History of Marspedia

Marspedia was founded in 2007 to provide information on Mars to the general worldwide public, using a free & open wiki-based platform, similar to Wikipedia. Marspedia was initially funded and set up by the Moon Society/Artemis Society International (ASI), and was set up at the same time as several other space-themed wikis. Marspedia was hosted on a personal account owned by a Moon Society member. The domain name MARSPEDIA.ORG is owned by the Mars Foundation and provided to the Moon Society at that time for the project.

In 2011, The Mars Society and The Mars Foundation, officially joined the Marspedia project and the front page was edited to reflect that Marspedia was now an official project of both of these organizations. Technical ownership of the domain and hosting remained unchanged at this time. In August 2017, an agreement was reached between principals of the three organizations to transition the ownership of the domains and web hosting to the Mars Society for permanent upkeep. This was done by the end of August and the wiki was moved to the Mars Society web host, secured, and modernized by James Burk (jburk), Webmaster and IT Director for the Mars Society.

On September 13, 2017, the Moon Society's leadership committee officially designated James Gholston (strangelv) (of Texas) to be the Moon Society's official representative for Marspedia. James Burk (of Washington State) has similarly been designed the official representative from the Mars Society. Bruce Mackenzie (of Massachusetts) is the owner and principal of the Mars Foundation and represents that organization.

In September 2017, these three individuals met multiple times to work out a bylaws framework with the expectation that they would be forming a larger group to administer and maintain Marspedia.

In October 2017, the Marspedia Governing Council was officially formed, comprised of ten Council members from Mars Society, Moon Society, and Mars Foundation. Susan Holden Martin was elected as Chair.

In March 2018, Susan Holden Martin resigned to focus on a new full-time job and James Burk was elevated from Vice Chair to Chair. This was confirmed on March 30, 2018. We also added two new Council members Kerri Miller and Frank Crossman, and approved a new logo for Marspedia that was created by Paul Conrad.

In May 2018, the Marspedia Editorial Subcommittee approved a new set of categories, and began work to re-categorize and review all existing articles, as well as to re-design the Browse page and create a Category Selector/Picker inside of the VisualEditor to ease this work.

In August 2018, James Burk and Frank Crossman presented on Marspedia at the annual Mars Society Convention.

In March 2019, the Category Picker was completed by Josh Baldwin and rolled out to the production site.