Hi! You may have seen that Weird Gloop is now hosting the official League of Legends Wiki. We’ve spent the last couple months working with the Riot folks and the League wiki editors to move it off of Fandom, and turn it into something the players will (hopefully!) really dig. I also love that it got started because one of the Riot guys plays a ton of Old School RuneScape and thinks our wiki is awesome. How cool is that??
I want this to kick off a new era where communities and developers take control from Fandom, and make some really great wikis. We’ve already been doing a bit of this, starting when we helped the Minecraft Wiki leave Fandom, but I think it’s time for me (and the rest of our group) to be more explicit about what we want to do.
So if you’re any of these things:
- A frustrated wiki editor trying to figure out your options
- A community manager trying to get internal support for an official wiki
- Someone contemplating making a new wiki
I will give you (free, very specific) advice on how to get your wiki off Fandom, and make a kickass wiki somewhere else. We might even be able to host you ourselves.
If you think this sounds cool, come talk to me.
- Why do we actually care?
- Why ditching Fandom is cool and based
- What I’m offering
- How to not turn into Fandom 2.0 (with these 2 simple tricks)
Why do we actually care?
This post (and many others) have done a much better job than I could, explaining from a reader’s perspective why Fandom is bad place to host a wiki, but I thought it might be useful to give my take on it as a long-time wiki editor.
I love wikis. I think it’s unbelievably cool that this completely insane idea (“what if we just had a website that anyone can edit?”) doesn’t descend into anarchy, and instead self-organizes into a fun, project-oriented community. I think that despite its flaws, Wikipedia is the single coolest thing the internet has ever done. And wikis on niche topics feel like some of the last remnants of a friendlier, more collaborative, early 2000s web. I loved contributing to wikis, building something with other people, and feeling a sense of ownership (and pride that so many people were using stuff I made).
Which is why it’s so concerning that Fandom has taken this wonderful concept and turned it into one of the most dreadful parts of the internet. Being deeply involved with the RuneScape Wiki on Fandom had a huge psychological cost – what wonderful thing did they add today that made our wiki harder to use? Scammy green link ads? Comically bad videos on the top of our most popular pages? Garbage AI-generated Q&A? Ads that take up literally 100% of the content window?
I (and so many others) had spent countless nights trying to make the best possible resource for RuneScape, and it was brutal to realize that it didn’t matter how hard we worked or creative we were – our wiki was never gonna be that great, because Fandom was in charge. That sense of ownership and pride…slowly turned into feeling like my passion was being exploited by a company that didn’t want the same things I did.
We weren’t the only ones feeling this way, of course – some wiki communities got fed up and moved somewhere independent. But here’s the key thing you need to understand: even when a wiki community unanimously wants to leave, Fandom keeps their copy of the wiki up, even though it no longer has a community. Google remembers years of people searching, linking, and visiting the Fandom wiki URLs, and continues to rank the increasingly stale Fandom results first. Since roughly 85% of a wiki’s traffic comes from Google, it’s nearly impossible for the new wiki to win without fixing this ranking disparity. It’s an extremely draining thing to do – nobody likes to spend their waking hours competing against the thing they helped lovingly build.
Historically, independent wikis have had an extremely hard time winning this battle. Most of the traffic stayed on the Fandom wiki, and the independent wikis often fizzled out. This had a chilling effect on the remaining communities, and emboldened Fandom to further prioritize revenue extraction.
That’s the key takeaway: if leaving Fandom was easy, they wouldn’t be able to enshittify as much as they have.
But don’t lose hope! Google has gotten much friendlier to independent wikis over the last decade. With a large, sustained effort, we were able to recover 95% of RuneScape Wiki traffic within the first year.
Why ditching Fandom is cool and based
The main advantage of leaving Fandom is likely clear to anyone who’s ever visited one of their wikis without an ad blocker. But there’s more than that! When you have a site that people are happy to go to (instead of something they’re forced to grimace and use), you get all these wonderful secondary effects that are worth mentioning.
For starters: on average, moving away from Fandom doubles the number of people editing. I’ve seen the pattern across every wiki we’ve ever moved off Fandom, but here’s a pretty striking graph from OSRS Wiki:
It’s incredibly consistent: way more people show up and want to help, when they feel like they’re contributing to something that isn’t taking advantage of them.
It’s not a coincidence that OSRS Wiki got really good once we left Fandom in 2018. Once we had way more people wanting to contribute (and the only objective was “make the best possible wiki for the game”) the wiki magically got way better! Crazy!
Departing from Fandom has also opened the door for a number of custom technical projects that otherwise would have been downright impossible to implement on the old wiki. In-game item lookup, WikiSync and real-time prices are core parts of our offering now, with hundreds of thousands of users. They’re all made possible by the new flexibility we gained when we took control of the hosting.
What I’m offering
I think a lot of people would love to get their wiki off Fandom, but it’s extremely not obvious what that even involves, so it’s hard to formulate a plan. I will help you figure out a viable, detailed strategy for you to get your wiki off Fandom, and bring the traffic along.
In the next couple weeks, we’ll be posting some general advice on this blog that goes through the main steps and pitfalls involved with leaving Fandom. Most of it should be broadly applicable, but the real power comes from looking at the specifics of your topic (how big is it? does it change frequently? is it a game? are you the rights-holder?) and tailoring the plan to fit.
As far as where you host it…there’s plenty of decent options. Wiki hosting is not nearly as hard as Fandom makes it out to be – for example, if you’re the Path of Exile devs and you already host a bunch of PHP web stuff, then hosting the wiki yourself is objectively a really good option.
Sometimes Weird Gloop will be the good option for your situation, and being totally honest, sometimes it won’t be. And that’s okay! I want to help communities get away from Fandom, regardless of who’s running the servers.
I will say, I don’t think we would ever do a “self-service” thing where you could just sign up and immediately make a wiki. We want to do projects where we get to know the community, and closely support every wiki we host.
How to not turn into Fandom 2.0 (with these 2 simple tricks)
As we’ve started hosting more wikis besides RuneScape, some people have asked a pretty reasonable question: what’s stopping us from eventually getting enshittified, just like Fandom (or the other wiki farms that eventually sold to Fandom)?
From my perspective, there are two key choices that Fandom made that have had major negative consequences for communities. And we’re just going to do the exact opposite on both points.
Point 1 - wiki communities need to be able to freely leave their host
You can probably tell that I think wiki editors (as opposed to hosts) are the ones who create the vast majority of the value on a wiki. So the premise is simple:
If a wiki community is unhappy, and they have a better option somewhere else, they should be able to leave and take their stuff with them. We won’t prop up the old wiki, Weekend-at-Bernie’s style, abusing the dominant Google position that the wiki editors built up while they were on our platform.
In my opinion, this is really the only rule that matters. If you have the ability to leave (and take your revenue-driving wiki with you) when things go to shit, then your host has an extremely strong incentive to not let things completely go to shit.
There’s a long history of wiki farms vaguely handwaving that they’d agree to something like this, and then backtracking later. So why believe us?
It helps that Weird Gloop literally only exists because we were on the losing end of this sort of situation with Fandom back in 2018, and that we have no outside investors or debt (the company’s owned by wiki nerds)…but I don’t think that’s convincing enough on its own. So we’ve been voluntarily entering into agreements with the wikis we host (here’s an example) where we set very clear obligations for what happens if the wiki community wants to go somewhere else (hint: it’s all about the domain). If we ever start going down the same path as Fandom, everyone can just leave! I would love to see other wiki platforms start to do this, because I think it’s the only way you really solve the problem.
Point 2 - global branding is extremely negative value for wiki farms
If you go to any page on a Fandom wiki, even if you’ve got an ad blocker…you’ll be greeted by an absurd amount of Fandom-related branding: a gaudy sidebar that links to Fan Central (whatever that is), a bunch of other links to wikis that aren’t relevant to you, buttons to follow Fandom on Instagram, TikTok, to take “Fan Quizzes”. The brand strategy seems like it was cooked up by a bunch of market researchers who think that people are fans of…media properties in general? It’s super cringey and totally irrelevant to the people who are on Fandom wiki to, say, look up the stats of a new pickaxe they got.
It’s easy to laugh about how bad the branding and identity is, but there’s a bigger issue: the fact that it’s so overwhelmingly branded as “Fandom” (as opposed to, say, the Warframe Wiki) makes it way harder for each of the individual wikis to develop an public identity, because anything they do will be subordinate to the (very loud) global brand. These individual wikis are the only popular thing that Fandom has ever operated, and the focus on global branding makes each individual wiki worse.
Our position: the actual wikis should be front and center, because it’s way more important for the wiki itself to have a great reputation, rather than sucking all the oxygen out to make sure people know who owns the platform. We have extremely minimal branding (can you even find it?), and I can’t imagine ever trying to put wikis on subdomains of weirdgloop.org (or anywhere else) unless there were no decent domain options. We don’t actually get anything out of everyday readers knowing who we are.
That’s all I’ve got right now. If you liked this and want to talk to me about wiki things, please come say hi – it doesn’t matter if you have a big wiki or a small wiki (or no wiki at all!) – I really just love talking to people about this stuff.