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 24922 pages and 6826 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
Screenshot.
On October 10, 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 U.S.S. 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 Start Trek: First Contact [sic].
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.