Saga Who all is responsible for saga world-building?

Is the world building done as a collective thing? As in, in blah-blah EU book it was necessary to construct a history of Sienar Fleet Systems, and so it just gets inserted as canon, etc. Or was there a dedicated Lucasfilm group pecking away and constructing elements before canonized media stuff made its debut? Or was all of it in at least a general fashion in GL's head from day one, and simply appeared online as soon as the Internet became THE thing?

It just seemed like that one day (for me), everything about everything within the Star Wars galaxy was on wookiepedia. It's soooo much stuff. Where did it come from?

Thanks!

 

Originally it came from George Lucas's films and the novelizations. There was a secondary canon in the Marvel Comics series that some fans appreciated, adn there were a few side novels, but the three films were basically it. Some ancillary materials came out in the fan newsletter Bantha Tracks and merchandise like games or toys.

The first popularly available attempt to make a system out of it with some encyclopedic coverage was the table top role-playing game by West End Games. I personally disliked some of the decisions they made, and didn't care for some of the writing in the sourcebooks, but it was mined heavily by Tim Zahn when he brought out his Thrawn series of novels set after "Return of the Jedi." So while not every fan acknowledged it, the beginnings of an encyclopedic resource were in the game. It introduced the name "Basic" for the galaxy's lingua franca and it named various characters and species, gave them a background, and defined some of the technical rules of the setting for game play.

Lucasfilm licensed a mass of materials beginning in 1991 especially, which didn't always agree with each other and varied greatly in quality (I think almost any fan will agree with that point) but anyway, for points not established in the movies, the many licesned novels and comics added up to a stockpile of information available for fan encyclopedists. Lucas himself considered all of the expanded universe material secondary, but when Disney bought it all these materials were rebranded as "legends." There have been a few television series, mostly animated, and television specials. Lucas Arts also made some very popular video games which sometimes added characters or ideas to this deutero-canon.

My impression since the beginning has been that fans have picked and chosen among these things, and again they didn't always fit together. New movies often steamrolled over the side materials, because Lucas considered them secondary and didn't feel obligated to take them into account. What fits with the movies, some fans like to keep. Of course Disney era Lucasfilm has tried to create an integrated canon of everything without stepping on its own toes but I think it already contradicts itself. You just naturally get a flood of material when you keep licensing novels and comics and shows and so forth.

*For reference, the RPG came out in 1987