Zelda Wiki:Fork Announcement
Since this announcement was made, we have gone back to using the name "Zelda Wiki". The site's current domain is zeldawiki.wiki.
As of October 19, 2022, Zelda Wiki has officially forked from Fandom. This means that the wiki, previously hosted under Fandom, has split ties with the company and has moved to independent hosting. We will continue to work on the wiki at a new site, zeldapedia.wiki. Fandom’s Zelda Wiki will remain at zelda.fandom.com.
Most editors and staff who previously edited Zelda Wiki on Fandom have now moved to zeldapedia.wiki. All content on the wiki has been migrated to the new domain. As the wiki was forked, this is not a complete restart, but instead more of a refresh.[note 1]
Why We Forked
While there is a multitude of reasons behind our decision to fork from Fandom, we have outlined a few of the major ones below. If you wish to learn more about the reasons for forking, you may ask the wiki staff in the #wiki-independence channel of the Zeldapedia Discord server.
NIWA Membership
Zelda Wiki is one of the founding members of the Nintendo Independent Wiki Alliance (NIWA). The requirements for joining this group are one, that your wiki is independently hosted, and two, that your wiki covers a topic relating to Nintendo. However, in March of 2017, Zelda Wiki was sold to Gamepedia, a wiki farm that hosted multiple wikis for profit. Zelda Wiki’s independence and NIWA membership were called into question following the migration to Gamepedia.
When Fandom bought out Gamepedia in 2018, Zelda Wiki's NIWA membership was further questioned both publicly and privately within NIWA. Fandom, previously known as Wikia, is an even larger wiki farm with a reputation for constricting their wikis and imposing standardized rules across all of them. Zelda Wiki could no longer be considered independent by any stretch of the imagination. On October 13, 2022, NIWA leadership initiated a ballot to expel Zelda Wiki from membership. Forking the wiki allowed us to retain our status as a founding member of NIWA.
Intrusive Ads and Layout Standards
Fandom’s default layout goes against our goals for a clear and cohesive wiki experience. During our time as a Fandom wiki, several changes occurred in Fandom’s layout, including an increase in advertisements. This was particularly detrimental to our readers' mobile experience, where one could not scroll for more than a few paragraphs without encountering an ad. Many ads on mobile would cover the entire screen, requiring the reader to wait and clear the ad, interrupting their reading experience. Large banners would appear across pages, and on top of the number of ads, Fandom announcements would appear at the bottom of screens and could not be closed completely. Overall, the amount of adware that took up the pages on both mobile and PC subtracted from the reading experience of our readers and damaged our reputation.
In addition, the Fandom wiki skins, FandomDesktop and FandomMobile, were forced upon us without due consideration of the Zelda Wiki community. Many editors wanted to keep the current Vector skin. During the transition from Gamepedia to Fandom, the community was told that the site design would not be changed, and that was the main reason that we accepted the move to Fandom. Over time, the site was changed more and more to fall in line with other Fandom wikis; the domain name was changed to zelda.fandom.com and the wiki was later transitioned to the Fandom skins. Now only basic changes to the desktop skin are allowed. Edits to the mobile skin are restricted to Fandom user groups. All changes to the site's JavaScript are subject to Fandom review. Now that the Fandom migration is finished, the only thing left mostly unchanged on the wiki is the content itself. Even that has had some Fandom influence since the migration.
Remain Editorially Independent
One of Zelda Wiki’s biggest reasons for forking was the desire to have our edits remain independent from Fandom’s policies. As a Fandom wiki, we were forced to make editorial decisions based on search engine optimization, prioritizing Fandom’s profits over editorial discretion. In addition, interlanguage links were added from our site to other Fandom-owned Zelda wikis without any regard for whether these sites shared our ethics. (The Discord server for one such site was randomly renamed “AniGaming Club” and had an 18+ NSFW channel, which we do not consider appropriate given the age range of the Zelda audience.)
How to Move to Zeldapedia
If you wish to migrate your account from Fandom Zelda Wiki to Zeldapedia, please refer to the account migration guide. Migrating your account will not delete your account on Fandom and will only copy over your edit history and watchlist.
- ↑ The technical fork occurred on October 16, 2022. All edits made prior to this date are available on both wikis.