This article was copied (instead of imported) from the Rotten Websites Wiki.
Fandom (stylized in all caps from 2018 to 2021 and stylized in all lowercase in October 2016 and 2017, formerly known as Wikia from 2006 to September 2016 and Wikicities in 2004 to 2006) is a wiki hosting service that was launched on October 18, 2004 by Jimmy Wales (also known as the co-founder of Wikipedia and WikiTRIBUNE/WT.Social) and Angela Beesley Starling. The site is free of charge, but is for-profit and mainly derives that from advertising and selling content. Fandom communities consist of online encyclopedias, each one specializing in a particular subject or theme, most of the popular fiction franchises of books, films, games, and other media. The main purpose of articles in a Fandom community is to cover information and discussion on a particular topic in a much greater and more overall detail level than can be found in Wikipedia articles.
NOTE: The community itself isn't that bad overall. This article will mainly focus on the staff side of Fandom due to their business practices.
Overall
Even after the UCP update, Fandom used to run on a heavily modified version of MediaWiki (1.33),[1] which was rendered obsolete on June 6, 2020 (they also previously used 1.19 version of MediaWiki throughout the years (which also was obsoleted) and not even using LTS version which has longer support). This editing system, despite being easier to use, is much more restricted in terms of function. This also applies to wikia.org.
The source editor is also sometimes very buggy and slow depending on the browser (and its hardware) used to edit it, especially if you're using a Chromebook that isn't supported by Windows. If so, bound for it to lock up and display a 502 error when trying to access it, or if trying to apply changes, displays an error in a foreign language and refuses to save it.
This seems to be (mostly) changing as Fandom has finally announced that they will continually upgrade to newer MediaWiki versions, starting with 1.37.[2]
They used to have a skin named Monaco that was quite beloved by the userbase, which was replaced with the theme Oasis that decreased space for actual content in favor of space for ads, which sounds quite ridiculous.
Even worse, they retired the MonoBook skin for the same reason, and Fandom claimed it was retired to comply with the GDPR, yet Oasis has more space for ads than the retired skins.[3]
Inconsistent policy about creating wikis. Everyone is free to create their wiki without restrictions. However, any wiki can still be closed if one of Fandom's higher-ups thinks it must be closed because it violates their Terms of Use, meaning users "being free to create their own wikis" is a completely false claim.
Constant and unnecessary ads and Fandom’s stupid game trailers always playing when you’re just trying to read an article in peace.
During March 2020, both sites forced anyone who made a new wiki to use an "upgraded" version of their wiki software called the Unified Community Platform (UCP). This new version is completely unfinished and broken, and now, there's no way to create a non-broken wiki unless you adopt an inactive one.
In regards to the new version of the wiki software, it’s a good idea on paper as it fixes many of the problems Fandom has had in the past like the outdated version of MediaWiki, but the whole thing just makes it look more like a social media page rather than a Wiki and with the bugs that haven’t been fixed after it began to be rolled out. It’s unknown why they decided to do this at all.
Recently, Fandom and Wikia have been switching already existing wikis to this new software. This has infuriated many users of the website.
Also, as of 2021, it appears that most wikis from both sites have officially upgraded to this, and it is unlikely that there are any wikis left not using UCP.
The FandomDesktop (UCP 2) layout is atrocious and is considered even worse than the original UCP/Oasis theme, with ads being more frequent. You could change it back if you have an account, but this is no longer available after August 9, 2021.
A week or months after the introduction of FandomDesktop, the advertisement was updated and now covered half of the wiki pages on certain user devices when loaded mostly lower monitor resolutions such as 1366x768 or 1280x720 and lower or any iPads).[4]
Both sites also removed redlinks for no clear reason.[5] Even if this was because of the expected reason "they don't go anywhere with any proper content", this shows that Fandom does not even know what the purpose of redlinks is as if you read WP:REDLINK on Wikipedia (aka the inspiration of all wiki-hosting sites), you will see that the purpose of redlinks are that they are supposed to be there in case anyone wants to create an article for the said topic, and they should only be removed if they definitely won't have an article on the wiki.
Both sites replaced forums with discussions, a buggy replacement hated by many users.
On November 15, 2021, they announced that wikia.org wikis would be migrating to Fandom, because "people can be fans of anything", despite that there are times when they can't or shouldn't.[6]
Unlike most websites that allow you to change your username with no consequences, changing your Fandom username for some petty reason, qualifies as sockpuppeting when it shouldn’t.
Fandom
Before being rebranded as Fandom (as they were known as Wikia back in the day), the site was far more focused on fan-made communities/wikis, with its homepage being far easier to navigate. By logging into the Fandom homepage nowadays, however, you will be assaulted with an array of random posts covering various pop-culture news. Even if you use the search function in the "Discover Wikis" section, you'll still be greeted with various blogs, and the search results for wikis are crammed away pathetically in the corner, almost as if the site had forgotten what it's supposed to be.
With the "Fandom" rebranding, the platform is now completely and utterly biased towards entertainment wikis, with annoying features such as the "Fan Feed" located at the bottom of every article containing links to clickbait titles under the Fandom website. The rebrand makes it look like a third-rate fansite, instead of a wiki farm, due to the name not having any connection to wikis at all.
Speaking of blogs, the majority of them are BuzzFeed-type, Screen Rant-esque clickbait garbage. Some are more focused on rapid feminist ideologies than creating content that fans want to read, from blogs complaining how "Soul Calibur VI's" female characters are "a letdown," to blogs defending Battlefield V's historically wrong choice to add women in the frontlines, and to blogs claiming that Yaoi and Yuri are harmful to the LGBT community. These blogs eventually became less common after numerous creative staff members were laid off.[7]
The auto-playing "featured videos" are just as bad at times, containing multiple inaccuracies and normally only feature a summarized version of the page. An example is on Castlevania Wiki's Alucard page. The video uses footage of Alucard from "Hellsing" (anyone who watched the OVA will know that the "Hellsing" Alucard is Vlad Dracula himself). The ones on the RWBY Wiki were so bad that they had to add disclaimers on the pages.[8] The fact that these autoplay videos were added without the agreement of the wiki users didn't help either.[9] Not to mention they also hog the CPU and RAM for older computers. Thankfully the videos start as muted.
Similar to most political extremist sites, Fandom will try and insert politics at any given opportunity. For example, on Piper's page on Nukapedia (Fallout Wiki), Fandom inserted an introduction video of her that includes a reference to "fake news" and an allusion to President Trump. It annoyed the admins of Nukapedia as they format pages to educate readers about Fallout and editorializing is simply out of place.
The number of advertisements and multiple features that often cannot be turned off hogs CPU and RAM, as well as clogging half of the page if using a 1366x768 monitor/cheap laptop monitor. It is very unfriendly to older computers or cheap computers with weaker CPUs. Before the rebrand, it was more accessible for unregistered users, but now it's almost impossible to browse without getting infested with ads unless an ad blocker is used.
Fandom recently has become more pro-censored. A good example is when they marked the term "SJW" as spam and prevented any edits containing the words from being submitted and pages containing the words from being edited until any mentions of "SJWs" were removed. Needless to say, users were quick to come up with alternatives.[10]
More recently, they have started taking action against wikis with excess nudity or fanservice, meaning some wikis especially anime based will be taken down and most of the hard work and research put into those wikis would be lost.[11]
SOAP takes anything like some random, unknown person's complaints very seriously, in Q3 2018 they even suggested to close down wikis for "Pushing GamerGate thoughts." However, the user who wanted to close wikis for being pro-GG was banned from another wiki for posting actual bestiality pornography.[12]
They discourage forking off the site. Even though wikis like Trollpasta Wiki, the Qualitipedia wikis, other reception wikis, the Ballmedia wikis, RuneScape Wiki, and Minecraft Wiki[13] have been successful, they had a large history of demoting admins and globally banning users who attempt to encourage moving their wikis off Fandom, which even happened before the rebrand after the Oasis skin was forced. [14]
In one recent incident in 2020, an admin from the Spanish SmashPedia got disabled by staff and had his blog forking his wiki deleted without any chance of recovery (alongside blocking who made the blog and who deleted it). Shortly after, a screenshot was taken onto another wiki, and not only did they use COPPABot (a bot naturally only used to delete content of underaged users, which is now abuse of a wiki tool), but the entire wiki where the image was posted got closed as well. Shortly after, a staff member used a tool called "Piggyback" to censor the blog and then globally disable his account. Shortly after this incident, the staff attempted to censor this case further by deleting any threads related to this incident and also globally banning anyone who was involved.
Hacking and vandalism often happen due to low-security features.
Wikis kept getting infested by many trolls who kept vandalizing pages and spamming comments attacking others.
Hypocrisy for two reasons:
Fandom claims to offer a friendly and welcoming environment for everyone. Yet, the staff can abruptly close even very old and very frequented wikis without warning, changing their Wiki Software to a new and unfinished version, and not caring about any lost content-related problem the users they should care about may experience. They are often using a sort of courteously intolerant behavior when their decisions are questioned, often using the same copypasted reply in their messages. Community Central, the core of the service, is full of users biased in favor of Fandom, whose comments are left untouched.
Fandom also claims that adding videos to Wiki pages will help decrease the number of overall ads, which should be "a better experience." However, you may get stuck watching a whole minute's worth of ads before the featured video plays without an adblocker.
They have continued to allow rip-offs of Qualitipedia wikis, as there are new rip-offs like Greatest Books Wiki (a rip-off of Magnificent Literature Wiki), Wonderful Books Wiki (another ripoff of Magnificent Literature Wiki), Incredible Characters Wiki (although the founder admitted it was created just in case the original closed down)[15] and Fresh Websites Wiki (a rip off of the original wiki of the same name, our sister wiki), despite them shutting down the positive reception wikis as well when the negative ones started shutting down in September 2018. [16]
On September 15, 2021, Connal2021 copied the entire main page of the now closed Miraheze version of Best Shows & Episodes Wiki, and pasted it on the main page of another wiki ripoff, Best TV Shows Wiki (a rip off of Best Shows & Episodes Wiki).[17]
Wonderful Books Wiki, Incredible Characters Wiki and Fresh Websites Wiki are arguably the most pointless ones, as there are already Fandom wikis with the same topic, as there is already Greatest Books Wiki, Characters Wiki the Fandom version of Incredible Characters Wiki and Best Websites Wiki, the original version of our brother wiki.
However, this can be excused by the fact that, unlike the other wiki rip-offs, these wiki rip-offs are based on wikis that were created after the migration, so Fandom doesn't necessarily know that these wikis are rip-offs.
When asking a staff member why a certain user has been globally blocked or why a user's account has been disabled, they refuse to give any information as to why.
If a user gets unfairly blocked on a wiki by a corrupt admin, they usually side with the corrupt admin without a second thought.
Worse, if someone was wanting to adopt a wiki and yet they were blocked on another, the Fandom staff would not allow that person to get the rights to that wiki, and sometimes in the worst case scenarios, globally block the user.
A lot of bad and average wikis can be found on the site. Most of them are either unorganized or not very good due to lack of moderation, lack of quality control, refusing to listen to criticism and instead blocking people who criticize them, frequent vandalism, spam/useless categories, poor writing structures, refusing the pleas or help of blocked users and showing them no mercy, unfair rules, not caring about a second rewrite, and when a user is blocked, they can not edit their talk page. Many examples of bad/mediocre wikis include:
Wikis based on Nickelodeon shows, with the Sam and Cat Wiki, Breadwinners Wiki, Bunsen Is a Beast Wiki, Henry Danger Wiki, Rabbids Invasion Wiki, The Loud House Encyclopedia, the now-closed Casagrandes Wiki, and Santiago of the Seas Wiki being the worst offenders (Encyclopedia SpongeBobia, Avatar Wiki, Jimmy Neutron Wiki, T.U.F.F. Puppy Wiki, Danny Phantom Wiki, Fairly Odd Parents Wiki, School of Rock Wiki, Nickipedia, Drake and Josh Wiki, Blue's Clues Wiki, and Hey Arnold Wiki are the only exceptions from these).
Out of all of the Nickelodeon wikis, The Loud House Encyclopedia is debatably the worst offender by many, as the users there constantly ship the older characters with the younger siblings and any character[18] (which started in 2016), disrespect other users opinions, many of the users and admins being massive hypocrites, protecting upcoming episode pages and sometimes even regular pages for administrators only indefinitely (with the worst offenders being Clyde McBride/Lori Moments, When I Grow Up, No End in Bite, and Lily Loud), etc. In addition, the infamous episode "No Such Luck" ruined the fanbase, as they went from being average to being a bad wiki[19], being one of the reasons why the The Loud House actually went downhill in Season 3... and it must and needs to be mentioned that "A Grave Mistake" would somehow start the downfall of the show... only for the Season 5 premiere titled "Schooled" would actually worsen the downfall of the show. Eventually, as of 2021, the fanbase was so fed up, even to the point where they made posts and polls on the wiki to improve it over time, thus leaving many of the writers to improve it. The wiki has a few redeeming qualities here and there, but that is not saying much.
Most wikis related to preschool or preteen TV shows, including wikis like CBeebies Wiki, Learningblocks Wiki, PBS Kids Wiki, and PBS Kids GO! Wiki, Pocoyo Wiki, Judy Moody Wiki, Angelina Ballerina Wiki, Henry Hugglemonster Wiki, Special Agent Oso Wiki, and Fireman Sam Wiki. Also, because many of these shows are underrated, they end up coming off as shovelware for the wiki.
Arthur Wiki, while not a bad wiki, relies on subheaders too much. Luckily, it's fork toned down the subheaders a lot.
Lost Media Archive, while not outright tiresome has gone downhill a bit since 2018 when most of the admins left the site, though newer admins were eventually added and some good pages can still be found here and there.[20]
The Powerpuff Girls: Action Time Wiki is a rip-off of Powerpuff Girls Wiki.[21]
Miraculous Ladybug Wiki is also really toxic, and we mean really toxic, even bullying a fan who liked a character called Lila Rossi, where the fan is hated by the wiki, if not worse than the Steven Universe Wiki, even to the point where in January 2022, they actually made the person commit suicide.[22]
Waddle On Wiki, just like the Angry Birds Universe Wiki is a rip-off of a wiki with this wiki ripping off the Club Penguin Wiki but this case is even worse since this wiki simply imported the page from the Club Penguin Wiki and called it a day which makes the Angry Birds Universe Wiki look like Encyclopedia SpongeBobia in comparison.[23]
KineMaster Wiki, for its lack of information and featuring pages that have some to do with the subject in question.
After the release of Mario Party 10, the Mario Party Wiki started being inactive as some of its pages are outdated and some of its admins haven't been active for years though it still has some active users. You can look at the difference if you compare the Mario Party page with the Mario Party Superstars page.[24].
As stated on BQ#11N#2, Fandom has continued to allow rip-offs of Qualitipedia wikis.
Dream Fiction Wiki, which while not bad, is a clone of the Idea Wiki and some of its admins can act aggressively towards certain users.
While Muppet Wiki is fairly good in terms of content, the admins of that wiki are somewhat mean to innocent users, as they tend to instantly block them after just a few edits, and will show no mercy towards returning editors who were previously blocked, thereby choosing to ignore and block them again. They can also be very poor in grammar and writing structures, which also applies to other sites of the Muppet fandom (including ToughPigs, Muppet Central, and social media like Twitter/X), and can be hard to reason with. To add insult to injury, starting in the late 2010s/early 2020s, the fandom went downhill for the following reasons:
The Sesame Street section is the worst when it comes to Muppet Wiki and other sites in the Muppet fandom, having been overseen by Shane Keating/Oscarfan/MarshalGrover/sokdrawer (who has since expanded to other parts of the Muppet fandom, including the Muppets, Fraggle Rock, and Jim Henson's life and legacy). For that reason, he has written bizarre sentences (which can mean accurate sentences with poor grammar and novel writing structures not found elsewhere) in those articles and has also made false remarks, both of which have influenced others in the fandom as a whole to do the same. Some of Shane's poor writing skills and unethical practices in the Muppet fandom have especially inspired the crafting of a rule on one of Muppet Wiki's policy pages, namely the Style Guide.
Even worse, Tim Batarseh was the biggest abusee of Muppet Wiki and perhaps the rest of the Muppet fandom, thus becoming its worst member, owing to his hatred of the aforementioned Shane (and possibly other bizarre sentence writers, including Jon Brangwynne/Jbrangwynne53, Scott Hanson/Scarecroe, his primary blocker, and Tony Whitaker/MuppetDude). One last plea to Whitaker to have him unblocked on Muppet Wiki and the fandom resulted in him allegedly being reported to the Fandom Wiki farm for "personal threats" ("death threats and harassment" as Kimberton calls them) and later permanently banned.
Wikis associated with Seth MacFarlane's adult animation, particularly Family Guy Wiki, are considered to be the absolute worst wikis on Fandom to date, since they are a mess in the formatting department and have corrupt, cruel admins, notably Buckimion, although Buckimion did retire from the Family Guy Wiki, the other admins that followed continued to act toxic to several innocent users and would unfairly block them for the pettiest of reasons.
They never care about a security breach or whenever features become broken until it becomes a serious issue. Two of Fandom's staff accounts got hacked and action wasn't taken until the damage had already been done.
Bureaucracy never helps matters, since as a whole, it causes more problems than it has solved. In terms of a wider issue, what is to always be expected from bureaucrats, is that they are painfully indifferent to people's feelings, apathetic to people, have no moral compasses, rely on their politically correct agendas to shut down people who have the right to stand up against corrupt staff, admins, and moderators, destroy efficiencies and dreams that will make beneficial changes, and are otherwise shallow. The same logic applies to the Fandom staff, as well as its various wiki domains.
In addition to that, admins and moderators, as well as most if not all users in particular, revert well-done edits for no reason, revert them just because they don't agree with them, as well as under absurd, perverse reasons.
While it may sound good in certain ways if done in minorly/moderately restricted methods, having the communities run the wikis variably is not just painfully capricious and arbitrary, but also unreliable and unstable, as there will be changes that will negatively affect the wikis.
As it additionally ties in with the communities running by themselves, the changes are also, driven by opinionated, biased mentalities rather than looking from a factual perspective, and happen to ruin things that are fine the way they are, hence the changes are made just because someone personally doesn't like it.
Ever since the start, there have always been problems with opposing abusive moderators and administrators. There were zero ways to hold them to account and to punish them. Fandom doesn't do anything helpful against them, and all they do is offer advice to message them, which far more often than not, is always a hit-and-run. To make matters worse, they give them freedom w/o any obvious restrictions. What this insinuates, is that both moderators and administrators are treated as privileged positions, when they just aren't. Most people joining the aforementioned had chosen to be in those positions, knowing full well of all the challenges involved, but there is no excuse for them to abuse their power for their selfish ends, for example, banning people for no/petty reasons. The same logic applies to founders that happen to abuse their authority as well.
Unlike Miraheze, which makes you request wikis for them to be created, Fandom lets you create wikis yourself. While some people think that this is not a bad idea, as you don't have to wait for someone else to make the wiki for you, the problem is that there are no restrictions in doing so which results in users such as this one creating a wiki about racism,[25] which was later closed.[26]
FANDOM sometimes annoys viewers with a "LET US KNOW" or "TAKE THE SURVEY HERE" icon covering half of the page. This problem can be fixed by refreshing the page.[citation needed]
Annoying quiz game that blocks almost the page view in a wiki. Thankfully, it disappeared.[citation needed]
Starting from 2023, there is an annoying forced age gate pop-up asking if you are a child or an adult, and the only way you can get rid of it is a third-party extension.[citation needed]
Fandom was hired by the US Navy to promote Twitch. In return, Fandom sent in February 2024 a $200,000 bonus check to the IDF during the 2023 Israel-Hamas War.
In 2019, the domain wikia.com was changed to fandom.com, as Wikia Inc. was being rebranded to Fandom Inc. The wikia.org domain was used for non-entertainment encyclopedias.[27]
You couldn't directly create a wiki on the site. You have to create it on Fandom first and request to have it migrated to wikia.org.
Qualities That Are Still A Good Fandom
Overall
There are some good things about UCP:
If someone creates a page, it now appears in the logs, therefore, you can now prove whether or not someone created a page without being an administrator.
While removing chat was something that annoyed users, Fandom staff did have a point about it not being very popular, and also, it's kind of pointless now considering that Discord servers exist.[28]
While they were not originally there, blogs and comments were eventually added to the platform.[29]
You now automatically get a notification if someone replies to your comment or comment you replied to when in the past, you had to ping users for them to get a reply. This is one of the few things that Fandom has over Miraheze.
It is much easier to see users' posts, as in the past, you had to click on the thing that said "[number of discussion posts] discussion posts", however, you can now view their discussion posts by clicking "Activity" and while there are three things that are shown here (posts, comments, and messages), it will automatically be on posts.
The sites recently added sandbox links to user pages proving that the site is starting to slowly improve again aside from the UCP update.
Fandom
The site used to be good before 2018.
Most of these issues focus on the bad staff and moderation, and the user base
As mentioned above, it's easier to use and understand than MediaWiki.
There are still quite a few well-designed wikis on the site. Examples being the WWTBAM wiki, the Silvagunner wiki, the Screamer Wiki, Heroes Wiki, Villains Wiki, Five nights at Freddy's Wiki, The Binding of Isaac Wiki, and The Encyclopedia SpongeBobia
The clickbait blogs when viewing wikis can be easily removed through an adblocker or editing your global CSS on Community Central.
The videos are now disabled, albeit only for logged-in users.
We still get a lot of great wikis, some of which have information written from an in-universe perspective (most notably the Harry Potter Wiki).
↑Just click the edit button on your sandbox on any wiki (if you don't have one, create one, and if you're an anonymous user, edit the public sandbox titled "[insert wiki name here]:Sandbox" and if there isn't one feel free to create it yourself) and link a non-existent article, then publish it and you will see that there is no redlink on the article despite that your edit was saved.
