Summary
- Wowpedia has split from Fandom and moved to wiki.gg (see below for reasons) and we are now called Warcraft Wiki! (or "WCW" in short) The URL to use is https://warcraft.wiki.gg
- All the content and all our pages are the same and have been ported over to the new wiki
- Unfortunately, Fandom's policy prevents permanently closing a wiki, so Wowpedia will remain in existence BUT it will no longer be maintained, as all our admins and editors are moving to Warcraft Wiki. Wowpedia will just slowly grow out of date and less reliable over time as new expansions, patches and interviews are released, which will all be documented on WCW but not Wowpedia, similar to what happened to Wowwiki (so you should probably edit your Bookmarks to WCW!)
- You don't need to remember the new URLs! There is a browser extension that automatically switches you to the wiki.gg version of Fandom wikis when you click a Fandom link so you don't have to think about it, highly recommend grabbing it here (Chrome / Firefox) (The extension is updated on a weekly basis, so we are not on there yet but we'll be soon!)
- Help us spread the word across the community!
What's new?
- Warcraft Wiki will load and run much faster
- There are no ads that take up 90% of the screen, no floating "video" popups that follow you around the page as you scroll on mobile, no Fandom feature bloat, no flashy sidebar, nor disguised ads in the middle of our paragraphs! These are imposed by Fandom on all their wikis.
- Warcraft Wiki's search function is much better and accurate, example.
- The mobile version is a lot more usable and a lot less bloated! Try it out right now, https://warcraft.wiki.gg
What can I do to help?
- Spread the word and share this post! It'll be extremely difficult to compete against Fandom now owning both previous versions of our wiki (Wowwiki and Wowpedia) on Google search results or anywhere, so word of mouth is where it's at. If you see people sharing a Wowpedia link, whether that's on here or twitter or elsewhere, comment and give them a Warcraft Wiki link instead.
- Don't click Wowpedia or Wowwiki links. And try to search for "warcraft wiki" when Googling. (We're not appearing on Google's search results at this minute but we'll get up there as more people do it!)
13 years after we moved from Wowwiki to Wowpedia, we still occasionally see people linking to Wowwiki even though it has been dead for over a decade. It'll be hard to change the community's habits, so any nudge will be appreciated. - Maintaining Wowpedia and now Warcraft Wiki is purely volunteer work (no one here makes money out of this). But it's also hard work. If you've ever noticed typos or inaccurate/outdated information, please feel free to just create an account and start editing yourself! The more we are, the better.
Why did you move? (story time)
Originally, we were known as Wowwiki, and we were hosted by Wikia. Wikia started pushing ads onto us and making unilateral layout changes, so around 2010 we decided to leave. You can read about this historic event
here.
- Wikia's policy meant that wikis couldn't really "leave", they had to "fork" instead, ie. make a new copy of the wiki somewhere else, but the old/original one unfortunately remains behind in the hands of Wikia
- We moved to Gamepedia and called the new wiki Wowpedia, and Wowwiki remained behind. Without editors, Wowwiki quickly got out of date and deprecated, but to this day it is still listed first on Google search results because Wikia just has such great Search Engine Optimization
Recently, in 2018, Wikia rebranded themselves "Fandom", and... bought out Curse/Gamepedia, Wowpedia's hosts. We were back in the hands of Wikia/Fandom.
- And history repeated itself. Fandom has now forced too many ads on us, "features" that slowed down our wiki, made unilateral layout changes, and the experience on Wowpedia has just become awful especially for mobile users, so we have once again voted to leave Fandom, you can read about that here.
- Like many other wikis (including our sister wiki at Hearthstone Wiki), we have picked wiki.gg as our hosts. Unfortunately, that means losing our name and website, as Fandom gets to keep the Wowpedia name and URL for themselves, so we are now Warcraft Wiki
What if I had an account?
- If you had a Wowpedia/Fandom account, then you'll just need to click Log In on WCW and then "Reclaim your account", you'll get your username, all your contributions and watched pages back
- After today, any edits made to Wowpedia won't be able to be ported over to Warcraft Wiki, so make sure you edit the right wiki
Who are wiki.gg?
wiki.gg are owned by Freedom Games, a game publisher who have also created wiki.gg just to host the wikis of various games, who too got fed up with Fandom.
The owners of Freedom GG are Ben Robinson (former President of Gamepedia, our former hosts who too got bought out by Fandom years ago) and Donovan Duncan (former President of Fandom), and the Head of Wikis is one of our very own admins. They seemed to represent the safest option!
wiki.gg is not totally ad-free because they need to pay for server costs, but that's about it. The ads are small, and mainly, they are where you'd expect to find them on the screen. Also, they only advertise Freedom GG games or partnered developer games (such as Terraria), not random ads.
We know the WoW community uses Wowpedia a lot, specially lore fans, and this was a really difficult task (we had to design a whole new logo!), but we really believe this is our best option (and you should already notice the difference specially on mobile).
