The Future of Wowpedia - Again

Lore Story Forum
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Original thread from 2018 can be found here for those wanting a refresher.  Moving on…

For those unaware, a proposal to leave Fandom was initiated on September 18, 2023 and is currently scheduled to close October 2, 2023.  I’ve created this thread to reach out to those who may be interested and/or affected but would otherwise miss out on sharing their thoughts.

Statement

During the last several months, the hosting situation with Fandom has reached a level that some of the admins feel is untenable. Fandom has gotten more and more aggressive with ad insertion, including places them into the middle of pages and also including ads in lists of recent or popular pages. Undesirable features such as Fandom Quizzes, have thus far been kept off of Wowpedia while they’re considered in beta, but will inevitably be forced upon us whether we want them or not - indeed, even while disabled we can see that browsers are still attempting to access them, contributing to the substantial load time issues that have been noted by a number of users. We have reported all of these issues, and more, and been met with either silence or outright refusals to address our complaints. As a result, we are asking the community whether Wowpedia should follow in the Hearthstone Wiki’s footsteps and migrate to wiki.gg, which is run by former Gamepedia staff.

The biggest hurdle we would face, if we did so, is essentially competing against ourselves. Due to the content licenses in use, a copy of Wowpedia at the time of the move would continue to exist on Fandom, and the existing site has years of history contributing to search engine priorities. This is nothing new - the same thing happened when Wowpedia forked away from WoWWiki. Still, it is not an inconsequential problem and is definitely worth keeping in mind so that everyone goes into this fully aware of the potential ramifications. But, to be clear, no content would be lost - we would be starting with all pages and data that currently exist on Wowpedia.

This vote will close on October 2nd.

The proposal to leave Fandom has been adopted.  Wowpedia will be migrating to wiki.gg.

Doubtlessly, people may wonder what is next.  This is not the entire section, but believe it most pertinent:

Migration process

The actual technical migration process is what will take the most time, but also be largely invisible to most users. Our new host will get a snapshot of the wiki and upload it to their servers. After that’s done, for the next few weeks they’ll automatically import any updates made here to the new site, so there’s no worry about anything getting lost during the transition period. Once the new site is set up and the admins have confirmed everything, we’ll share the new URL. There will be a process when you register to link your new account with your old Fandom one in order to keep your contributions. If you want to change your account name, this is the time to do it. The goal is to have the new site up and running before BlizzCon.

The name

This is the one aspect that’s still in flux. Sometime in the next day or so we’ll put up a second vote for whether we want to keep the Wowpedia name or rebrand, and if the latter, what to change it to. A vote has been started for this at Forum:New Wowpedia Name.

The vote to decide on the wiki’s name is scheduled to end on October 16th at 12pm PDT.

The vote on a new name was ended early today (Oct 12) due to conflict with Fandom policy.  The proposal to change Wowpedia’s name was adopted.

WE HAVE MOVED TO https://warcraft.wiki.gg - SPREAD THE WORD!

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I’m not voting on this… but keep this central reality in mind.

Everything has to pay for itself No matter where you go, you’re going to have this problem as the era of Free Lunches on the Internet is over.

I don’t see a viable alternative for you folks. People aren’t going to pay for stuff they’re used to getting for free, so the only alternative is ad revenue.

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I appreciate you bringing this to our attention.

I won’t be voting because I’m not sure how to, I never made an account or anything. I just go there when I look up something on Google, and it sends me there. Idk what is required to vote.

What is a vote even about? The YES side seems clear to me. But the NO side? Some people who vote NO basically are saying : don’t bother because it is too much work and might fail and is not worth it and the same problem may occur in a few years?

I am not up to date on all the corporate internet chicanery.

I certainly don’t own or run the website but I would use it as I do if you stay, or follow it if you go. As Drahliana said, it’s free on my end, so I can’t complain either way.

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While yes, you are right, but only of we continue allowing late stage capitalism and hostile marketing to hold us captive is to give it power.

Wikipedia still thrives ad free on public donation.

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Wowpedia is not Wikipedia A lot of serious thought and time went to creating Wikipedia Foundation that supports it. and it’s a legacy from the earliest days of the Internet. Folks have tried to duplicate it… generally conservartive folks who feel the original is to “liberal and leftie” for them. of them, only Conservapedia has had any staying power.

Most other imitiative efforts have died on the vine.

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It has power, my living and I suspect yours as well is utterly dependent upon it.

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The main host that the wowpedia team has been looking at is wiki.gg who is a viable alternative that many places (including Terraria, Deep Rock and Hearthstone) have moved to. They’re very community focused rather than greed focused as it’s a passion project of another company, run by people who once headed gamepedia and were upset when their parent company (amazon/twitch) sold them.

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Unlucky. It’s wild that shoddy, ancient, perfunctory WoWwiki articles still beat out their WoWpedia counterparts in search engines. Must be a daunting prospect to stare down that barrel again, especially with how much content has been added since. Lor’themar Theron’s article was three sections and maybe five hundred words when I started wiki surfing; forget about it now.

An explicit endorsement from Blizzard wouldn’t hurt. I credit some of WoWpedia’s success to the blue nods of approval it got following the original split. Considering certain passages from the 'pedia (rooted in canon and unsourced guesswork both) have found their way into the game and its supplements, sometimes verbatim, they’d only be paying it back to the community. :joy_cat:

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I am pretty sure the development team does use wowpedia as a quick reference tool. It is ironically more accurate than some of Blizzard’s own published materials.

I half way feel they might be better off with self hosted wiki software modded for WoW’s specific needs. That at least would be more tenable to move in the future than dealing with migrations between platforms

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Most of them were accurate when published. Unfortunately print media can’t adjust to changes and retcons.

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I suggested reaching out to Blizzard for the wiki to be hosted as the official wiki on Blizzard servers with Blizzard collaboration a few years back and was told Long Ago they considered it but they bilaterally agreed it was a bad idea for whatever reason (I do not remember the why I was told)

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If Fandom offered a paid version without adds I would be happy. I even suggested that to them. The adds are so bad it is degrading performance of the site dramatically.

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That would only patch ads, not the popup quizzes, videos or other “features” that fandom forces. Those are the majority of what cause the performance issues. This is one of the reasons why ad-blockers aren’t enough.

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The vote has officially ended and Wowpedia is moving from FANDOM to wiki.gg.

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A vote is underway to determine the future name of the new warcraft wiki site, either remaining as Wowpedia or crafting a new one.

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I don’t see a good reason to change the name. Wowpedia is a good recognizable name that’s already being put to use, might as well keep it.

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Unless you had to change the name because of some legal reason, I would keep it.

Take Twitter/X for example. Maybe someone is calling it “X”, seems most people, even in the news, still call it Twitter. Maybe X will stick eventually?

Or Fred from Howard Stern - he changed his name to Eric legally but he didn’t tell anyone for a long time, because he knew they would call him Fred anyway. And they still call him Fred.

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Umm doesnt Fandom just own that anyway lmao

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It doesn’t. Wiki.gg is run by former members of the Gamepedia staff.

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No, they’re run by the people from Gamepedia who left when Amazon sold their company off to Fandom. So the owners are very much against the idea of selling out.

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