The Future of Wowpedia

[Alynsa-wyrmrest-accord]

Sarcasm incoming

Damn it Sylvannas! I told you, burning down Teldrassil was enough. You didn’t need to start burning down things we, the players, love to truly extinguish hope and joy!

[Eithris-dawnbringer (Eithris)]

Probably because they are the staff that’s considered redundant and will be let go. When you are merging two sites that cover the same material, you don’t need two sets of editors.

you… don’t know much about wikis, do you

[Irenaus-wyrmrest-accord (Irenaus)]

You don’t think they genuinely view Wikia as an inferior site to Gampedia?

[Drahliana-earthen-ring (Drahliana)]

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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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What are your thoughts and feedback on this?

That’s an irrelevant factor when it comes to coroporate acquisition.

[Balanor-maelstrom (Balanor)]

The wikis are managed by volunteers. They don’t let people go, they’re providing free labor.

[Pumlaxer-moonrunner]

But they might not stay admins.

[Eithris-dawnbringer (Eithris)]

it’s not just the admins who are furious. fandom/wikia has… a very, very poor reputation when it comes to listening to its users even a tiny bit. that’s the entire reason part of wowwiki’s community split and formed wowpedia in 2010; fandom constantly pushes these stupid, unwanted updates that have little to do with (or are completely antithetical to!) running/using a wiki. then, when folks are like “hey this sucks” they say “oh, we’re listening, your communities are extremely important to us :)” and proceed to make no changes to their shiny new feature

and on top of that, a number of folks there seem to be extremely unprofessional. for example, the WW admin who posted in this thread earlier; calling other editors “wayward children” and playing Dick-Measuring Contest with your edit count shows a really poor attitude, i think. i would vastly prefer not to have to work with someone like that

[Vilebroth-moon-guard]

Perhaps you should tell them about the Burning Eye of Wowpedia. Last I heard it was located deep below the seas, in an ancient Tomb.

[Aelenice-alexstrasza]

So far a wiki known as Codex Gamicus, originally Encyclopedia Gamia, moved from Fandom to Gamepedia a few months back.

Fast forward to just a few days ago, it has been announced that the “gaming .wikia.com” would now be redirected to the “gamicus .gamepedia.com” due to being more active pretty much.

You can read more about that at the community portal on the Gamia Codex Gamepedia wiki.

Another wiki known for the game “Diep .io” also had a similar change but vice versa; Diepio Gamepedia redirects to the Diepio Wikia due to the Gamepedia one being out-of-date and inactive.

With Wowpedia, I personally can see something like what happened with Gamia Codex, with WoWWiki being redirected to Wowpedia.

[Olibu-moon-guard]

Ugh. Wikia sucked. Period. Their admins are egotistical dolts. I’m going to miss WoWpedia…