I Tried to Fork a Fandom Wiki – And Learned a Hard Lesson About Community

I don't like Fandom. Their mission – to provide free hosting and maintenance for wikis – is noble. Wikis are one of the greatest things to emerge from the web, and it's hard to imagine where we would be without Wikipedia.

Fandom is one of a few different organizations which host wikis for free, but they are by far the most popular and controversial. If you've ever looked for information about a fictional series that you love and ended up on Fandom, you'll know about the extreme quantity of advertisements littered around otherwise quality content written by dedicated fans.

There are ads at the top of page. Ads on the side of the page. In some cases, there are even ads inline with content. Dedicated fans pour hours into archiving information about something they love only for Fandom to dump loads of ads on it as if it's one of those clickbait article content farms. It's absolutely disrespectful to the editors that just want to make quality information freely available.

When I was younger, I started reading the fantasy dragon series Wings of Fire written by Tui T. Sutherland and published by Scholastic. I have a deep appreciation for the Wings of Fire community, which is where I met some of my now closest friends.

Now, I have an interest in sysadmin skills and in December of 2024, I looked at the Wings of Fire Fandom wiki and thought to myself I could just host my own MediaWiki instance and make a wiki free of dependence on Fandom.

This wasn't out of dislike for the Wings of Fire Fandom wiki itself. The team that keeps it comprehensive and well-edited does an incredible job doing so. I was just extremely irritated with how Fandom had been moving away from improving wikis and toward seeking more ways to monetize the platform. And I knew I wasn't alone. Many wikis formerly hosted on Fandom have forked away to regain the control that Fandom was continually taking away. The Minecraft Wiki is probably the best-known example. I knew I could easily host and maintain my own MediaWiki instance and set up a wiki with an interface much, much better.

I felt this was also a good chance for me to make a positive change in a community I really cared about. The Wings of Fire community (although not perfect) had done a lot for me as a person and I wanted to give back.

I went all-in on the wiki project. I set up a MediaWiki instance on my own server, made by own logo, used my own templates, and wrote my own pages. Unrestricted by any established guidelines, I was also free to make more changes which I thought would improve the wiki. Rather than using the common Book/Page format for citations, the citations on my wiki would use Book/Chapter/Paragraph/Quote, which would allow readers to quickly and easily verify where exactly a statement is backed up by the novels, even when using different editions like ebooks. ElasticSearch, image maps, top contributors, multiple skins, chapter summaries; I wanted to do a lot of cool stuff.

The project was received with cautious approval by various Wings of Fire circles I am in, and I can even say that Wings of Fire wiki was given a channel in the r/WingsOfFire Discord server as well as a link in the r/WingsOfFire subreddit sidebar.

Over the following six months, nearly 150 users were registered and a significant number of them made contributions big and small. I felt that, with time, the wiki would eventually be able to reach the amount of content of the Fandom wiki with equal or higher quality and that it could then become the definitive Wings of Fire Wiki.

Fueled by all this excitement around the project I had started, I also started up my own instance of Discourse called Wings of Fire Forum as a similarly independent and ad-free community center for Wings of Fire fans. Discourse takes after classic forums of the early web, but also introduces modern features like instant chat, excellent moderation tools, and an extensive plugins and themes system, all while being free and open-source software.

Things felt like they were going so well. I felt like I could do anything. And so I did something incredibly stupid.

One of the people involved in the project mentioned that they wished more Fandom wikis could fork, specifically calling out Warrior Cats, which is sort of a sister series to Wings of Fire (though wildly more mature and popular). I arrogantly thought that if I can host one MediaWiki, why can't I host two?

Now, I am not terribly familiar with Warrior Cats. I read the first eight or so books when I was in grade school, but I really didn't know it that well, so I decided to just go up and ask the existing Warrior Cats Fandom wiki if they were interested in having a free MediaWiki instance hosted for them.

Looking back now, that was incredibly stupid. The admin who responded essentially told me that what I was proposing was so much larger than what I was thinking, and others joined in to humble me (as I deserved). But the admin also allowed me to have a conversation about Wings of Fire Wiki and they explained to me that such a project would likely do more harm than good.

They explained that building an entirely separate wiki will either endlessly be catching up to the Fandom wiki and never grow into any significance or eventually come into conflict with the Fandom wiki and cause problems within the community for everyone involved. They pointed out that starting a completely different project will inevitably cause fracturing between editors and the community and, eventually, a lot of hard work to be discarded on one side or the other. It would be more beneficial for everyone to focus efforts on improving one single wiki rather than split precious editor contributions between multiple projects. The Fandom wiki is established and has a lot of good framework and structure, not to mention the massive amount of content that exists.

Thank you VectorSig, and I’m sorry for being so incredibly stupid.

It was at this point that I realized that I had made a really bad move. One that had costed hours of not only my time, but the time of dozens of contributors who also had hope in the project. And I felt really awful about it. I made the difficult decision to shut down the project the very next day.

I decided to close the forum, too, because of a similar situation that occurred around the same time. I thought that the Discourse software I used was so good that it could be the new community home for a Minecraft server I help lead called Wings of Fire: The New World. I proposed it to the rest of the staff team, but got a very harsh and vocal no.

Most of the pushback was from one of my close friends. She pointed out that most online forums are already dead simply because the community will never choose an indie internet forum over a recognizable and also that a lot of people just don’t care about quality and privacy as much as familiarity.

It hurt a lot, especially because I legitimately believed it would make the community a better place. But it’s true. I don’t know why the web is being consolidated into fewer monopolistic platforms but if that is what people prefer, a forum can never succeed without a lot more backing than I am capable of.

As a last-ditch effort for the wiki, I opened a discussion on the Wings of Fire Fandom wiki to try and get things back on the right track and focus on improving the existing and established resource. I made a post on the discussion forum exploring the idea of forking from Fandom, highlighting the benefits as well as a bit of the story of how I tried to do it myself. Everyone who chipped into the conversation was respectful (especially compared to a few of the earlier threads I saw suggesting a fork), but the answer was ultimately a hard no.

All of this hurt a lot for me because of how promising it seemed just before these two incidents. I felt I was making a positive change, and it backfired into a lot of work by a lot of people completely wasted.

Ultimately, everything's turned out alright. Most people never even cared about the project to begin with and if anyone involved was hurt by the closure, they haven't come to me with pitchforks yet.

The whole situation was a hard reminder that it is nearly impossible to make positive community changes if you don't have the backing of a community. Web of Fire, as I called it, was not just a fun idea. I spent a lot of hours and energy making it the best I could. But I was only one person, and if the majority of the community you're trying to improve isn't all that interested in improvement, there's no path to that improvement succeeding. It was really selfish of me to think I could come in with shiny new websites that addressed all of my own problems and think that everyone actually wanted that.

I previously stated this in the closing post I made to Wings of Fire Forum, but I want to once again extend both my gratitude and my apologies for all of the contributors who have put hours into editing. Your efforts are recognized and I am deeply grateful for you. I’m so sorry.