Hello guys, gals and everything in between. I'm John, but more importantly I'm the founder of the Modern Family Wiki. I'm not a huge fan of blogs, both reading and writing (on account of they're super boring), but this was long overdue. This post might be a bit long, and as your about to find out I have terrible grammar, but I've wanted to address the success of this wiki for quite some time. So sit down, grab your reading glasses and be prepared to laugh at a grown man who's grasp of the English language and sentence structure would make even Luke and Lilly roll on the floor laughing.
It was about five years ago. I had saw a commercial for a new show coming out called Modern Family and decided that it would be added to my list of shows to try. The day had finally came and I was ready to give it a shot. It didn't take me long at all to fall in love with the cast, writing and locations. I still remember the exact moment that I decided there had to be a fan made wiki, it was during the scene the Dunphy's were trying to decide what time would be best for Phil to shoot Luke with a B.B. gun. I was hooked.
The day I started this site I immediately was in over my head. These wiki's seem to run themselves, thanks to the great community of fans, but starting one was unlike anything I had done online before. I truly wouldn't have been able to do it without a handful of very key users here on the wiki, as well as A LOT of dedicated help from some good friends I met working on the TV show LOST's wiki. Without Lostpedia the Modern Family Wiki wouldn't have had such a smooth start. They helped with letting me know what pages HAD to be added as well as hours worth of code writing. The tables we use to this day are products of Lostpedia and the help from there operators. We would be the wild west if we didn't adopt their policies, we also wouldn't have about 1/4 of the fancy features you can find here.
It didn't take long for the wiki to draw in some attention. Within a week we already had a load of users, but they weren't just regular users, they were some of the best helpers this wiki has seen. They put in hours and hours of edits that I just couldn't do by myself. The system operators here are something else as well. Without the operators this entire place would be littered with more unrelated garbage then we could imagine. This is where the community has helped a lot as well, but I'll get to that in a bit. Between the operators, users and Wikia staff this wiki is better then I pictured it and I really, really couldn't be happier with how it's turning out.
Now on to the community. You guys are the best. That's all I can really say. I never imagined that people would actually come visit our site here, but you guys go above and beyond every day. I don't even know where to start. I'm amazed at everyone from the users who edit from their IP just to fix an error, to the people who start up a wiki account just to come and help us add content that we weren't able to get around to at the time. Without you guys we would just have a bunch of blank pages and article stubs. I also would like to thank our affiliated wikis, thanks to them we immediately saw in increase in web traffic and it's helped a lot (Don't forget to check out their sites, link can be found at the bottom of the home page).
Last week we saw web traffic totals around 43,000 people for the week. To most larger websites this doesn't mean anything, but to me personally, this is the most amazing thing I've seen here. I really can't believe that so many people were able to make their way here, and it means so much to me. I used to be proud of my YouTube channel with 150 views (all of which seemed to be from Australia), but what I've seen this site do is unbelievable. It's really an honor knowing that we all put all this together and that so many people are seeing what we've done. We create pages, add images and do so much research and almost 50k people get to see what we've done. That's an overwhelming honor to this guy at least.
To finish this up I would, once again, like to thank everyone. From the editors to the admins, the readers to the comment section fans. Even the vandals brought us together as a group, almost like a band of brothers that's fueled by the hatred of people without real hobbies (Side note - please stop swearing at the vandals, it's just more work for me haha). I should also thank the Wikia staff. Thanks to them this wiki has stayed current with the most modern system available as well as all the coding that goes into making this site look like it wasn't created in '95. Every single person is essential here, and without you guys (besides the vandals) we would just have blank pages and no actual information. I'm a very busy person now and I'm not always adding critical information, but I read the recent changes every day and every day I grow more proud of what we've created here.