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Should mention the pessimistic possibility that Fandom buys WG and those wikis return under their umbrella. An example being Wowpedia forked off WoWWiki in 2010, moved to Curse's Gamepedia in 2013, which, Gamepedia, Fandom (then Wikia) bought in 2018.

edit: Seems they moved again recently to wiki.gg.


Replies

Washuu10/10/2024

The reason behind Fandom buying Gamepedia/Curse is both a blessing and a curse(HAH!) that would require a specific set of circumstances to happen again.[1]

Basically during 2018 Curse's owners, Twitch and Amazon, wanted more head count for Twitch and to cut out anything that was not part of Twitch's main mission. The decision at the time from the Twitch CEO was to completely shut down Curse and fire everyone by the end of 2018 even though Curse was a cash positive subsidiary. That would mean turning off every single wiki with no transfer to anywhere else. It would all just be gone.

So the director of Curse at the time worked his ass off find a buyer for the company. The final options came down to The Verge, Wikia, and one other that I forgot. Essentially Wikia was the only one that could promise to meet all of the buyout terms and a two year transition period of employee benefits for current employees.

I'm not going to call Wikia a savior here, but without any company offering to buy Curse a lot of wikis and jobs may have been lost that December.

[1]I signed some NDA about this, but it has been many years and I don't care.

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rbits10/10/2024

With Weird Gloop they have agreements that the community can move the wiki away from Weird Gloop if that happens. For example this one is not legally binding yet, but once the minecraft wiki had a legal entity it will be: https://meta.minecraft.wiki/w/Memorandum_of_Understanding_wi...