Wiki

NetHackWiki is a wiki; it is a web site that allows all readers, including you, to edit almost any page. The process is simple: click "edit" at the top of a page, make some changes in the box that appears, and then save them.

If this seems strange (or if wiki seems familiar, but NetHackWiki seems strange), you might want to experiment by editing the NetHackWiki:Sandbox. If you want to learn about this wiki, read About. The remainder of this page concerns the origin of wikis, from the perspective of this wiki.

Founding of this wiki

Though many other wikis have had pages about NetHack, we are not aware of any attempts to start a NetHack wiki before 2004.

Magnus Nilsson started a different NetHack wiki, formerly at riters.com, on 3 September 2004, in response to an rgrn suggestion by xanthian. Though not much content appeared there, its "recent changes" page did feature a random (true!) NetHack fortune. Within a few months, spammers overran the wiki.

User:Sgeo started this wiki (then called WikiHack) on Wikia on 11 October 2005. Editors immediately began the task of SeedPosting the wiki to encourage the development of many detailed articles.

When Wikia changed their terms and their wiki skin, the admins of the WikiHack decided to make a change, and on 8 November 2010 the wiki was moved to the server where nethack.alt.org resides. It continues to live in Amazon AWS next to the NAO instances.

Right now we have 4,480 articles.