KittyCatWiki

The KittyCatWiki (or KCW) is a major Aaron franchise fan wiki. It was one of the first fan wikis on the internet, launched in August 2000, predating Wikipedia by five months.

History
KCW was predated by a site called the “UnOfficial Aaron Show Database” or “UOASD”, ran on a Geocities page and launched in 1996. The site was run by volunteers from the “alt.tv.argosy.aaronshow” Usenet group, and encouraged fans to email contributions, updates, and corrections.

In 1999, after Geocities was bought out by Yahoo, UOASD left the platform in protest, and migrated all content to its own hosting, under the domain “uoasd.kittycat.net”, run by longtime fan Amber Hawke, or “KittyCat”.

UOASD admin Terry Main, or “CunningLinguist”, found out about the wiki concept through early wiki sites, WikiWikiWeb and MeatballWiki, in mid-2000, and successfully encouraged Hawke to create a wiki based on UOASD content, using the UseMod platform at first. This became the KittyCatWiki, or KCW; the name came from the fact that it was initially hosted on “wiki.kittycat.net” (it is currently hosted at “kittycatwiki.net” since 2007).

Jimmy Wales was an early contributor to KCW, and was encouraged by either Hawke or Main to create a wiki version of his encyclopedia project, Nupedia, known as “Wikipedia”. The development of Wikipedia encouraged that of KittyCatWiki; in 2005, KCW switched from UseMod to the MediaWiki software originally designed for Wikipedia.