GTA Wiki:History

Origins
In 2006, Thai420 founded the GTA.wikia.com wiki here on Wikia (now Fandom.com).

There was already a more comprehensive, privately run wiki, founded and owned by Gboyers (previously known as Xenon) at GrandTheftWiki.com. In May 2007, negotiations began to forge a co-operative partnership between the two.

Merge in 2007
In late 2007, Gboyers sold GrandTheftWiki to Wikia and the contents and users of the two wiki were successfully merged. The new combined wiki was then run as the "Grand Theft Wiki" at gta.wikia.com by these two Bureaucrats and various other staff and many dedicated contributors for the next three years. Thai420 stopped contributing in late 2008, and Gboyers assumed sole "founder" status. Grand Theft Auto IV and Grand Theft Auto: Episodes from Liberty City were released and documented on the merged wiki in this period, along with the continued expansion of content for the older games.

Split in 2010
Fast forward to late 2010, and discontent with Wikia came to a head, due primarily to the "Oasis" skin changes to all wikis on Wikia. This was perceived to be focused more on advertising revenue gathering than usability, and Gboyers successfully re-negotiated directly with Wikia founder Angela Beesley to copy the entire content of the wiki as it stood in November 2010 back to his own domain at grandtheftwiki.com.

Wikia naturally reserved the right to continue hosting the wiki as it had done prior to the merge and some contributors elected to stay here at this wiki, which was renamed GTA Wiki.

This obviously caused some animosity between the two communities as spelled out further in the split documentation. For a while, the content here at GTA Wiki was subjected to mis-directed attempts to focus on other aspects of the GTA community (i.e. Modding). These issues were eventually resolved, and each wiki continued to operate independently, adding their own content. Grandtheftwiki.com were permitted to copy content from gta.wikia.com with proper attribution, but copying the other way was, and still is, prohibited by the staff of grandtheftwiki.

The Wiki in 2020
Contributors and staff have come and gone regularly since 2010, and Wikia is now Fandom, but the GTA Wiki community has continued to try our best to focus on the presentation of the factual content of the Grand Theft Auto series. We have added content for Grand Theft Auto V original and Enhanced Version, and we continue to keep up to date with all Grand Theft Auto Online content as soon it is released, as well as continuously enhancing and further expanding upon the existing content for the older titles.

There are many pages that have had little to no changes here since 2010 though, so these will still appear more or less identical to the corresponding page on Grandtheftwiki, which unfortunately is no longer being actively updated.

The Future
We now await the announcement of the next installment in the series, whatever it shall be called, and look forward to the future growth of GTA Wiki and the 22 other (non-English language) GTA Wiki versions here on Fandom.com, some of which are direct translations of some of the content here, while others are completely independent of the English wiki.