Wiki profiles Marvel comic characters
Wiki profiles Marvel comic characters

By Matthew Price
Published: June 15, 2007

For movie viewers or comic readers who want more in-depth information about Marvel Comics' characters —such as the Silver Surfer, from the new movie "Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer” — Jamie Hari's Marvel Database is a one-stop shop.

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"We have the largest count of Marvel characters, somewhere in the tune of five digits, more than 10,000 Marvel Comics characters that they have (intellectual) property for,” said Hari, editor-in-chief of the site.

Marvel Database, located online at marveldatabase.com is built on the same wiki software that is used by Wikipedia, and is hosted by wikia.com, an online community for user-edited databases that was founded by Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley of Wikipedia. Marveldatabase.com is one of the 10 most active wikis hosted at Wikia.

Hari said the site gets between 6,000 and 7,000 visitors daily.

"We tend to get a spike in traffic every time a movie comes out,” Hari said.

"When ‘Spider-Man 3' came out on May 4, not Spider-Man but Venom was the most popular page for quite some time, because I think people who are not comic fans, yet movie fans, didn't know too much about him, so they wanted to read up. Typically it's the heavy hitters, it's your Wolverines, it's your Magnetos, it's your Spider-Mans. It's the big ones that have their own comic series.”

Hari said with the "Fantastic Four” release, he expected an increase in the traffic to the "Fantastic Four” and "Silver Surfer” pages.

"I'm looking at the Silver Surfer page right now,” Hari said. "Silver Surfer is what's called a herald of Galactus — he's a big bad cosmic entity — and you see the words ‘Galactus' in the article, that's obviously a link, and it takes you over to the Galactus article.”

Hari, 24, of Waterloo, Ontario, said marveldatabase.com just crossed 21,000 pages of online information.

Comic fans worldwide help Hari keep the information up-to-date.

"I think last month we got 9,000 edits,” Hari said. "We don't allow anonymous edits, but all you have to do is register an account.”

Hari said a team of 10 to 12 administrators keep an eye on the edits to keep the site as accurate as possible.

He said Marvel Comics was fine with his attempt to encyclopedically categorize the company's thousands of characters.

"Before I started the project, I wanted to clear it with Marvel from a legal standpoint. I told them what I was doing, and how I was planning on doing it,” Hari said. "And they said, ‘That's great, go nuts. Try not to infringe on us, and put links to marvel.com,' and I said no problem.”

Each page has a discussion page attached, if questions arise about particular content. Other tags notify administrators of potential issues. They also will sometimes "lock” a version of a page during times of peak interest.

Not only does marveldata

base.com feature a directory of characters, it also has a directory of comics. Searchable by year or title, browsers can find covers or information about particular comic-book issues.

"We're trying to amass every piece of knowledge about these comics possible,” Hari said.