Fandom

The now out of date Wikia logo

Fandom (formerly Wikicities, then Wikia until 2019) is a wiki farm founded and formerly run by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales and Wikimedia Foundation board member Angela Beesley.^[1] It has raised millions in investments and used to enjoy preferential treatment by Wikipedia.^[2] At one point Wikia was slowly declining, to where many wikis were abandoned and received few edits.

Fandom rebrand[edit]

As of early 2019, Wikia entirely rebranded to Fandom, and their URL was updated to fandom.com. Around the same time, the company acquired Curse LLC and their services, one of them notably being another wiki host, Gamepedia.

In 2021, Fandom's TOU was updated recently to ban "deadnaming" (i.e., referring to someone the original birth-given name of) people suffering from gender confusion (i.e. transgenders), and blocking anyone who dares to refer to someone by their birth gender.^[3]

Wikis[edit]

Users make their own wikis, by making wikis for their own topic, like games, movies, TV shows, universes history, etc, and sometimes businesses. LyricWiki, the largest wiki with over 2 million pages, got blocked from editing. (The Wikia Staff blocked users and even LyricWiki administrators permanently from editing due to pornography concerns).

Advantages over Wikipedia[edit]

• Upload images of their own or from somewhere else without having to through the difficult process of obtaining permission to use many of the images.
• Can create blogs on whatever topic as they please (depending on the policies of each wiki).
• Helpful contributions to articles (depending on the wiki) are not automatically reverted.
• Most of the time, each wiki can enforce their own policies with minimal interference from Community Central
• Has a WYSIWYG layout, making it easier for beginners to use, as well as the traditional "source editor."

References[edit]