wiki.vg

» see wiki.vg as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The oldest surviving copy of wiki.vg is from October 2010 and it is not a Minecraft site. It is a DokuWiki belonging to a developer called Tyler Kennedy, tagline "Randomness. Pure randomness. With cookies.", and the front page lists four things he had written up. Two concern Minecraft Alpha: the protocol and the authentication scheme. The other two are about dumping Game Boy ROM headers and rendering previews of Minecraft skins. The footer reads "start.txt, last modified 2010/10/08 20:29 by tktech."

Minecraft in 2010 had no documentation and no modding interface, and Mojang kept saying both were coming. People who wanted to write a server or a bot or a map tool had to work it out themselves, by running the client and reading the bytes on the wire. Kennedy wrote down what he worked out. Other people added what they worked out. That page grew into a wiki, the wiki moved off DokuWiki onto MediaWiki, and the thing turned into infrastructure without anyone deciding it should.

By the end the Main Page covered the Java edition, Classic, Pocket Edition, and Bedrock, each with its own banner. It is admirably honest about its own condition. "There are ongoing efforts to keep reverse engineered documentation updated, but it isn't as easy as it sounds," the page says. "The protocol generally changes slightly with each release, and both the Client and Server classes get rearranged on each release." Underneath that sentence sit links to the current protocol specification, the data types, the encryption handshake, the chunk format, and a page on how to write a client from scratch.

Minecraft arrived after my game years ended, so I have never opened a page here for the purpose it was written for. The practice behind it I recognize completely. Somebody runs the client, watches the bytes go past, writes down what each field means, then does the whole thing again when the vendor ships a patch that moves everything one byte to the left. That is how a large fraction of anything got documented before vendors learned to publish specs, and wiki.vg is that method sustained for fourteen straight years against a product whose owner could have published the spec in an afternoon.

~ the case file ~

~ the stopgap that outlived its reason ~

Kennedy is direct about this in his closing note. The project "was always intended to be temporary," because developers had been promised a modding API and documentation that never came, and wiki.vg was supposed to be a bridge until they did. A modding layer did eventually arrive by other hands, through Forge and later Fabric, but an official wire-protocol spec never did. So the bridge stayed up.

What finally ended it was not the work of documenting Minecraft, which hundreds of volunteers were doing. It was the work of running a service other people depend on. His words: users "have expectations, and they have problems, and they have questions." He shut down Notifico, a notification relay he had run for over a decade and more than fifteen million messages, on the same day and for the same reason.

~ the day it died ~

The announcement went up on 11 November 2024 and gave nineteen days of notice. The Minecraft Wiki's account posted "The Minecraft Protocol Wiki (wiki dot vg) is shutting down tomorrow, November 30" on the 29th, which is also the date of the heaviest crawling in the Internet Archive's record of the site: hundreds of edit-history and diff URLs captured in a burst over 29 and 30 November by people trying to get the revision history out before it went.

The last archived response from wiki.vg is a 301, timestamped 30 November 2024 at 18:55:21. After that the Internet Archive has nothing at all from the host for eighteen months.

~ what replaced it ~

This one did not get lost, which separates it from most of what gets written here. Kennedy exported the whole wiki in MediaWiki's XML format under CC-BY-SA, images included, and the Minecraft Wiki imported it with the revision history intact. The pages landed in a project namespace rather than the mainspace while categories get fixed and links get repointed, and the merge project is still open two years later. Roughly 150 pages came across.

The content also kept its license and therefore its contributors' names. Anyone who wrote a packet description on wiki.vg in 2013 is still credited for it on minecraft.wiki today, under the same username, in a page history that now spans two wikis and two decades.

~ what the host answers now ~

Kennedy said the domain would redirect to the archive long-term, partly to keep it out of the hands of anyone who would abuse its reputation. That is not what it does. In 2026 http://wiki.vg/ answers 200 with the stock "Welcome to nginx!" page, and the HTTPS version does not answer at all. Request any path under it and an Apache instance returns a 404 naming itself. So two different web servers are running on a hostname with no site behind either of them, and a status checker reading only the response code reports wiki.vg as up.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »