User:Mooncloud/Moving from Fandom
Overview
On May 9th 2024, around four months ago (at the time of writing), Urbanshade.org was created in order to move the Pressure Wiki off of Fandom. I wanted to make this post to talk about deciding to move, moving, and the effect it's had on our project.
I personally hope to see more Roblox Fandom wikis migrate, and I hope that this writing can help other projects reach a decision. This writing is personal to our situation as a wiki project and my personal experiences and opinions, and won't always apply to all other projects.
How did we get started?
To give context, I registered the Pressure Fandom Wiki on March 21st, 2024 as a personal wiki project I hoped would become official. Originally I was the only editor as the game was still relatively small and hadn't released yet, but over time new editors began contributing and helping out.
At the time, I was content with managing the wiki on Fandom, despite having seen the Youtube videos by Mossbag, the two videos by PhoenixSC, and the video by Connorsseur about Fandom as a platform. My reasoning at the time was that it would be too much work for what it's worth, and the new wiki would go unused and unrecognised. Numerous other Roblox wikis were already on Fandom, and there was a large alliance, so I was against moving.
The move off of Fandom was brought up to me by several Pressure community members, with them mentioning their issues with Fandom as a platform and how they would prefer a non-fandom official wiki. I was hesitant to the idea, but eventually I warmed up to it after discussing with the community and brought it to a poll amongst the staff.
Although at the time there were only 4-5 staff members, the poll reached an overwhelming majority in favor of moving, and urbanshade.miraheze.org (later moved to urbanshade.org) was created.
The Moving Process
After creating the wiki, we decided to manually move all of the content and files in order to set a new quality standard, rewriting most of if not all of the pages in the process. Moving the wiki to Miraheze completely eliminated the issue of removing all of the pre-built templates, categories, and other general bloat that Fandom adds to a wiki on creation.
Moving gave us the freedom of a completely blank slate, which allowed us to organise our pages and categories efficiently and in a way that worked for us. We also had the opportunity to create our own simple templates that our editors could understand and contribute to without needing to rely on modules.
Re-creating the needed templates and pages was a seemingly daunting task, but as the wiki at the time was still small, it was manageable. After a series of polls, we decided on enabling the Moderation extension, which allowed us to moderate edits as they were made and approve or deny them.
Setting up the backend aspects of the wiki using ManageWiki was simple and only took a few small edits, giving us more time to focus on content rather than technical issues. As we were a small wiki run by a small group, we had nobody available to help contribute to styling our site which proved to be an issue, as Miraheze has no in-built styling options like Fandom does.
Although we had no site styling at the time, we were still able to create core pages such as the main page with wikitext. Learning and getting used to the new wiki's skin and editing style took a little time as the majority of the staff at the time were primarily Fandom editors, but it wasn't a setback, and in time it became intuitive.
One of our largest issues was file usage and migrating the files. As Fandom has no in-built image export and we had nobody able to automate the process, we had to manually save and re-upload all of the files from the Fandom wiki to the new wiki. Although it was only around 200 files compared to the over 1000 we have now, it was still a large task that took a considerable amount of time.
Getting our wiki onto search engines was surprisingly simple. After reading through a few guides written by and suggested to me by the Miraheze community, we were able to set up Google Search Console with the help of the WikiSEO extension, giving us the ability to add our pages to google and manually write descriptions for them.
Previously, when the wiki was created, we elected to keep it private so that only select members could view pages while we were still working on moving the content. Once all of the content was recreated and everything was ready, we were able to open the wiki to the public.
After Moving & Game Release
After the moving process was completed and the wiki was open to the public, we began getting more visitors and contributors. We were promoted as the official wiki in the Pressure Discord server after our theme was completed, greatly helping the visibility of our site overall.
Our most major issue was competing with Fandom and their overwhelming SEO. Fandom is a for-profit company that utilises advertising in order to generate revenue, allowing them to essentially buy their way to the top of search engines. This was (and still is) an issue for our project.
Initially we attempted to remove the content from the Fandom wiki and direct people to the new wiki, planning to request the closure of the wiki. Fandom reverted our edits, demoted near-everyone involved with the project, and globally blocked the majority of the admins.
Fandom's official Forking Policy states:
"The Fandom wiki must not be used to promote or advertise the fork wiki... ...Sitenotices and Annonnotices referencing the discussion, the fork, or the new URL are not permitted."
Effectively prohibiting us from announcing our migration. They have also filtered our URL from being added anywhere to the wiki, resulting in an automatic 1 month block. Fandom's Forking Policy also states:
"Departing admins and other rights holders must make a clean break from the wiki... ...Staff will remove rights from departing admins and allow new admins to be chosen once the fork is complete."
Which, as the entire Fandom wiki administrative team was moving, left the wiki with no management. Fandom's wording in their policy portrays "forking" as the decision of a group of editors to break away and leave the Fandom community, while in reality the greater wiki community agreed to move away from Fandom.
Once the game released, the previously-dormant Fandom wiki began gaining traction again. Since Fandom refused to close the wiki, had demoted all of the admins, and actively prevented mentioning the new wiki, the Fandom wiki was left completely unmoderated and prone to griefing with no chance of directing users to the new wiki.
Users now looking for accurate content about Pressure are directed to the abandoned wiki and often met with vandalism and misinformation. Although over time our wiki has been climbing in search results, Fandom is still first in essentially every search query that isn't the URL of the new wiki itself.
Advice to other Roblox wiki projects
My honest advice is that moving to Miraheze or any other wiki host as a Roblox wiki is worth it. I can't speak for other projects considering we moved early on, but the entire experience and all of the quality-of-life changes after moving have been incredible. Miraheze is an amazing platform, and while it may take a while getting used to, the freedoms it provides definitely are worth it.
Not all wikis have the liberty of being small and obscure enough to manually recreate content, but Miraheze has tools available import wiki content from sites like Fandom, and the volunteers would be more than willing to help with migrating content and other settings.
Moving to Miraheze has been nothing but a net-positive for our community, wiki editors and users alike. Although we're still considerably early into our project, our experience has been great. We've been able to reach and achieve a higher quality standard, moderate and completely prevent vandalism, and fully customise our project how we like. We never would've been able to achieve this level of control over our own project if we hadn't moved from Fandom.
Miraheze's open community of volunteers and contributors have supported our project and many others in numerous ways, such as providing important resources, providing technical and wiki-related support, and maintaining their transparent moderation and management systems.
Testimonials from other migrated wikis
I've had the pleasure of meeting a few managers of wikis that have also moved off of Fandom, mainly to Miraheze.
Here's what Beefore, one of the lead bureaucrats of the Phighting wiki, had to say about projects moving to Miraheze.
"While the switch to Miraheze may seem daunting at first, you will be extremely relieved once you actually finish the transfer. You can go to the Special:Export page to download an XML file of the wiki and use that to transfer over the Fandom wiki's content. It is completely fine to start over, much like the Pressure wiki, as the quantity and/or quality of content may not be up to par with how you'd like. With Miraheze being hosted on a pure version of Mediawiki, there is much more customability you can do with the theme of the wiki. There's many creative wikis on Miraheze that use Mediawiki to its fullest potential! Of course, there's also the difference in staffing. Fandom staff is known to be incompetent, and I have witnessed that personally. While I have not had much contact with Miraheze staff myself, all I have heard about them is that they are incredibly hard-working and sweet. It's extremely easy to get help from staff or other Miraheze editors in their Discord server. Even though Fandom's forking policies are awful, and it may seem discouraging to have to deal with these rules, switching to Miraheze is more than worth it. It's much more accessible to users without an account, as there are no ads. TLDR MOVE TO MIRAHEZE !!!!!!!!!!"
Conclusion
I strongly urge any heads of Fandom-based wiki projects, not just Roblox wiki projects, that are reading this to start a discussion about moving off of Fandom. I believe it will always lead to a net positive experience for both users and editors.
Miraheze's Github Sponsors page describes Miraheze as such:
"Miraheze is a community-centric, ad free, 100% open-source, and locally controlled wiki hosting platform funded 100% by donations from community members, in part to maintain editorial independence and freedom from third parties. All of Miraheze's volunteers are unpaid, so monetary donations entirely fund Miraheze's hosting and legal (paperwork, filings, etc.) expenses."
If you would like to learn more about Miraheze and their operations, check out their FAQ page.
Resources
I personally have been passionate about editing wikis and other wiki-related projects for several years, so I love to contribute and help out where I can. I've compiled some resources about MediaWiki and Miraheze that helped our project in the earlier stages.
Editing & wikitext
SEO & Extensions |
Wiki customisation & management |
