About → Awards This page is designed to catalog various awards given to Memory Alpha in the course of its mission.
Ex Astris Excellentia award - September 2005[]
The Ex Astris Excellentia award
In September 2005, Memory Alpha was awarded the Ex Astris Excellentia award by Bernd Schneider of Ex Astris Scientia.
When the project was launched in November 2003, the ambitious goal of Memory Alpha was "to become the largest, most reliable, and most up-to-date encyclopedia about everything related to the Star Trek universe". It is time to declare that this objective has been accomplished. With its sheer size of currently 24,922 pages and 6,826 registered contributors Memory Alpha dwarfs any other attempt to create a Trek-related database online. There are spin-offs in Dutch, German and Swedish. Memory Alpha is the biggest and most successful site hosted at Wikia. And it's being expanded and improved every minute! Only collaborative work can accomplish that. This award goes to all contributors of Memory Alpha, but especially to the two founders, Dan Carlson and Harry Doddema.
Science Fiction Weekly - Site of the Week - October 10, 2005[]
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On 10 October 2005, the Sci-Fi Channel's newsletter, Science Fiction Weekly, awarded Memory Alpha their Site of the Week award.
When it comes to pondering four decades of Star Trek, an auxiliary brain could be helpful. The official continuity, combined with the myriad divergences introduced by everyone from writers to modelers to customers, is staggeringly large, but Memory Alpha manages to keep it all straight, thanks to an armada of helpful fans.
The site is a wiki, an encyclopedia-like online construct that allows anyone – administrators, regular readers, casual visitors – to add, update and correct articles. And add they have – the site is composed of just over 14,000 pages, seemingly covering every Star Trek facet imaginable. Episodes and movies from all the series get the royal treatment, with extensive summaries peppered with hyperlinks to related topics. The entry for the classic time-looping Next Generation episode "Cause And Effect" includes links to all the main characters, the role of the senior staff on a starship, the temporally unstable Typhon Expanse, subatomic dekyon particles and the USS Bozeman, among dozens of others.
The amount of detail in each entry can be impressive. For example, the writeup on the aforementioned USS Bozeman references the origin of its name (Bozeman, Mont.) and its contradictory registry numbers and explains its appearance in the Trek universe several times after "Cause and Effect," including the TNG episode "All Good Things", Star Trek Generations and Star Trek: First Contact.
As with most wikis, the site's home page has a weekly featured article as well as a "did you know" list displaying an assortment of facts from deep with in the site's core. These make for excellent jumping-off points, but visitors can also make use of its established categories for episodes and movies, society and culture, science and technology, other media, people, space travel and hardware and fandom.
Entertainment Weekly - 25 Best Fansites - December 2007[]
In December 2007, the US entertainment magazine Entertainment Weekly named Memory Alpha as the 11th best fansite on the web.
11. Star Trek
memory-alpha.org
Launch Date November 2003
What You'll Find The wiki-based Memory Alpha is truly the final frontier when it comes to online Star Trek info. Fans can quickly scan (and even update) news and TV listings, read articles on Andorians and Krieger waves, and further their Starfleet knowledge via complete profiles of minor but memorable characters (Boothby!) and starships (Excelsior!).
Why It's Essential There are plenty of other Trek fansites floating out there in cyberspace, but Memory Alpha wins out for its handsome, intuitive presentation and its overwhelming mass – it even has copies of the old Trek newspaper comic strip from the early 1980s.
MakeUseOf.com - The 10 Best Sites To Go On A Star Trek & Become A Trekkie - December 7, 2010[]
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On 7 December 2010, tech website MakeUseOf.com listed Memory Alpha second in its list of The 10 Best Sites To Go On A Star Trek & Become A Trekkie.
Memory Alpha is a seriously authored and moderated wiki on everything and anything that's Star Trek. Think of it as a collaborative encyclopedia (32,427 pages) on Star Trek. The name is taken from the Federation's library of knowledge. You can browse the different portals that cover people, technology, arts – the entire Star Trek universe.
Memory Alpha also publishes breaking news and if you aren't careful, you may be hit with a spoiler or two.
Another mention[]
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And, on 28 November 2011, MakeUseOf.com singled out Memory Alpha once again in an article titled Check Out These 6 Sci-Fi Wikis To Kill Some Time On:
Trekkies, I was going to write something clever utilizing the phrase, "Beam me up, Scotty," but then I realized the phrase isn't actually canon. Speaking of canon, Memory Alpha is a comprehensive wiki of all things true to the Star Trek story arc.
With at least 33,494 articles held in the servers of Memory Alpha, you could spend forever reading up on the history and details of Star Trek. It also might be good to mention that the wiki includes data (pun intended) from all the TV shows, the films, and yes, the animated series.