This is a public-service announcement that WoWWiki has closed its doors to further editing, and in the future all contributions will be consolidated to a single wiki:
https://wow.gamepedia.com/Wowpedia
Wowpedia was a fork from WoWWiki about ten years ago, following disagreements with the parent company over the website’s appearance and technologies (like item tooltips, for example).
However, the same parent company has owned both sites since 2019 after corporate acquisitions, and so the divided wiki community was becoming impractical. Moving forward, edits will only occur on the Wowpedia infrastructure.
This means if you are looking up lore, API, or other topics, you will want to check Wowpedia for the latest. This is especially true going into Shadowlands because WoWWiki won’t be updated for it.
I want to express my thanks to everyone who contributed and supported WoWWiki over the past decade and a half, and hope that everyone finds themselves welcome at Wowpedia.
(Commentary): Not to be offensive to the folks who worked on WoWWiki, but it wasn’t exactly accurate after the split. That having been said, thanks for the information. Here’s hoping wowpedia doesn’t suffer the same nonsense WoWWiki went through. One would hope a lesson was learned here.
This is a process that began nearly a year ago with participation by some key stakeholders from both Wowpedia and WoWWiki – including some who recall the original fork.
These discussions had a range of opinions and featured a degree of mistrust and interpersonal conflict between the parties. Fortunately, a firm decision was made to reunite the communities.
I don’t have a crystal ball and cannot speak for the company or administrators, but suffice to say that a small dose of mistrust and conflict is perhaps healthy to safeguard the broader community’s interests.
I have a serious question, how do you know that Fandom won’t force you back onto their infrastructure at some point? I find it unlikely that they will continue to support 2 different types of wiki systems forever.
There has already been some small steps toward convergence, but the only ones I’ve noticed in the past year are helpful things:
Language drop-down menus at Fandom wikis can point to Gamepedia, such as “WikiWoW-fr” pointing to “es-Wowpedia”
They are now trying to deploy single-sign-on between the two sites using OAuth2
I would suspect they have more plans for further convergence. Will they take it too far? Will they suddenly repeat everything that caused a fork ten years ago?
Only time will tell. But I will say, to Fandom’s credit, that its already been a year and they haven’t done anything drastic yet.
