Fandom is a wiki hosting service and big business co-founded by Wiki-king Jimmy Wales. Unlike Wales' other ventures, Fandom is a for-profit company and its homepage is one of the most popular websites in the world. The company was acquired by private equity firm TPG Inc. in 2018, and then went on an acquisition spree of its own, acquiring, among others, Curse LLC's wiki service Gamepedia.Gamepedia has acquired The Witcher, Minecraft, Dota 2, COD, Wowpedia, and countless other official wikis.

Gamepedia's content was gradually migrated to Fandom's services and rebranded as Fandom in mid-2021. Since the acquisition, however, contributors and editors have been anxious for Fandom's big money to clamp down on their nipples, and as the site's design changed and ads and pop-ups increased, that sentiment finally boiled over at one of the biggest wikis: Minecraft.

Minecraft's wiki editors are mad as hell and will not put up with it any longer. What started with anxiety and Discord chat is now a vote on a total migration of the Minecraft wiki from Fandom, with the existing Fandom wiki remaining intact but unmaintained, and the Minecraft wiki forks migrating to another host and happily Minecraft wiki forks will be moved to a different host and live happily ever after.

SonicWave, the editor of the Minecraft wiki, created the page where this discussion is currently taking place, and if you are not familiar with wiki politics, this is essentially an emergency board meeting, and one that has an overwhelming number in favor of the move. reasons are summarized as follows:

There is also deep disquiet among wiki editors over the recent controversy with McDonald Wiki, where Fandom replaced existing Grimus pages with paid McDonald ads, without the consent or knowledge of the McDonald Wiki editors. No, I am not making this up.

Two hosts have already contacted the Minecraft wiki (Bulbapedia has its own usability issues, ABXY does), and wiki.gg, run by former Gamepedia staff, is another preferred option.

"Of course, switching hosts is not an easy task," writes Sonicwave." In particular, Fandom's forking policy requires that the current wiki remain intact and that links to the new wiki not appear for more than the first two weeks. This means that we basically create a new wiki [...]. The Fandom wiki will continue to be uploaded without any indication that it has moved, while the existing editors will be gone, and will compete with the new wiki in Google search results for Fandom's high SEO and possibly higher positions.

Other issues include many pieces of content requiring significant rewrites in order for Google to hide duplicate content in search results, what Sonicwave calls a "lack of transparency from Fandom" to the community, and the loss of certain wiki features, issues such as the fact that the Minecraft wiki is available in 21 languages. The current thinking is that since each of these wikis is maintained by a different group of contributors and editors, the English wiki will migrate first while we see how successful the others will be.

In an act of self-sacrifice that would make wiki editors proud, I read the entire discussion page and calculated the support for and against the move; of the 47 responses, many of them substantial, dealing with technical aspects and the logistics of the move, five overall opposed the move and prefer to remain in Fandom. Despite the difficulties of relocation, 42 Minecraft wiki contributors and editors voted to fork off to Fandom.

Aside from the practical issues, the big question here is whether the Minecraft wiki can escape its own gravitational pull. A popular topic like Minecraft will one day draw more contributors and editors to Fandom. And something strange may happen, with two Minecraft wikis competing and both claiming to be original or official; it's clear that the Minecraft wiki community inevitably hates Fandom. But whether it can escape its shadow remains to be seen.