RuneScape Wiki left Wikia with help from Jagex. Can Blizzard do the same for Wowpedia?

Community General Discussion
1

Note: There is an extra space (i.e. “. com”) in links.

What happened?

I read about this today although many of you must have already known. Last year (September 2018), RuneScape Wiki left Wikia with, quote, “support of Jagex, both financially and institutionally”.

Why does this matter?

“If you haven’t heard the news, Fandom (Wikia) has purchased Curse Media from Twitch (community.wikia. com/wiki/User_blog:Brandon_Rhea/Fandom_and_Curse_Media_are_joining_forces). Curse Media owns Gamepedia, and therefore Wowpedia is on the way back to Wikia.”

Why did Wowpedia give up their name (WoWWiki) and domain (wowwiki. com) to get away from Wikia (now known as Fandom) in the first place?

wow.gamepedia. com/Forum:Should_WoWWiki_leave_Wikia%3F

What I hope Blizzard can do:

Sign an agreement with the current administrators of Wowpedia, allowing them to use Blizzard’s trademarks properly and form a partnership with them to host the wiki.

Further reading:

Thread on RuneScape Wiki: runescape. wiki/w/Forum:Leaving_Wikia

An Admin said on Reddit that Jagex is paying for hosting: www.reddit. com/r/runescape/comments/9j297t/runescape_wiki_leaving_wikia/#e6ogfj2

Coverage on Kotaku: kotaku. com/video-game-wikis-abandon-their-platform-after-year-of-p-1829401866

Current thread on Wowpedia: wow.gamepedia. com/Forum:Gamepedia_and_Fandom

Current thread on Wikia: wowwiki.wikia. com/wiki/Thread:385777

Thank you for reading.

People have been asking why does this matter. The following are quoted from RuneScape Wiki’s statement (runescape. wiki/w/Forum:Leaving_Wikia) on leaving Wikia:

Why?

Short answer: To get away from Wikia.

Longer answer: Here are a few reasons:

  • The state of advertisements on Wikia is horrendous and not improving.
  • Wikia’s movement away from wiki content to clickbait editorials.
  • Wikia’s increasing control over our site content, via things like JS review and by pushing their own videos over the actual articles.
  • Wikia’s security history is terrible; historically, they haven’t fixed a problem until someone abuses it.
  • Wikia’s software is super out of date. MediaWiki 1.19 is six-and-a-half years old and grossly incompatible with new/updates to extensions. Security fixes and similar have to be backported and Wikia’s custom additions are mostly things we don’t like (and the ones we do have better extensions in current MW).
  • Wikia don’t care about us. We had a discussion with Wikia earlier this year - most of our concerns have yet to be addressed. Not to mention the entire fiasco with featured videos, javascript review, new infoboxes, and so on. Just, they don’t care about us or any community in general.

We can solve all of the above by not being on Wikia. Additionally, there’s major upside to having control over our own infrastructure:

  • We get to use the latest MediaWiki version, 1.31 (and keep upgrading it as updates are released).
  • We get to use new and updated extensions, or even create our own: we can stop using MediaWiki for exchange prices, make interactive maps, create better calculators… so many opportunities for cool stuff when we’re not limited by Wikia.
  • We get HTTPS everywhere by default
  • 2FA is available for all accounts
  • We use a new full width skin, the same used by Wikipedia, allowing us to display more content on the page, rather than the page being riddled in advertising.
  • We get to expand out into auxiliary things that we can integrate into the wiki - some of you have already been using our general purpose tool server, where we’re collating editing tools. There’s plenty of things we can do and there are some grand plans percolating.

That all said, the most important thing is that the people running the wiki will be people that actually care about the games and the communities.

2 Likes
2

I do like wowpedia for lore stuff. Wowhead is obviously the go-to for game information on items/quests/etc. but whenever I’m googling around to answer some question I have about story (especially older pre-WoW events) I seem to end up at wowpedia.

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The problem with wowwiki is that it’s considered to be unreliable compared to wowpedia.

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4

I’m not sure what the OP wants. Does he want Blizzard to personally subsidize Wowpedia? Is he complaining about Wowwiki?

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What I hope Blizzard can do:

Sign an agreement with the current administrators of Wowpedia, allowing them to use Blizzard’s trademarks properly and form a partnership with them to host the wiki.

6

Are you saying this as if they don’t already have the right of fair use? Do you want Blizzard to incorporate Wowpedia into itself? What do you want here, exactly? Your OP does not detail this.

7

As echoed by RuneScape Wiki’s statement (runescape. wiki/w/Forum:Leaving_Wikia) on leaving Wikia, video game wikis usually operate on shaky grounds when it comes to fair use. I personally think
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; (17 U.S.C. § 107)
can be the biggest problem.

I want Blizzard to allow Wowpedia to use their trademarks properly and pay for hosting, so that the current editorial team can continue operate Wowpedia without interference from Fandom, does that answer your question?

8

Yes. So you essentially want Blizzard to purchase Wowpedia.
Thank you for finally answering my question.

PS, for this part

Blizzard reps literally send you to Wowpedia and Wowhead. It’s officially recognized by Blizzard. They clearly have no intention to shut them down.

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Thank you for giving me the opportunity to clarify my position.

10

Why would any care about this, including blizzard ?

11

To quote RuneScape Wiki’s statement (runescape. wiki/w/Forum:Leaving_Wikia):

Why?

Short answer: To get away from Wikia.

Longer answer: Here are a few reasons:

  • The state of advertisements on Wikia is horrendous and not improving.
  • Wikia’s movement away from wiki content to clickbait editorials.
  • Wikia’s increasing control over our site content, via things like JS review and by pushing their own videos over the actual articles.
  • Wikia’s security history is terrible; historically, they haven’t fixed a problem until someone abuses it.
  • Wikia’s software is super out of date. MediaWiki 1.19 is six-and-a-half years old and grossly incompatible with new/updates to extensions. Security fixes and similar have to be backported and Wikia’s custom additions are mostly things we don’t like (and the ones we do have better extensions in current MW).
  • Wikia don’t care about us. We had a discussion with Wikia earlier this year - most of our concerns have yet to be addressed. Not to mention the entire fiasco with featured videos, javascript review, new infoboxes, and so on. Just, they don’t care about us or any community in general.

We can solve all of the above by not being on Wikia. Additionally, there’s major upside to having control over our own infrastructure:

  • We get to use the latest MediaWiki version, 1.31 (and keep upgrading it as updates are released).
  • We get to use new and updated extensions, or even create our own: we can stop using MediaWiki for exchange prices, make interactive maps, create better calculators… so many opportunities for cool stuff when we’re not limited by Wikia.
  • We get HTTPS everywhere by default
  • 2FA is available for all accounts
  • We use a new full width skin, the same used by Wikipedia, allowing us to display more content on the page, rather than the page being riddled in advertising.
  • We get to expand out into auxiliary things that we can integrate into the wiki - some of you have already been using our general purpose tool server, where we’re collating editing tools. There’s plenty of things we can do and there are some grand plans percolating.

That all said, the most important thing is that the people running the wiki will be people that actually care about the games and the communities.

12

Wowpedia isn’t made by Blizzard.

13

That site is incredibly out of date most of the time.

Hell, just to make the point I looked at the Druid page just now and they list “mark of the wild” as a signature Druid ability. How long has that been out of the game?

The page for MotW doesn’t even say it was removed.

Wowpedia is the definition of irrelevant.

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If they were to do something to get away from Wowhead, I think these things would apply. I rarely ever go on the wiki because there just isn’t much there of interest.

15

I just checked that page myself and there was a banner at the top that said, The subject of this article was removed from World of Warcraft in patch 7.0.3., which, according to this revision log (wow.gamepedia. com/index.php?title=Mark_of_the_Wild&diff=4740248&oldid=4740247), has been there since 4 November 2017 (UTC).

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16

Looking on my phone. Didn’t show up there.

Maybe someone put some time into it recently, but thru the 2nd 1/2 of Legion at least it was often not updated fully. I guess I’ve just found it unreliable.

The write up on shaman still has descriptions of spells removed on 5.0…

Maybe old lore stuff is useful? But I’m terms of classes, quests, and gameplay I don’t find it so.