The Future of Wowpedia

Lore Story Forum
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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?

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Hi all, Kaydeethree, Wowpedia admin here.

Admittedly, I’m not exactly pleased to see this news, but I’ve only known about this for ~three hours now. We still don’t know how this is going to play out as far as who controls what and what happens to the old wiki or anything else. Those discussions still have not been had by anyone as of yet.

Wowpedia has been a passion project of mine for eight years and I’m not going to let down our editor community and the greater WoW community who depend on us as a resource.

You’re welcome to discuss this on the wiki as well - check the forum thread “Gamepedia and Fandom”, where we’ll post updates as we get them at https://wow.gamepedia.com/Forum:Gamepedia_and_Fandom

Thank you all for trusting us to be the best wiki resource for WoW!

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A link to that thread:
https://wow.gamepedia.com/index.php?title=Forum:Gamepedia_and_Fandom&t=20181212202745

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Oh boy, I can’t wait for constant ads for other games at the bottom of my screen on Wowpedia.

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Gosh darn it, Wowpedia was made to get away from them.

I, frankly, don’t trust Fandom. They can say what they want, but when their sites are known places of virus, and shrink the articles to fit in more adds, they are terrible. Fandom is not deserving of our faith that they will do us right. They have to prove it, until then make sure you never stop arguing to keep Wowpedia as it is, not the cruddy site that they turned wowwiki into.

Though, I;ll be honest, I don’t actually have faith they’ll listen. Maybe that’s a bit too nilihist, but again, I don’t trust Fandom.

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I hope most things stay the same, wowpedia is a great source of info in every aspect of the game.

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An important reminder is that all of Gamepedia’s leaders will be taking up leadership roles at Fandom, and from the sounds of it, Fandom’s people are giving them a good bit of power to do as they please.

From misterwoodhouse, Gamepedia’s Community Manager:

We’ve done right by you in the past. Allow us to prove we still do right by you going forward.

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That’s concerning. I suppose it was too much to hope that Wowwiki would just quietly phase out over time. Isn’t Wowpedia even endorsed by Blizzard as an information depository? I know it was on their old site.

I thought the breakaway to Wowpedia was the right choice to begin with; I couldn’t tell you how many hours I’ve whittled away navigating what I felt was a far superior wiki to the old one, both content and layout-wise.

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But Ximothy! These are the top 5 sidequests you MUST complete in Red Dead Redemption 2!

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I first began wiki editing in 2009, so I was around for the Great Fork of 2010. Can’t say I like the thought of possibly repeating history.

I want to be hopeful about all this, but right now I’m feeling very nervous.

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This is like Myspace taking over Facebook (before facebook became evil scum).

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This is not the Christmas present we editors wanted. :frowning:

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Yea, Wowpedia has been endorsed in the past by Blizzard in the Armory, which included links for the items to Wowhead and Wowpedia.

There were even multiple blog posts as well, the most recent being 7 months ago.

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If the partnership/merge was deemed to be unfavorable, would it be possible to rehost the original Wowpedia articles/info on a new website? Clueless about how data ownership works on Wikis.

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Ew.

I can’t even read anything on Fandom with my phone because of the ads constantly popping up and forcing me to close the window.

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I feel awful saying this, but I think it shows how much BfA has disenfranchised me to WoW that despite how active I’ve been on Wowpedia over the years I’m more concerned with how this will effect Zelda Wiki than Wowpedia. They only just barely transferred over to Gamepedia from their own server, too.

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I hope they don’t start doing that utterly stupid thing I see on some wikis where some of the bigger pages have damn embedded youtube or twitch videos in them. My internet connection’s not that great and I HATE it when my connection gets bogged down because of that garbage. Half the reason why I’m looking at a wiki article in the first place is because I don’t want the information to come from a video.

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That thing is the absolute worst.

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This might be the darkest timeline.

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I’m torn on this because there’s a part of me that wants to clone wowpedia and self-host it somewhere without all the advertisements, but I also think my web host will scream to high heaven and my finances would be unable to support the bandwidth costs as a private individual.

If Blizzard could host something and let people who are authors of existing articles or whatever do things, that’d be best. I don’t see that happening.

I think it’s definitely worth preserving the content from wowpedia somewhere somehow.

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