Greetings,
This morning it was announced that Curse Media / Gamepedia, the owners of Wowpedia, will be bought by Fandom, the owners of Wowwiki. The two websites are planned to merge in the coming months.
Official Statement
For years, Fandom and Curse Media have a common mission - to provide online tools, resources, and forums for communities in the entertainment and gaming spaces. By joining forces and combining knowledge, we are able to expand out resources and provide better support to our communities.
Our teams are being purposeful and thorough in making decisions on how Fandom and Gamepedia in particular will align in the coming months. Because of this, there will be no immediate impact to your user experience on either site. We ask for your patience as we evaluate our combined strengths and determine how to best leverage them to empower passionate communities worldwide. Our commitment to you is that our users are our first priority in every decision we will be making, and that your voices will be heard throughout this process!
This is an exciting time for the future of both Fandom and Curse/Gamepedia. We hope you’re just as enthusiastic as we are to see how this new relationship evolves over the first few months of 2019. As we know more, updates will be provided to the communities. Our team will be available on Slack to answer questions as best we can!
TL;DR: Fandom is buying Curse. Nothing will change in the next few months while things are figured out. We plan on listening to the community moving forward.
What Does This Mean?
Currently, we’re not sure. We don’t know the extent at which Wowwiki will be crammed into Wowpedia or vice versa. Thankfully, the developers at Curse are being very active in Gamepedia’s community, and at the time of writing, I and others are in a very open dialogue with them and they seem very willing to listen to feedback and act accordingly. They’ve also stated that they will be stepping into leadership roles at Fandom so they will have the power to make changes, that Fandom has been open in their admiration of Gamepedia’s centric ethos, and that they plan on being entirely candid as the process progresses. I will also continue to update this thread as I receive new news.
Also thankfully, the vast, vast majority of Gamepedia’s editors, from the Legend of Zelda gamepedia to Minecraft to a number of us from Wowpedia, have expressed utter distaste at this idea. In the majority of cases, as such with WoW’s, the Fandom version of the wiki is absolutely inferior to Gamepedia’s version, and many have expressed that the least amount of change possible for us, the better.
In the mean time, Gamepedia’s developers have promised to listen to feedback and will keep an eye on this thread as well, along with a few of the Wowpedia mods that will help to communicate back to them.
Other Statements
I’ve dedicated more than five years of my life and virtually my entire career building Gamepedia as an awesome community-focused wiki service. I will be bringing that passion and experience to the table in this process, as will the rest of our team.
- Benjamin Tarsa, Gamepedia Marketing Manager
We’ve done right by you in the past. Allow us to prove we still do right by you going forward.
- misterwoodhouse, Gamepedia Community Manager
To be clear, we don’t plan to make any major changes without lots of discussion and planning. Right now, those conversations are just starting, and we’ve got a lot to figure out before any actions take place. Until then, we’ll just continue doing our thing.
- Benjamin Tarsa, Gamepedia Marketing Manager
I think there’s a lot of reason to be hopeful, and as I’ve said before, please bear with us and be part of the conversation. You guys are still, as always, our priority.
- Benjamin Tarsa, Gamepedia Marketing Manager
What are your thoughts and feedback on this?