star Trek fictional universe.[3][4][5][6] Conceived by Harry Doddema and Dan Carlson in September 2003 and officially launched on December 5 of that year, it uses the wiki model and is hosted by Wikia, Inc. on the MediaWiki software. Memory Alpha contains over 43,000 articles and 44,000 images in its English edition alone as of December 2018, making it one of the largest wiki projects. The site is also available in several other languages,[7] including Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, Esperanto, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, and Swedish.

History[edit | edit source]

Memory Alpha aims to create a comprehensive database for all fans, but was not conceived as a wiki.[8] Two concerns spurred its creation: many Star Trek references of the time were incomplete, and the most promising would shut down regularly. Doddema and Carlson christened their project Memory Alpha, after the Federation's largest information archive, from the original series episode "The Lights of Zetar".

The two decided on a wiki format, which allowed for more collaboration than other formats available. As Carlson said in the Charlotte Observer, "The idea I latched onto with the wiki concept is you can spread the work around. Everyone can pitch in and go in on their own special interest." After experimenting with TikiWiki software, they switched to the MediaWiki platform, finding it less cumbersome. The platform of choice for Wikimedia Foundation projects proved to be, in their opinion, more stable and efficient, and they brought a testsite online on November 11, 2003. Memory Alpha officially launched on December 5 that year.

The site gained momentum in the following months, aided by a mention on the Star Trek fan site "TrekNation" on December 23. Memory Alpha reached 1,000 articles by January 12, 2004, but on March 23, the site's database was accidentally erased during an upgrade of the MediaWiki software. Although this caused six weeks of work to be lost, the project expanded to include Dutch and German versions on April 10 and May 14 respectively. It remained stable until the following year, when the fees associated with hosting the site became more than the founders could afford.

In February 2005, Memory Alpha switched hosting servers and joined Wikia, a free for-profit wiki-hosting company started by Wikimedia Foundation board members Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley. The site remained stable on Wikia, opening a Swedish site on May 5 and a French one on November 5. It also received several distinctions that year, such as the Ex Astris Excellentia award from Ex Astris Scientia, a Star Trek reference site, in September 2005, and it was featured as the Sci-Fi Channel's Site of the Week for October 10, 2005.[9] Star Trek: Voyager and Star Trek: Enterprise writer/producer Mike Sussman joined the community that year as well.[10][non-primary source needed]

Technical issues led the MediaWiki software to believe Memory Alpha was started on November 23, 2004, and despite the inaccuracy, this date was adopted ex post facto as Memory Alpha's "birthday".

The latter part of 2005 and early 2006 saw several new features added to the site. Among these was a peer review process, implemented on September 21, 2005 in response to questions about the process by which articles become featured.[11][non-primary source needed] On November 20 of that year, Memory Alpha began a "Babel" program, inspired by and modeled after that of the Wikimedia Commons, to help users who speak the same language. Other recent innovations include an area for user projects, sometimes referred to as WikiProjects on other wikis, and coverage of fan films.

Memory Alpha has influenced the design of other wikis dedicated to information about television franchises, including The X-Files Wiki [1][non-primary source needed] and the 24 Wiki [2].[non-primary source needed] It is a resource used by mainstream journalists for information on Star Trek related issues.[12] Blogger Will Richardson hailed the site in his 2006 book Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms as "one of the most impressive [wikis] out there".[13]

On June 12, 2007, Memory Alpha reached a milestone of 25,000 articles with the creation of the article Robert Iscove.[14][non-primary source needed]

Entertainment Weekly named Memory Alpha one of the 25 Essential Fansites in 2007. In comparing it to other Star Trek sites, the reviewer wrote, "Memory Alpha wins out for its handsome, intuitive presentation and its overwhelming mass".[15]

It was revealed in April 2016 that actor and writer for Star Trek Beyond, Simon Pegg, used Memory Alpha as a canon resource in writing of the film, even asking the community's leaders to name and give etymology for a device in the film.[16][17][18]

Structure[edit | edit source]

Several aspects of Memory Alpha set it apart from other reference works, such as its method of citing sources. All information must be cited from a valid source (see Canon section below), but rather than a "Works Cited" or "References" list, Memory Alpha prefers stand-alone inline citations, which are placed in parentheses after the sentence or section in question. For television episodes, this consists of an abbreviation for the series from which the information came (e.g. DS9 for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine), followed by the name of the episode in double quotation marks. So, to cite information from the Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG) pilot "Encounter at Farpoint", one would add: (TNG: "Encounter at Farpoint"). The same rule applies for films, without the series prefix and with italics in place of quotation marks. The same method of notation is also used in the printed Star Trek Encyclopedia, which is unrelated to the Memory Alpha wiki.

Articles on Memory Alpha are written from two points of view: "in-universe", which are written as if the reader is a part of the Star Trek universe, and "production", which speak from a real-world perspective. For "in-universe" articles, behind-the-scenes information is not included in the main body of the article; rather, it is placed in a separate background section or included indented and italicized to separate it from the in-universe perspective. The latter method is used in cases where either the information is particularly important (such as conflicting information from two canonical sources) or there is not enough background to justify a separate section. In most cases, the background method is preferred and italics are used sparingly.

Like many wikis, Memory Alpha has a section for "featured articles", those believed to represent the best the community has to offer.[9] The criteria for this distinction are that an article must be well written, comprehensive (which includes citing sources), accurate and undisputed – criteria any article could hypothetically fulfill. This has caused some conflict over the criteria involved (see Current issues section). To be featured, an article must be nominated by a user and unanimously supported by at least five other users; any objections must be fixable and may be invalidated if deemed irrational or unreasonable. Each week, one of the site's featured articles becomes the "Article of the Week" to be displayed on the project home page.

Several methods of communication are available beyond conventional talk pages. The "community portal" section of the website is named after Ten Forward, a locale frequented by characters on The Next Generation. Issues discussed there range from disputes between users to new ideas on how to improve the site to upcoming projects. A separate area, the reference desk, exists for discussions and questions related to what is considered part of the canon, discrepancies between sources, and other such topics. However, "meta-Trek" topics (a term used for Star Trek-related topics that do not pertain in any way to Memory Alpha) are not discussed on the wiki; a separate IRC chatroom exists for these discussions.

Canon policy[edit | edit source]

The question of canonicity is a complex one and has plagued fans since Star Trek began in 1966.[citation needed] The general policy of Paramount Pictures is that anything outside live-action television episodes and movies is apocryphal, or non-canonical.[19] However, grey areas in this policy, especially in relation to the canonical status of Star Trek: The Animated Series (TAS), further complicate the matter and have led to many debates among fans. In light of this, Memory Alpha crafted its own unique definition of canon in relation to what may be used as a "valid resource". The Animated Series is included as valid, or canonical, for a number of reasons, such as the fact that Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry and most of the cast of the original series were involved with it and the existence of several references to TAS events in later series.

Information taken from the Star Trek Encyclopedia and Star Trek Chronology is mostly accepted on Memory Alpha as well, to the extent that it does not break from established on-screen facts. Content from these sources is an acknowledged grey area of Memory Alpha's canon policy and is disregarded if deemed speculative or contradictory. Thus, in some ways they hold the same weight as novels and other publications do for Star Wars canon: a "second tier" of canonicity, which is subservient to primary (on-screen) sources.

Other sources such as books and computer games are not included as canonical, but are covered by Memory Alpha in a way which sets it apart from other Trek resources: books, comics, and other products are included as articles about the products (i.e. from a "production point of view"), but "in-universe" information unique or new to them is covered on the product page. For example, in the Star Trek: New Frontier line of books, a new host of characters is introduced to the Trek universe, and their vessel is known as the USS Excalibur. The characters, ships and information from New Frontier books do not receive pages of their own, but they are covered on the pages about the books. In this way, Memory Alpha remains all-inclusive while attempting to distinguish the canon from apocryphal material.

Non-canonical characters and topics are instead covered at Memory Beta, and fan-films and other fan-created material at Star Trek Expanded Universe; both are hosted by Wikia. The Star Trek Online Wiki, hosted by Curse, covers the Star Trek Online MMORPG.

Issues[edit | edit source]

Organizational[edit | edit source]

Several issues face the Memory Alpha community, one of which is the question of which articles should be given "featured" status. Under Memory Alpha's current policies, both major and minor topics are eligible; however, the question has been raised of whether the criteria for featuring should be more subjective, i.e., if a topic is not significant enough, it should not be featured regardless of how comprehensive its article is.[20][non-primary source needed] There is no consensus in the Memory Alpha community about the topic, although there has been no change in featuring policy.

The question of what content Memory Alpha should cover has plagued the project since its creation. On the project's home page, it describes itself as "a collaborative project to create the most definitive, accurate, and accessible encyclopedia and reference for everything related to Star Trek", but fans often have different interpretations of what "everything" means. Sometimes, one or more users may add content about a subject – such as a website, fan club or parody – that does not fit existing pages, necessitating a community decision about whether to keep the content and, if so, what to do with it. Such incidents led to the creation of an article on Star Trek parodies after several questions were raised about where to put information related to, but not a part of, the Star Trek franchise. An example of the reverse case is "The Sunspots", a musical group consisting of Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, LeVar Burton and Michael Dorn. Although the actors involved were all prominent parts of Star Trek: The Next Generation, several articles on the group have been deleted because the community deemed the topic not directly related to the franchise. As of 2006, information about The Sunspots can be found on the different actors' pages rather than a single, separate article.

Perhaps the most heated issue on Memory Alpha in recent years is the controversy surrounding their canon policy. Aside from issues of length and excessive use of legalese, this policy has been put into question by several of the site's regular users because of its rule that articles and information which were not seen on-screen but were derived from official production sources are not considered canonical on Memory Alpha. The site's archivists are divided as to exactly whether such information should be allowed as canonical; some want only to allow what was seen on-screen while others wish to include that which was originally intended to be used on-screen but never made it, such as information from deleted scenes, early script drafts, etc. The latter archivists believe that such information can be included so long as it does not contradict what was seen on-screen and so long as it states where the source of the information comes from. As of July 2006, this debate has died down significantly, with most having accepted the terms of the new policy.[21][non-primary source needed]

Despite early concern about how to incorporate information from the 2009 movie Star Trek, which is considered a semi-reboot of the original series, Memory Alpha members found a solution to the issue. All information from this film is recorded as separate articles, which are titled according to their subject with the term "alternate reality" included in the title. This is from the term used in the movie itself to describe the new continuity. For example, the article Nyota Uhura discusses the character as portrayed by Nichelle Nichols, while the article Nyota Uhura (alternate reality) discusses the character as played by Zoe Saldana.

Licensing[edit | edit source]

The contents of Memory Alpha are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial (CC BY-NC) license. Because this license does not allow commercial reuse, it is incompatible with the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) and with the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license (CC BY-SA), and material from the site cannot be copied into projects that use the GFDL or CC BY-SA.[22][23] This distinction makes Memory Alpha a "sister project" of the primarily CC BY-SA based[24] (formerly GFDL-based) Wikia project. Memory Alpha is cited as a source by academic journals, scholarly studies and books as well as Star Trek-universe novels and reference works.[25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32]

See also[edit | edit source]

Notes[edit | edit source]

  1. ^ "Memory-alpha.wikia.com Site Info". Alexa Internet. Retrieved 2014-04-01. 
  2. ^ "Copyrights". Memory Alpha. Retrieved 14 May 2018. 
  3. ^ Barron, James (July 6, 2006). "It's an Auction, Jim, but Not as We Know It". The New York Times. The New York Times Company. 
  4. ^ Tossell, Ivor (January 12, 2007). "It's a wiki world". The Globe and Mail. [permanent dead link]
  5. ^ Lee, Ellen (December 25, 2005). "The (mostly) wonderful world of Wikis". Contra Costa Times. Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service. 
  6. ^ no byline (October 14, 2006). "Web watch: Star Trek sites abound", The Record, p. F1
  7. ^ Crockett, Christine (September 17, 2006). "A 40-year 'Trek'", Sun Journal, p. B1.
  8. ^ Ebersbach, Anja (2008). Wiki: Web Collaboration. Berlin: Springer. p. 33. ISBN 3-540-35150-7. 
  9. ^ a b Newquist, Ken (October 10, 2005). "Sci-Fi Site of the Week". SciFi.com. 
  10. ^ Some (but not all) of Memory Alpha's distinctions can be found on Memory Alpha's announcements page. Among the announcements are links to the Ex Astris Excellentia award and SciFi newsletter. Mr. Sussman's identity on Memory Alpha has been verified as authentic; see his talk page for more details.
  11. ^ The issue at hand was originally raised by user AJHalliwell on July 15 of that year, and a subsequent discussion Archived 2006-03-01 at the Wayback Machine resulted in the creation of Memory Alpha's Peer Review section. According to the page history of the Peer Review page, it was created by user Cid Highwind at 22:53, 21 September 2005 UTC.
  12. ^ Barron, James "It's an Auction, Jim, But Not as We Know It." New York Times. (Late Edition (East Coast)). New York, N.Y.: Jul 6, 2006. pg. B.3
  13. ^ Richardson, Will (2006). Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms. Thousand Oaks: Corwin Press. p. 62. ISBN 1-4129-2767-6. 
  14. ^ "Forum:MA Press Release - Memory Alpha, the Star Trek Wiki". Archived from the original on 2007-10-13. Retrieved 2007-06-13. 
  15. ^ Vary, Adam B. (December 28, 2007). "25 Essential Fansites", Entertainment Weekly 971: T9.
  16. ^ "Gizmodo". 
  17. ^ "Trek Core". 
  18. ^ "Spinoff Online". 
  19. ^ An official Star Trek FAQ FAQ Archived 2010-06-28 at the Wayback Machine dated 10 September 2003 stated, "Story lines, characters, events, stardates, etc. that take place within the fictional novels, the Animated Adventures, and the various comic lines are not canon."
  20. ^ Hippocrates Noah's archived nomination for featured status can be found on Memory Alpha. There was an unprecedented level of debate associated with the nomination.
  21. ^ "Memory Alpha:Canon policy - Memory Alpha, the Star Trek Wiki". Archived from the original on 2006-08-10. Retrieved 2006-07-17. 
  22. ^ Peter Black, Hayden Delaney; Fitzgerald, Brian (2007). "Legal Issues for Wikis: the Challenge of User-generated and Peer-Produced Knowledge, Content and Culture" (PDF). Murdoch University Electronic Journal of Law. 14 (1): 245. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2012-12-22. 
  23. ^ "Wiki/cc license compatibility". Creative Commons. Retrieved 7 November 2016. 
  24. ^ "Licensing". Wikia. Retrieved 7 November 2016. 
  25. ^ Ochoa; et al. (2007). "A Game Board Implementing Data Mining and Cultural Algorithms". Uruguaiana. 31 (59/60). 
  26. ^ Edited By Emilio Corchado, Juan M. Corchado; Abraham, Ajith (2007). Innovations in hybrid intelligent systems. Berlin: Springer. p. 490. ISBN 978-3-540-74971-4. 
  27. ^ Conley, Tim (2006). Encyclopedia of Fictional and Fantastic Languages. Westport: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313-33188-X. 
  28. ^ Firsing, Scott T. (2007). Disturbing times : the state of the planet and its possible future. New York: Pocket. ISBN 1-4165-2741-9. 
  29. ^ Jill Sherwin; et al. (2001). The Definitive Star Trek Trivia Book. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-7434-0671-0. 
  30. ^ A. Decandido, Keith R.; David, Peter; Shaw, Sarah (2007). Star Trek : mirror universe : obsidian alliances. New York: Pocket Books. ISBN 1-4165-2471-1. 
  31. ^ Lajoie, John (2007). Enterprising Endeavour: Scorpius Rising. p. 309. ISBN 0-557-00794-1. 
  32. ^ Sennewald, Nadja (2007). Alien gender : die Inszenierung von Geschlecht in Science-Fiction-Serien. Bielefeld: Transcript. p. 65. ISBN 3-89942-805-6. 

References[edit | edit source]

  • Barnett, Cynthia (Sep 1, 2005). "Wiki mania". Florida Trend. Vol. 48 no. 5. p. 62. ISSN 0015-4326. Archived from the original on November 22, 2005. 
  • Lee, Ellen (Jan 1, 2006). "The world's gone wild for everything wiki-wise". The Charlotte Observer. p. 4E. 

External links[edit | edit source]

 
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