Stop using Fandom (Script)

The Hollow Knight wiki has officially moved to a brand new website “hollowknight.wiki”, leaving behind the previous wiki at hollowknight.fandom.com. The old Fandom wiki will no longer be updated by the same team who did an excellent job contributing to and building it up. So if you ever need to look up the location of a pale ore or for some reason don’t remember one of Zote’s precepts, please look it up using the new wiki. Also, if you’re on desktop, you should consider downloading the Indie Wiki Buddy extension, which will redirect all Hollow Knight Fandom links to the new wiki.

You may be wondering why the Hollow Knight wiki community chose to leave behind a site they had already established. The answer lies with the company hosting that original Hollow Knight wiki, Fandom. Fandom is a wikifarm, or basically a website that hosts multiple wikis. The company was founded in 2004 under the name WikiCities in part by Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia. The name was eventually changed to Wikia in 2006 and finally Fandom in 2016. Despite its similar origins to Wikipedia, Fandom is a completely different site. Fandom is a for-profit company, and is held to an entirely different standard than Wikipedia.

Fandom’s success as a wikifarm is difficult to deny, with the company hosting a reported quarter million unique wikis ranging from the largest entertainment IPs in the world, to small burgeoning indie communities, to bizarre but popular niches to complete and utter shitposts. Fandom’s reach on pop culture is gargantuan, and the wikis hosted on their site have an insane amount of reach.

But over the last several years, a number of wiki communities have decided to part ways with Fandom. Recent years has seen the departures of Zelda Wiki, Fallout Wiki, Terraria Wiki, ARK Survival Evolved Wiki, Arthur Wiki, Noita Wiki, Jojo’s Bizarre Encyclopedia, RuneScape Wiki, Diary of a Wimpy Kid Wiki, Rhythm Heaven Wiki, and most notably, Croc Wiki.

And as of just a few weeks ago, the massive Minecraft Wiki finished moving off of Fandom as well, with members of the community citing reasons to leave as aggressive ads and branding, degraded readers’ experience, and the infamous Grimace Incident.

But just how bad is Fandom, you may ask? If you poke around various internet threads and forum posts, it won’t take long to find numerous complaints about Fandom’s website. The most common complaint is the website’s aggressive ads. Giant video ads will appear at the very top of the page, which will pop out and follow you as you scroll down. Once the ad is finished, the video player will then start auto playing some random Fandom content that often has nothing to do with the wiki you're on. The experience is even worse on mobile, where precious screen real estate is devoured by numerous ads and pop ups.

Fandom also likes to put distracting features on pages as well, such as things like Fandom Trivia, little quizzes you can take to test your knowledge on various media franchises, as well as be subjected to about a dozen different banner ads. They also like to push completely unrelated wikis on the wiki you’re in as a form of cross promotion.

They even stick ads and other random junk inserted into the middle of articles. Like this page on Team Cherry just has a GameSpot Expert Review from 2018 shoved into the middle of it. Despite it already being shoved into the top corner of the page higher up. This same video is also on like every other page on this entire wiki. I’m honestly not exactly sure why you would ever be looking for a review of Hollow Knight if you’re already on the wiki. But it makes a lot more sense when you consider that GameSpot is owned by Fandom.

The final straw for the Hollow Knight wiki community in particular was the introduction of AI generated “quick answers” that were added to numerous wiki pages and were filled with completely wrong information. Did you know that the White Lady gives the Knight the Deithwen, a powerful enchanted weapon? Or that Hornet is shipped with Yorktown (her older sister), Enterprise (her older sister) and the Eagle Union? These quick answers were implemented by Fandom without warning, and community admins had no ability to remove them from their wikis. Fandom quickly removed this feature due to extremely vocal backlash, but they haven’t completely canned it, hoping to reintroduce the system later on, without any clear word on whether or not communities will be able to turn it off.

Another example of Fandom shoving things people don’t want on their site is this sidebar, which is always displayed on the side of any wiki page you visit. That way you’re always just one click away from Fandom’s anime page. Which is just links to a bunch of popular anime wikis as well as the Honest Trailer for the 2008 anime classic Speed Racer. This sounds a bit random but it makes a lot more sense when you consider that ScreenJunkies is owned by Fandom.

You can also access the beta for Fandom’s new Fan Central, which is some kind of strange social media feed where you follow specific fandoms. There are lots of posts, but they don’t seem to get much engagement at all, but who knows, maybe this will be what finally kills Twitter. For some reason, I get a lot of posts from the Funkipedia Mods fandom. Glad to see they’re still kicking in the year of our lord 2023.

Because Fandom likes to insert all these ads and video elements and other random crap into their website, they also restrict how a wiki is allowed to look. Fandom, along with pretty much every wiki on the internet, is built on the open source software MediaWiki. But Fandom is far more restrictive of how a community can layout and style their wiki. And many administration features are blocked behind Fandom representatives, limiting creative choice among wiki communities.

A good example of this is Fandom’s policy towards community moderation and user verification. Fandom does provide some protection against vandalism, but the options are limited. Outside of a complete page lockdown for everyone except admins, which is not a good long term solution, any page protection on Fandom can be passed by users who are verified, a process which happens automatically four days after an account is created and registered.

Fandom wants to keep the bar for access to edit wikis low, since they believe that wikis belong to the community, and everyone should be allowed to contribute. This is actually fairly reasonable, but it doesn’t quite work as well for fandoms composed primarily of shitposters. Case in point, Pizza Tower.

Vandalism became a huge concern for the Pizza Tower Wiki in the summer of 2023. Due to the average Pizza Tower fan being approximately 11 months old, the wiki became overrun with people inserting memes into pages. The constant vandalism drove the moderators to fork the wiki and move it to a different wiki farm website entirely, Miraheze. 

Of course, you’ll find vandals attempting to deface any wiki site. If you didn’t know that, welcome to the Internet. P;ease leave before you learn what the word bussy means. Every wiki has to deal with vandalism in one form or another. But if your wiki is on Fandom, it’s not just vandals that might show up to deface your articles. It might be a mega corporation looking to advertise their newest product.

Long ago in the summer of 2023 McDonald’s released a Grimace Shake to celebrate the birthday of McDonald’s anti-hero mascot Grimace. The Grimace Shake was a huge success, beloved by people all over the world. Just look at all these happy faces. But there’s a more sinister side to this corporate marketing stunt.

To help promote the Grimace Shake event, McDonalds paid Fandom to alter the Grimace article on the McDonald’s wiki, distorting it into one big advertisement. Fandom replaced the independent research done by volunteers with what I can only describe as Grimace propaganda. His ass is not driving that car.

Even the front page of the McDonald’s wiki wasn’t safe from Grimace’s grubby paws. The entire front page became a paid promotion, with adverts luring visitors to download the McDonald’s app, and a commercial where Brian Cox demanded helpless viewers to partake in the drinking of the Grimace shake. 

Get Grimace’s birthday shake with 10 piece McNuggets or a Big Mac when you order Grimace’s birthday meal. If you move against me, I’ll put a hole in the back of your fucking head.

The front page of a wiki is arguably the most sacred and important of them all, with editing rights usually restricted only to the admins themselves. To change that to a giant advertisement, well… To quote a wise man, what a joke.

One of the prominent contributors to the Grimace wiki page shared his frustrations on Twitter, pointing out the clear ethical quandaries related to Fandom replacing actual articles with advertisements. It sets a dangerous precedent for how Fandom is allowed to replace or alter community content, the very same community content they claim to believe is so important.

Hopefully, you can understand why so many wiki communities have been jumping ship. Wikis are a ton of work, and communities need to have trust that their hosts actually care about them. And Fandom’s recent actions seem to indicate that the company is more interested in building out their own pop culture social media hub paid for by advertisements plastered all over user generated wikis than it is in listening to those communities and helping make those wikis better. And Fandom will introduce features and replace content in any way they see fit without clearly communicating with those who generate the website’s true value.

Of course, Fandom is well within their right to do all this. It is their website, after all. And migrating off of Fandom isn’t exactly easy. When the Pizza Tower wiki forked, there was a desire by some in the community to have the Fandom site decommissioned. Fandom representative, Saunt3D, made it clear that the Fandom wiki would not be removed. To quote the Fandom representative:

As I mentioned, this wiki will remain as long as there is a community enjoying it. You can call that Fandom being greedy, but the people who would be hurt the most if this wiki was closed are the Pizza Tower community. [Source]

Saunt is basically explaining that because the Fandom page was currently getting much more traffic than the new Miraheze site, the larger Pizza Tower community would suffer from the Fandom site’s closure. It makes no sense, of course, but it would also make no sense for Fandom to take down a wiki site that generates them revenue when they don’t have to. Suant goes on to say:

Fandom is by far the biggest and most popular wiki-hosting platform. It's the most stable and the most supported, making it very difficult to compete with. If you work on a wiki hosted elsewhere, competing with Fandom is a challenge you'll have to face. I don't envy you and I wish you well, but I can't throw the larger Pizza Tower community under the bus to alleviate your challenges. I know that's not your intention, either, but it's what would happen if this wiki was closed.

The fact that the Fandom wiki still exists after a fork acts as a huge deterrent for anyone looking to leave Fandom. And that’s due to search engine optimization. If you look up the wiki for any community, chances are the first result will be Fandom. For example, the official wiki for Dead Cells, hosted on wiki.gg and supported by the developers themselves, appears second on google, below the Fandom site they forked from in January 2023.

The same goes for the official Calamity Mod Wiki, a wiki dedicated to an incredibly popular Terraria mod. They forked from Fandom in early 2022, and are still below the Fandom site on google. To make matters worse, the Fandom wiki has become an absolute joke in the community, full of outdated information as well as containing pages about bosses and items that literally do not exist. So even outdated and vandalized Fandom wikis can still claim the top spot on search engines. It’s even believed that vandalism can actually make a Fandom wiki more popular in search engine results.

Now, Fandom isn’t completely unreasonable. If you decide to fork, you are allowed to promote your new site on the Fandom page. For about two weeks. After which the link has to be removed, and any wiki admins involved in the new wiki are locked out of their admin rights on the Fandom wiki.

All of this can cause a lot of wiki teams to just stay on Fandom, not wanting to deal with the SEO fight awaiting them should they choose to fork. They also have to consider the non-English speaking wikis who are moderated by separate teams that might not follow should the English wiki decide to fork. On top of all of that, Google suppresses what it considers “duplicate content”, so wiki pages will need to be altered so they aren’t word for word the same as the original Fandom pages.

With all of this stacked up against wiki communities, then, I think it’s incredible how many have taken the plunge in the last few years to say goodbye to Fandom and find a home somewhere else.

But that’s the next big question. If not Fandom, then where? It’s a question that every community looking to leave Fandom has to answer, and each solution has its own benefits and drawbacks that need to be considered. The Minecraft wiki community recently engaged in a lengthy discussion regarding this very topic, voting to decide on their new home. So let’s look at the various options out there for communities looking to leave Fandom behind.

Wiki.gg is a wiki farm launched in March of 2022 that already has over 200 gaming wikis, including the Official Dying Light wiki and the official Terraria wiki, as well as the wikis for Cuphead, Ace Combat, ARK: Survival Evolved and the obscure indie gem you’ve probably never heard of, Friday Night Funking. Wiki.gg was launched by Freedom Games, an indie publisher co-founded by Donovan Duncan, a former president at Fandom and Ben Robinson, the founder of Gamepedia, another wikifarm created in 2012, which was eventually bought out by Fandom in 2018.

Wiki.gg was established in direct opposition to Fandom’s ad riddled experience. And while almost every wiki site needs to run ads to cover their costs, Wiki.gg is unique in that all their ads are for games published by Freedom Games, or by other indie developers looking to partner with wiki.gg. So you don’t have to worry about the really sketchy ads that appear on pretty much every other website on the internet.

Another well known wiki farm is Miraheze, which has been around since 2015. The entire place is run from user donations and is completely ad free, which is kind of insane. Miraheze hosts over 7000 wiki sites including the official Rain World wiki, the Pizza Tower Wiki, and most notably, the Croc Wiki.

Miraheze is similar to Fandom in that making a wiki on their site is fairly straightforward. Where it differs is that Miraheze gives editors a lot more freedom. More skins, more extensions, the ability to set up custom domains, and even the ability to make completely private wikis.

Of course, if you don’t want to be hosted by a large wiki farm, another option is to just host the wiki yourself. That’s what the Jojo Wiki decided to do after forking from Fandom in 2019. According to their support page, it costs $480 a month to maintain the servers for JojoWiki. To cover the costs, the wiki does feature ads, but in a far less intrusive way than Fandom. The website also runs a Patreon where members of the community can donate to help keep the lights on.

Jojo is just one of many independently run wiki sites, alongside Fallout Wiki, Smash Wiki, Jiggywikki, the wiki that shall not be named, the Homestar Runner wiki, Yugipedia and many, many more. The benefits of self-hosting should be obvious. Self hosted wikis have the freedom to do pretty much anything they want, and don’t have to worry about any administrative powers that aren’t directly connected to the community itself.

The biggest drawback to self hosting is that it’s very complicated to set up. There’s a lot of technical knowhow required in self hosting a wiki site, not to mention the expenses involved.

Luckily, there are ways to operate as an independent wiki while also receiving the support usually provided by a wiki farm, and that’s through independent wiki alliances. These are groups of multiple wikis that work together to promote one another and assist with all the aspects of maintaining a high quality wiki. One of the most prominent groups like this is the Nintendo Independent Wiki Alliance, or NIWA. NIWA was founded in 2010 by three separate prominent Nintendo wikis, Super Mario Wiki, Zelda Wiki and Bulbapedia. This alliance was formed as a response to concerns over the corporatization of gaming community wikis. Before NIWA was eventually founded, Archaic, the webmaster of Bulbagarden, explained why he saw such value independent wikis working together, saying in 2010.

…I do feel that the meddling in the operation of our fan communities by the essentially faceless managers at Wikia really needs to be stopped. [Source]

So yes, the concerns with Fandom have existed for over ten years now. Archaic continues:

The main reason people seem to go to Wikia is because they lack the funds or technical expertise to operate such large communities. A network of the independents co-operating however may allow us to assist up and coming communities out there… Us geeks, nerds and assorted misfits need to stick together, right?

NIWA now contains thirty separate, independent wikis, of which, some but not all, are self-hosted. Bulbagarden provides hosting for NintendoWiki and the F-Zero Wiki among others. Another site, ABXY.org, provides hosting for the Metroid Wiki and Zelda Wiki. Both Bulbagarden and ABXY have been in operation for over fifteen years now, and offer wiki communities a large degree of freedom while also providing guidance and expertise from over 15 years of operation. In fact ABXY is the host that the Hollow Knight wiki ultimately decided to migrate to.

However, out of all the wikis that have forked from Fandom in recent years, there’s one community that has clearly won out in the Google SEO battle. And that’s the RuneScape wiki. When they forked from Fandom in 2018, they partnered with the game’s developer, Jagex, to establish the official RuneScape & Old School RuneScape wikis. This partnership was in the works for an entire year before the actual fork, and admins even established their own company Weird Gloop, LTD. 

Weird Gloop’s success with the RuneScape forking and SEO battle with Fandom is what ultimately convinced the Minecraft wiki community to migrate over to their team. 

Wikis occupy an interesting space in the modern internet culture. As more and more people go online each year, the internet is condensing into fewer and fewer sites. Message boards and online forums have been replaced by social media and walled gardens. Fandom is a crystallization of this exact same phenomenon in the shape of internet wikis. They want to capture every last community they can and create some kind of pop culture zeitgeist. But here’s what separates Fandom from other big social media platforms.

You can’t make a video hosting site better than YouTube. You can’t make a social media site as connected and influential as Facebook.You can't make another Twitter. And even if you could, you shouldn't. But there are a ton of talented, smart people out there that can create wikis better than Fandom. Because wikis stand in opposition to what large internet companies need in order to operate. The literal source code of almost all wikis, MediaWiki, is open source and free for everyone. And it’s been that way since 2002. Wikis are community created, and exist to share information freely and efficiently. Fandom exists to serve you ads and make as much money as it can, and it will compromise its own value to the community it claims to care about to do just that.

In 2019, after the admins of the RuneScape wiki left, a representative from Fandom shared the following message:

Fandom as a company has taken some steps and made some feature changes in the last couple of years that did not put our communities and their needs first, and that understandably angered quite a few users… Going forward, it's our goal to collaborate with the community whenever possible rather than dictate changes… [Source]

This was four years ago, and things have only gotten worse. The reality is that Fandom has no reason to change their practices regarding their community unless way, way more wikis start migrating off their site. Luckily, each individual community on Fandom does hold the power to migrate somewhere else. So perhaps it’s only a matter of time.

Now, I’ve been pretty mean to Fandom throughout this video.

Songs used:

Dung Defender - Hollow Knight OST

Greenpath Main Loop - Hollow Knight

Hornet - Hollow Knight OST

Gettin’ Freaky (Main Menu) - Friday Night Funkin’ OST

Celsius Troubles - Pizza Tower OST

Torvus Bog - Metroid Prime 2 Echoes OST

Title - Dead Cells OST

Faron Woods - The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess OST

Threat - Shoreline - Rain World OST

Dungeon Freakshow - Pizza Tower OST

Staff Roll - JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Heritage for the Future OST

Dire Dire Docks - Super Mario 64 OST

Onett - Earthbound OST

Theme - Old School RuneScape OST

Phendrana Drifts - Metroid Prime OST