Ten Years of MDN Awesomeness

Some ten (10) years ago, Mozilla launched the original MDN (Mozilla Developer Network) wiki site — 23 July 2005. Currently, MDN has more than 4 million users per month and has more than 1,000 volunteer editors worldwide. Here’s a chronology of events surrounding the MDN:

• 2005: Mozilla obtained a license from AOL to use content from Netscape’s DevEdge site. The DevEdge content was mined for still‐useful material, which was then migrated by volunteers into a wiki so it would be easier to update and maintain. The new wiki was launched in July 2005 as Mozilla Developer Center (MDC), also known as “devmo,” shorthand for its domain name, “developer.mozilla.org.”
• 2010: The name was changed to Mozilla Developer Network (MDN), reflecting the site’s growth into a nexus for all developer documentation related to the Mozilla Project and open web technologies.
• 2011: A “Demo Studio” section was added for web developers to share and show off their code, along with learning pages to provide links to tutorials.
• 2014: The basic learning pages have been expanded into “Learn the Web” content for beginning web developers, including a web terminology glossary, which Mozilla staff and volunteers will continue to develop over the next few years.

Key facts about the MDN:

• Original MDN wiki site launched on 23 July, 2005
• Today it is one of the richest resources on the Web for documentation with 34,500 documents and climbing
• Currently MDN has about 4,2 million users per month
• More than 20,000 contributors have made about 510,000 edits to date
• 1000+ people edit MDN every month
• So far, MDN editors created 13,200 English pages and made 21,200 translations in 42 locales
• 142 HTML elements documented, including all standard elements in HTML5, still experimental ones like
  and never‐standard, deprecated ones like (for historical reference).
• 275 CSS properties documented, covering 60+ CSS‐related specifications, many of which are still being defined for example, writing‐mode, which controls whether lines of text are horizontal (such as for Latin and most other alphabets) or vertical (for Japanese and Chinese characters)
• 300+ web terminology glossary
• 90+ articles for complete beginners and learners in the “Learn the Web” section, e.g. explaining the basic difference between a webpage, a website, a web server, and a search engine.