The Memory Alpha project had its beginnings in September 2003, when Harry Doddema suggested the idea of adapting the very successful structure and organization of Wikipedia for the creation of an open-source Star Trek database. In the past, most Trek reference sites had been run by individuals or small groups, or were massive, unwieldy, difficult to search, and run by closed organizations (such as the official Star Trek website's database).
At the same time, Dan Carlson had been approaching the same problem from the opposite angle. Dan had slowly been building a personal Star Trek database, called Starfleet Reference Databank, for nearly ten years. However, it was still far from complete because of continuing limitations — a database still far from completion — Dan was ultimately facing the fact that creating a truly useful Trek database required more time and effort than any one person could reasonably contribute.
The project first began on November 11, 2003, when Harry and Dan started setting up the Memory Alpha software. It was decided that for the sake of simplicity, an existing wiki engine would be used rather than spend time creating one from scratch. Originally, Memory Alpha used TikiWiki as the wiki engine, but after about a week of development, it was decided that the software was too slow and unwieldy for the project's needs. The existing database content (still in its infant stages) was transferred to the MediaWiki engine, which was much more streamlined and oriented towards pure wiki content. In addition, MediaWiki had several features of wiki management that TikiWiki did not, mainly in the realm of text formatting and article organization.
Memory Alpha was officially announced on December 5, 2003 following a brief beta-testing period. The membership gradually grew over the next several weeks, and first gained the spotlight when the project was mentioned by TrekToday on December 23.
On January 12, 2004, Memory Alpha passed its first major milestone, when the 1,000th article was created — less than two months after the project had begun.
On March 23, 2004, Memory Alpha suffered a major setback when the database was accidentally deleted during an upgrade of the MediaWiki software. A backup of the database was fortunately available, but that backup was already six weeks out of date. That problem, however, did not stop the Archivists from picking up the pieces and forging ahead, to make Memory Alpha even better than before!
Memory Alpha finally got its own domain name and server account in early April 2004. (It had previously been hosted on a subdomain of Dan's website, Star Trek Minutiae.) The hosting account was provided by Erik Moeller, one of the primary developers of the MediaWiki software. The move gave Memory Alpha the opportunity to grow much larger than before, and also eliminated the problems related to poor service provided by the previous host.
The expansion of Memory Alpha continued in April and May with the addition of multilingual editions of Memory Alpha. The Dutch edition was founded on April 10, 2004, and the German edition was founded on May 14, 2004. (See Start a new edition in another language.)