The Zelda Wiki has left the Fandom platform to create a forked, or duplicated, wiki on a new host site. The Zelda Wiki was the largest fan-created source of Legend of Zelda- related content and offered detailed information on every game released since 1987. Beginning in 2017, the wiki was hosted on Gamepedia, but that site was acquired by Fandom in 2018, after which all Gamepedia wikis were converted to the Fandom theme and URLs. Gamepedia effectively ceased to exist.For those unfamiliar with the behind-the-scenes of gaming wikis, the story can be slightly confusing, particularly because the former host site, Fandom, has gone through some name changes over the years. It began as Wikicities and later became Wikia, which many people will be most familiar with, before morphing to Fandom in 2019. At the beginning of October 2022, Fandom acquired seven popular websites, including GameSpot, Metacritic, GameFAQs, and Giant Bomb. This news was not viewed positively by many people. Perhaps coincidentally timing-wise, just a couple of weeks later on October 19, the Zelda Wiki announced that it would be splitting from Fandom and migrating over to Wiki.com, another wiki hosting platform. The new site, called Zeldapedia, is a forked version of the Zelda Wiki, and both sites now exist simultaneously. However, the original Zelda Wiki team is now at Zeldapedia.
According to the Zeldapedia team, there were multiple reasons for leaving Fandom, which is a for-profit organization. The foremost is that, since the acquisition of Gamepedia by Fandom, the wikis hosted there are no longer “editorially independent.” The team, after Fandom’s “recent buyouts and questionable staffing decisions,” felt that it was time to leave in order to be “free from corporate monopolization and control.” In its announcement on Twitter, the Zeldapedia team urged other gaming wikis currently hosted on Fandom to leave as well.
The problem can perhaps be better understood by going to the RuneScape Wiki. This is a site for the long running RuneScape franchise that is now also hosted on Wiki.com after having left Gamepedia in 2018 when it was still called Wikia. A page on the RuneScape Wiki explains that, even then, Wikia had been imposing its desire for profit on the site’s wikis. The advertisements had become “horrendous,” and the site had shifted its focus from creating wiki content to “clickbait editorials.” Wikia had also begun to more actively control content on the wikis, including posting videos that played over the articles.
Despite the alleged increase in oversight on Gamepedia wiki pages, a number of games still have maintained pages on the hosting platform. Fans can find everything from the expected Grand Theft Auto and The Elder Scrolls wikis to useful content about newly released games like Gotham Knights by WB Games Montreal.
Sources: GamesRadar, RuneScape Wiki