Cheese-E-Pedia

Cheese-E-Pedia, (formerly Decode-Document-Digitize Wiki, Chuck E. Encyclopedia, and Chuck E. Pedia) is an open-source animatronics wikipedia that launched on July 14th, 2022, now running through the Hugo static-site generation platform.

Cheese-E-Pedia’s goal is to archive everything that has happened in the 50+ year timespan of every major FEC animatronics company. No topic, item, or idea will be left undocumented, and every piece of data in the public’s hands will be preserved and archived. Every item is believed to deserve its own page to allow community members to delve into a topic as much as they would like, promoting community involvement from the wide range of enthusiasts and fans. Its information is free to copy and re-host (Under CC BY-SA 4.0).

History

The site launched to private access in November of 2021, where 7 community members would spend the next eight months building the infrastructure of the site. The site was run on Mediawiki and hosted on Miraheze. They would discuss the layout of categories, create articles, build standards and formats for articles, and begin to gather exclusive and thoroughly researched information for the legitimization of the site.

On July 10th, 2022, the site would be announced in the Cheese-E-Pedia Discord Server (Then called Pizza Time Techs), set to release the next week. The actual release would arrive early on July 14th, launching without issue. Initial throughput of articles and changes were slow, though picked up by the end of the year.

On November 17th, Miraheze would lose all files to CEP, moving to a prior backup from August of 2022, erasing everything publically contributed outside the first few weeks from the initial launch. Articles would be rewritten and restored from services like the Wayback Machine and Yandex. On December 19th, 2022, Miraheze would confirm the data was recovered and would be implemented soon. The implementation would occur on December 31st, though with merging issues from the newer articles.

The site would continue to see improvements to its layout and functionality through plugins, alongside many more user contributions. The site would reach 1000 articles on July 4th, 2023. In May of 2024 CEP would be mentioned by The Charlotte Ledger in an article.

In early September of 2024, plans would be made to move the wiki off of Mediawiki onto a statically generated site. This would allow the site’s commit history to be backed up on Github, allow any user to backup and make local copies of the site, and let the design and layout of the site not be confined to Mediawiki’s formatting. CEP would fully move over on September 24th, 2024. Many issues would arise with the move, particularly with retention of images in the migration, and issues with aquanting users to making articles through Github and Visual Studio Code.

By early December Decap CMS would be implemented on the wiki, allowing users a more easily accessible way to edit articles, now only requiring a GitHub account. 2025 would see constant iterations on the site’s layout, improvements to Decap, and approval of moderators to accept article commits. Due to many issues with Decap’s reliability, it was eventually discovered that a fork called Sveltia-CMS was soon to release that would hopefully alleviate the current problems, though the service was continually delayed for its launch throughout the year.

On April 30th, 2025, after discourse surrounding actions taken by Discord, an alternative community server for the wiki was hosted on Revolt. This test would end on July 3rd after low activity and a user-pool of only around 90.

On July 22nd, the entire wiki would have its article formats converted from HTML to Markdown to allow much easier editing. A live Markdown editor would also soon be included on Decap.

On September 6th, the entirety of all articles tagged ‘Location’ would have their text wiped. This was due to a vast majority of the articles being old, outdated, uncited, and not within standards. Parameters for locations would be mass updated for better accuracy, and the articles would begin to be remade one by one.

Changes Timeline

2021

2022

2023

2024

2025

Planned Upcoming Changes

History of CEC Information Before CEP

The start of the Chuck E. Cheese and ShowBiz Pizza Place fandom would begin in the late 90’s, with the keystone of the fandom being showbizpizza.com and its host, Travis Schafer. This site would begin as a general hub for pictures and info, but would grow into the main historical documentation hub for all things CEC and SPP. In 2000, the owner of spp.com would then open showbizpizzaforum.com, a place for the fandom to congregate and discuss. Lots of threads slowly piecing together the history of the company, alongside trading and sharing lost media, would occur throughout the forum, later being documented on the main spp.com website. This would continue into the early 2010’s as the fandom grew, before being cut short in November 2014, where adware would infect the host forum and render the site useless. The forum would be shut down and never brought back online. Around the same time, work on the spp.com site would slow down, with new documents, articles, videos, and other related media stopped being archived. Major items and breakthroughs would still appear throughout the years, mainly in 2015, 2017, and 2018, but work on general pages and documentation of the company’s current work would stop altogether. Due to the site’s owner being the only one with access to write pages for the site, none of the community was able to contribute further when the owner did not have the time to. Just a month before the forum’s demise, however, a new forum was created on the Zetaboards platform called Retro Pizza Zone. All the fandom members would flock to the new site, leaving the old forums without any proper archive. Discussion and growth would continue as usual, with lots of threads being made on a variety of historical topics. Just two years later though many major members of the boards would leave for Instagram, beginning the decline of the forum alongside general lack of interest in the fandom after disappointing events from the Chuck E. Cheese company themselves. Similar to the old forums, however, the new forum would also be hit with an immediate change that would ruin its appeal altogether in July 2018. Zetaboards would merge with the site Tapatalk, turning all old forums into an ad-ridden, slower, and more bloated UI. This would dispel members to social media sites and messenger apps, mainly Instagram and Discord. Prior to this in 2016, a Google spreadsheet would begin being worked on by CEC Master that would document the Chuck E. Cheese stores opening that year. This would greatly be expanded upon to include all stores and by 2020 would be publically released as the ‘Official Every Location Ever List - Open During Construction’. While not visible to the public, it would be shared around the fandom as the first collection of proper info for all known locations, still being worked on to current day. Due to the lack of a dedicated forum, little progress being made on the info site, and a sharp decline in the interest of the company’s current output, a centralized place for documentation of all historical info wouldn’t be anywhere for enthusiastic members to go to. Most info would instead be shared amongst users in group chats and social media, leaving critical pieces scattered amongst the internet and in private discussions. Cheese-E-Pedia is now the new centralized place for community members to begin documenting years of info that was held stagnant due to many circumstances, alongside allowing categories for archiving new information previously unexplored. The open nature of the platform should also ensure that any member of the community can contribute to information, getting areas done faster and allowing enthusiasts to write about their niche no matter the outward circumstances of the fandom and its general interest. Previous sites and forums however are still great resources for citing sources, reading, and finding topics yet to be detailed on the wiki. It would not be without the previous 20 years of hard work that the current community would be existing and thriving in archived content.