#migrating mediawiki

[fanlore-wiki]

September 22nd: Fanlore is getting an upgrade

Time flies since the last time Fanlore got a MediaWiki upgrade, but we need to wait no longer! This Sunday, September 22, Fanlore is scheduled to go through a MediaWiki upgrade at 4pm UTC (what time is it for me?)

MediaWiki is the software behind Fanlore, and the upgrade means we'll have fewer bugs and better security.

As we have less than 24 hours till the scheduled upgrade begins, please keep in mind that Fanlore will go into read-only mode during that time. This will last for about 1-8 hours while everything migrates and is tested, and during the upgrade you'll be able to browse Fanlore, but won't be able to log in or make edits. (So be sure to save your edits beforehand!)

Watch this space for more information on the scheduled upgrade, and if you have any questions, our Ask box is open - you can also join our Discord server!

----

We value every contribution to our shared fandom history. If you’re new to editing Fanlore or wikis in general, visit our New Visitor Portal to get started or ask us questions here!

[emiliers]

Vocaloid Lyrics Wiki is Migrating to Miraheze!

Been a while since I made an actual original post, and not sure how many of my original followers are still here (or even care about this kind of thing, considering I'm mainly a politics blog nowadays, but you know, this is basically the only social media platform I have anymore, not counting Discord).

Anyway, for the past few years, I've picked up a CN -> EN fan translating hobby and have been sporadically translating some vocal synth songs, posted at my own Wordpress as well as the Vocaloid Lyrics Wiki. Those who were in the fandom in the 2010s have probably heard of the wiki before, since it was basically the main hub of translation activity back then.

Well, almost fifteen years later, it's still going strong! And, with recent changes in implementation to Fandom policy, the wiki has finally decided to throw off the shackles of Fandom webhosting and move to Miraheze instead. I'll copy-paste the blurb I wrote for other vocal synth wiki discord servers about this:

Hi, so some folks might be aware of this already, but Vocaloid Lyrics Wiki has migrated to a new site on Miraheze. The admins of VLW has written a Google Doc explaining in detail the whys of the migration, if you want to check it out, but the long and short of it is that the new policy on lyrics removal has made our stay on Fandom untenable. Miraheze, in contrast, has agreed to host us and been much more transparent on actual policy. And, since they're on a newer MediaWiki installation with much more freedom in terms of what extensions we can install, we've been able to implement new templates and quality of life improvements on the new wiki! There's still a few kinks to work out on the new wiki, but we're open for editing now! Feel free to spread this message to other relevant servers/websites (with the exception of the old Fandom wiki -- the admins are planning on making an announcement themselves over there, once they're ready). And if you have any further questions, you can join our Discord or comment on our General Discussion page on the new wiki.

I am 100% biased because I helped with the migration (and have been wanting to move off Fandom for ages now), but I think the new site looks great!! And if anyone ever visited the old site and went "wow Fandom sucks, clicking back immediately", now you don't have to do that!

I'm also Emiliers on there -- as I am everywhere -- so feel free to hit me up!

[saveraedae]

Rambling about the TMS Wiki

A little side project i've been working on for a quite a while now is 'migrating' the TMS (fandom) Wiki to its own self hosted site, which will then be known as THE OFFICIAL TMS WIKI, and unfortunately it's taking a while due to the fact that lots of coding is involved with that. :/ (Building the site myself, not making it using a mediawiki host.)

But I did wanna take the time to say that this site, once live, will showcase only completely canon and official info, and anything that isn't canon to the finalized concept (AKA the show) won't be included. So due to this, there may be some gaps of information, or some descriptions of events may seem vague. It will serve as an encyclopedia for the show basically, but there will be some history segments included as well.

But this is intentional, as I don't want to reveal each and every change on the site, I want these changes to be showcased in the show itself. Y'know, to give people something to actually look forward to? lol

And also I should mention, I stopped upkeeping the fandom.com wiki a while back, so I would be very careful when trying to find 100% canon information. Some stuff is inaccurate or just REALLY poorly explained. And by some stuff I mean a lot of stuff lol.

I plan to include some new bits of info on characters and events that aren't spoilers per say, but good to know!

The new place will be an expanded version of the main TMS site and not like a typical wiki, Anyone being able to edit anything externally won't be a thing, only I can edit stuff internally.

[narusakuwiki]

Update!

We are in the process of meticulously moving to a new platform for a better experience!

This will take a bit more time as we try to make sure nothing is left behind before the switch, so we ask for a little more patience until the move is complete.

Further Information:

Originally, NaruSaku Wiki was developed with a platform named "Mediawiki". Mediawiki is the software many wikis use. Although it was a great collaboration tool, we ran into a lot of issues with spam and malicious editing.

To protect content better and for a more WSYIWYG ("what you see is what you get") experience for editors, we switched to "Wordpress". Wordpress is a lot more closed off, but allowed us to built out forms and other tools to make creating and filling out page easier.

While Wordpress has been great ease of access, we have run into many issues over the years upgrading the site even though there are not many plugins or fancy features in use. It's too risky.

For this reason, we are transitioning the site back to Mediawiki. Mediawiki and its extensions have many many good changes over the last 10 years, so we hope for a smoother page creation and edition process for editors.

That said, Registration and editing permissions will be manually approved and given at our discretion to avoid spam and malicious editing issues we faced in the past.

An announcement will be made as soon as the migration is complete. Please look forward to it!

[merlilica]

why not fandom wikia?

In general the absolutely horrendous amount of ads, rampant wiki page vandalism, massive layout and customizing limitations, and The Grimace Incident (McDonald’s paid fandom to overhaul every community-made McDonald’s wiki page and turn them into page long grimace shake advertisements, undoing months or years, even, of work).

It’s actively getting worse for its userbase and while user are technically allowed to migrate their wikis offsite, fandom doesn’t allow their wikis to be decommissioned. Ever. After migration, every user who helped to move the wiki are all locked out.

Mossbag, a hollow knight youtuber, made a great lil video here, but tldr; fandom wikia hates fandom but loves ad revenue.

If a wikia is being made, try miraheze or MediaWiki! Both allow for much more page customization, more user access settings, and less invasive ads.

[maythray]

i think the minecraft wiki is probably the best wiki to have a migration off of fandom dot com. i think it would benefit from.being a standalone wiki (or like a mediawiki) and would also make the user experience much nicer.

i get why its not migrated. the sheer amount of info on there is insane. but i always wish it would be

[kuroshitsuji-wiki]

Update:

As I couldn't request the new wiki as soon as I had planned (my body was not in it for another migration so soon afterwards^^', especially as my other wiki had an (then) ongoing anime season too...), and the request approval took a bit longer than the last time I did this (wiki.gg has been getting more requests which is, honestly, great! and they're busy with the MediaWiki update too), the schedule (as outlined in the og post) got set back a bit. Sorry!

The wiki request has been approved yesterday on Yana's birthday though :) and I finally have a deadline for the new wiki's launch: February 24, 2025!

The new wiki is currently onboarding and looks like this:

Time to make it look pretty (prettier) and fix/add stuff* :)

*this needs to be done or the site gets flagged as a duplicate and won't show up in search results

Kuroshitsuji Wiki... to migrate from Fandom Wiki!

Hello! A few weeks ago, I made a post regarding a recent issue with Fandom Wiki that has made many pages on the Kuroshitsuji Wiki unable to be edited and asked people to participate in a survey asking whether a wiki migration would be okay considering the circumstances.

And now, it's time to reveal the results!

(As the survey is now closed, all infos regarding Kuroshitsuji Wiki's issue with Fandom Wiki in particular and Fandom Wiki's problems in general can be found here.)

Thank you to everyone who shared my posts and took the time to participate! A total of 63 people participated in the main survey.

59 out of 63 voted "yes," 3 "neutral," and only one "no."

In the smaller-scale poll I conducted on tumblr directly, in which 22 people participated, the results were similar.

18 out of 22 voted "yes," 3 "neutral," and only one "no."

As such, I can announce with great joy that Kuroshitsuji Wiki will migrate from Fandom Wiki in 2025!

Results to the second question of the survey "Did you ever have any issues with Fandom?", your comments, and a preliminary "battle plan" for the migration can be found under the cut.

Second question results

14 said that they never had any issues with Fandom, 14 had minor issues with Fandom, 8 had major issues, 15 said they despised Fandom, and 12 reported they had no strong feelings about Fandom.

Of 63 participants, 29 were so kind to tell me what exactly their issues with Fandom were/are. (Out of them, 5 mentioned that they were wiki editors themselves or had, at least, a Fandom wiki account.)

Most common complaints:

The absurd amount of ads: This was mentioned by 18 people. They said that the ads are placed terribly and clutter the screen which makes navigating wikis more difficult - or even near-impossible. 3 people mentioned that they (even despite using adblockers!) often cannot access Fandom wikis because going on the website crashes their browers, pages freeze up, or all the ads make even short pages load very slowly.

Layout: 8 people complained that Fandom wikis were hard to navigate because of their layout, i.a. because of the sidebar, the ads, and formatting. The bad layout was also noted to decrease the readability of pages.

Mobile experience: 3 people specifically mentioned how awful it is to go to Fandom Wikis on their phones, i.a. because of the ads.

Other complaints:

Inability to edit pages because of the abuse filter/the offensive terms policy (Maurice's page was mentioned specifically)

Bad content moderation of some wikis

Fandom keeps logging them out

Website seems user-unfriendly in general

Using wikis for ad money and profit

Generally terrible functionality

AI usage

Lack of customisation of wikis makes everything the same

(One person simply wrote "gives me a headache" which sounds so like Violet, it's my favourite.)

Thank you all for your complaints! It was very refreshing reading them all because I could only nod along. I was particularly glad to read that people said that Fandom makes their browser crash, pages freeze up, and articles load slowly because I had/have the same issues. While Season 4 was running and I was writing the episode summaries, doing the image galleries, etc., my browser crashed all the time. Part of my plight is immortalised in article histories^^'

At the very least, Fandom automatically saves your progress or I might have killed someone. Still, having your page freeze up and your browser crash mid-edit is horrible, and I often had to restart my laptop afterwards too -.- (And I have a gaming laptop that was, at that time, just a year old!) I thought it was merely a problem with my laptop, so hearing you mention the same problem was very reassuring.

While long loading times for short pages were mentioned, loading times for long pages can be outright abysmal. There was a time no one from the admin team could really open up and edit Ciel's and Sebastian's pages (the two longest pages on the wiki). It was horrid.

I also like that the terrible mobile experience was highlighted a few times because, believe it or not, many decisions Fandom Wiki has made to their layout and such were meant to improve the mobile experience (often to the detriment of the desktop site). Wikis look so ugly and everything is extra "stripped-down" on mobile so that wikis would "run better and more smoothly on phones." Maybe we would know if this was actually true were it not for all the ads, hm?

Your comments

Thank you to the 15 people who left a comment! Most spoke out again in favour of a migration in their comment, saying that it would be for the best - one expressed their support despite having nothing against Fandom Wiki personally.

(Some of the comments were specifically for me which I didn't expect and so, so kind even. Thanks for wishing me luck and all your nice words. :'))

The only question that really came up was who would be the wiki's new host. I will answer this in the next section :)

(Preliminary) "battle plan" to move the wiki

Wiki's Next Host Site

One comment specifically suggested Miraheze as the next host, and another mentioned the migration history of the Twisted Wonderland Wiki (it moved first to Miraheze and then to wiki.gg).

While I am not opposed to the Kuro Wiki moving to Miraheze as I have nothing against that platform, I think it would be best for the Kuroshitsuji Wiki to move to wiki.gg.

My main reason for that is the fact that Miraheze cannot help migrating wikis with moving their images to their platform. An image dump can be given to Miraheze, but they cannot help gather all images. Fandom Wiki also prohibits the automated scraping of images.

The Kuroshitsuji Wiki currently has over 6k images.

So downloading and re-uploading them all manually is off the table. (I uploaded a great many images to the wiki but not all of them, and I'm just one person orz)

If you move a wiki to wiki.gg, however, the wiki.gg staff moves all images for you.

I moved another wiki of mine to wiki.gg (Ron Kamonohashi Wiki), and all its ~1,600 images were moved (I did not expect this at all, honestly; I was fully prepared (though dreading) to reupload everything. In that case though, I had uploaded the vast majority of images (really, like 98%) myself anyway, so I didn't have to download them first). Only 32 images "broke" in the move and had to be re-uploaded which was fine.

(Videos are not moved as they are only "linked" to wikis anyway. There are not many on the Kuro Wiki in the first place though, so embeding them with a template is quickly done, like I did on my other wiki (example). Videos are often too large to be uploaded, so they need to be embeded instead.)

Secondly, Miraheze is known for server outages which can cause data loss. The Twisted Wonderland Wiki was affected by such an outage once when it was still at Miraheze. (They did not leave the platform for that reason, but because Miraheze nearly closed in 2023. (This, thankfully, did not happen in the end; still, the news caused quite the panic.))

Further, wiki.gg possesses a better SEO than Miraheze. The moving of a wiki's content is the "easy" part of a wiki migration. The difficult part is for the new wiki to beat the Fandom Wiki in search results and visibility because Fandom will not delete a wiki after its community has migrated.

(To the person who wrote they wish I can "cleanly remove myself from Fandom Wiki," that, sadly, cannot happen.)

(Source)

(The image is a bit outdated because wiki.gg now hosts non-gaming related wikis too.)

As you can see from the pictured table, one of the pros for wiki.gg is "best mobile experience."

And I have to say, it really is fantastic, omg. When I moved my other wiki, I did not look at its mobile version while I prepared for the re-launch; I only accessed it on mobile afterwards, and the gasp I let out when I finally did, I tell you...

Let's take two pages (a character page and the main/home page) from the RKDD Wiki as examples. (Templates are the same as on the Kuro Wiki.) I logged out before I took the screenshots.

On Fandom Wiki's mobile version, these pages look like this:

Advertisement before the top navigation already; ads at the bottom

Weird auto-playing video ad at the top of the character page

The "gallery" tag that is used in infoboxes to "tab" the images is broken

Ads between all the sections (note: "Durchfall" means diarrhoea, btw...)

The scrollboxes don't work, so all references are rolled out in full at the bottom of the page (there are 300+ refs! have fun scrolling)

The note references don't work and give out an error message

The quote template has become very ugly and reduced (the source of the quote, though given, is omitted on mobile)

The notice spoiler template was stripped of its colours and formatting (note: all templates that are categorised as "notice" are actually invisible for non-logged in users by default on Fandom mobile; you have to categorise them as "design" or so for them to be visible at all)

The main page on mobile is not the main page on desktop, and only shows you trending articles and categories; you have to click on "view full main page" a bit farther below to see the actual main page

If you do, you find broken code, e.g. a broken slider and a broken character portal template

To compare, the same pages on wiki.gg's mobile version:

Advertisement at the top of the page and at the bottom

No auto-playing video ad

The "gallery" tag in the infoboxes work

No ads between the sections

The scrollboxes work and contain the references

The note references work

The notice templates look just like on desktop

If you have references popups enabled on your wiki, the popups also work on mobile! (on Fandom, clicking on the ref on mobile will send you to the bottom of the page, even if popups are enabled)

The main page looks just like the desktop version

No code is broken on the main page, e.g. sliders and character portal templates work just fine and (mostly) look as they should

I also added a screenshot of how the site navigation looks like because I think it looks neat??

While Miraheze has no ads whatsoever which is great, wiki.gg does have ads, but only very few. (And only if you're logged out.) They're definitely not as invasive as on Fandom Wiki. There is an ad at the top of a page and another at the bottom. On desktop, there is one on the side too. That's it.

Example page from wiki.gg:

The same page on Fandom:

... Yeah.

(I had to turn off my adblockers and malwarebites for the ads to reappear on Fandom. And then the page froze :D The browser I opened the wiki on didn't die (I use it less frequently, so less adblockers to turn off) - but another browser I have open did???)

Because wiki.gg has only existed since 2022, it does not have all the MediaWiki extensions like Miraheze does. The wiki.gg staff is working on this though. I'm particularly excited about polls and discourse forums, two features Fandom Wiki killed in the last years (forums were replaced by the undercooked Discussions, and polls are more annoying to add to pages (they are embeded Discussion polls) and only logged-in users can participate in them).

Wiki.gg would be the first choice. In the off-chance my migration request is denied, Miraheze would be the second choice.

Migration schedule

You have to send in a request if you want to open a wiki on wiki.gg. I plan to do that in early January. Because the new wiki needs to differ from the old one so that Google doesn't mark it as a duplicate, new content has to be created and old content edited. I will start with that before I send in my request. (For example, I plan to do the much needed and long overdue story arc page overhauls. I only re-did the Public School Arc page so far orz)

After the request is (hopefully) accepted, the onboarding phase begins. If a wiki is "onboarding," only those with a password can edit it; it's not open to the public. This gives editors the time and opportunity to fix up pages and code so that everything would be (more or less) in place when the wiki becomes public. Onboarding lasts a maximum of 4 weeks, but you can ask your wiki to become public before the deadline too.

So, the new Kuroshitsuji Wiki would launch either in late January or sometime in February - right in time for Season 5 in April. (And for when the manga returns from hiatus; whenever that will be.)

To summarise, the preliminary schedule is as follows:

late December to early January: work on pages for the new wiki

early January: send in wiki request

January-early (mid?) February: onboarding period

late January/early (mid?) February: re-launch! the new wiki becomes public

If anything greatly changes, I will let you know. As soon as I get the onboarding deadline date (if the wiki.gg request is accepted), I will be able to provide a better schedule.

----

I think that's it for now? I hope I haven't forgotten anything important. Thank you for reading all that! And merry Christmas and happy holidays!

If you have anything to add or want to ask a question, please feel free to do so.

[cms2cms]

Here's everything you need for a fast and totally automated #MediaWiki to #WordPress site move.

Make sure you are fully informed and start Free Migration right now! ⬇️👍

[jamverse]

i’m not gonna be so bold as to declare it open as it’s still massively incomplete,  but if you want to go poking around it’s at least got enough of a skeleton to trip over now. the hope at this point is more or less just to pique someone’s interest about something so they’ll ask about it, and that’ll spur me to go actually finish those pages :v

since it’s public now i’m pinning this post and adding a little tracker for what’s been done. i’ll keep this post updated as i work. *note: not started does not mean empty! there’s only actually 7 empty/nonexistent pages; the rest still have names, images, base tracks, and a summary tagline- just no other info outside the basic infobox stuff

wiki completion:

16/65 pages complete

10/65 pages with substantial progress

14/65 pages with minimal progress

23/65 pages not started

most recently completed page[s]: WILD_DOG WATCHING, messengers, VAST\/TOWERING

also, finally saying it outright: this blog here doubles as an askblog, so you can ask things both about and also directly to the characters. just make sure you specify who you’re asking to along with the question lmao

[ethersierra]

The Adventure Zone Wiki Migration

Hello TAZ community!

As you may know just from trying to navigate the website, Fandom.com is not all that user-friendly. Half your screen gets taken up by a video you never asked to play, and ads are constantly popping in at the sides. Overall, I'm not a fan of the platform because of their business model, but the wiki is a very useful resource, and I know many TAZ fans share these feelings.

That is why I have begun migrating The Adventure Zone Wiki to miraheze, an entirely non-profit wiki-hosting site which runs on MediaWiki, the same platform Wikipedia uses.

The new wiki can be found at adventurezonewiki.miraheze.org

While all of the content has been moved over, it still has some formatting errors from the platform switch. If you have a moment to help out as you see these errors, it would be greatly appreciated!

If you love TAZ and being able to access episode information, character details, and everything else, the wiki is a great resource for that! But it needs contributions! Wikis are user-run, and every edit counts.

The old Fandom wiki is still up, and will continue to be up, but as one of the people who have been consistently updating the wiki for information recently, I'm not going back there. All of my edits will be done at adventurezonewiki.miraheze.org, and the most updated information will be there.

Even if you do not intend to edit the wiki, any amount of sharing helps, as the migration will only be successful if people know about it! So spread the word!

[flecks-of-stardust]

Alright, I have permission from Aldelaro to mirror his thread here. I will also point out that there is a Twitter mirror site, apparently! So you can also view the thread yourself here. If you'd still prefer screenshots, they'll be below the cut here.

All tweets are from aldelaro5 on Twitter, posted on May 2nd, 2024, and are posted below according to thread order.

[So now that the migration news is out, let's talk about how that went because honestly, it is so much easier than one might think and the benfits are so worth that it is CRAZY to me that people still put up with fandom

let's talk about mediawiki first: how does one migrate it?🧵]

[Mediawiki is the tech that powers all wikis including wikipedia: every wiki you see uses it and it's the golden standard meaning you rarely will see something else

Because it has such a long history, it also has a lot standard ways to do things such as how its database works...]

[As an example, wanna know some stats about a wiki? go to the Special:Statistics page, even wikipedia has it! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Statistics

That means it has a VERY standard way to have its data exported

It's so standard, every fandom wiki has it in the Special:Statistics page...]

[I am sure other providers offers that ability, but I also seen Special:Export

Point is, getting a database dump is VERY easy and can be done for ANY wiki!

However, it doesn't cover images...but there's tools to get those! This is the one I used: https://github.com/mediawiki-client-tools/mediawiki-dump-generator]

[This works because once again, mediawiki is so standard in strcuture, everything is predictable: you can always archive a wiki in the same way

So you might expect the content import to take the most, but no: it's actually the easiest part! ...]

[The only thing I had to do for the import was wait miraheze's staff would run the import because bulk imports needs to be ran manually, but otherwise, it went without a hitch

...except some contents needed more attention, but that's just because I needed to enable extensions...]

[But the reason I had to enable them is a good thing: the Fandom wiki forced about 160 extensions, most of them are bloat like ads, spying on you and AI bullshitery

After we enabled what we needed, we ended at 60-70 extensions and MUCH less cluttered UI ...]

[And that's because you are given SO MUCH MORE options that I had to enable them...but I need to talk about this as this was crazy: did you know realtime preview was a thing in mediawiki?

so why is it not on fandom? Their mediawiki version although 2 major behind supports it...]

[THEY LITERALLY JUST DO NOT GIVE YOU THE OPTION TO INSTALL IT (Plain text: They literally just do not give you the option to install it)

YOU HAVE TO MESSAGE THEM AND I AM NOT EVEN SURE THEY WILL ACCEPT IT! (Plain text: You have to message them and I am not even sure they will accept it!)

This is insane: on top of giving you ads, give you a shittier editor, they literally do not offer you features that immensely help editing! ...]

[So ok, you enable extensions, things starts to work and then you enable more and now the site is 3x better already, is there any catch?

To be honest, if you want the most basic things, yes, that's all you need! The bulk took me like a week or 2

but we did a bit more ...]

[While the new wiki has light/dark mode, the latter is in preview and is kind of a stopgap for a proper dark mode so....it just inverts colors, but it made images look bad. We wanted something better so me and jocobo had to do a lot of CSS hackery to get it to look decent ...]

[This I think was the most annoying part, but it's not one I found THAT needed, it's just it makes things look a bit more professional with a nicer banner and stuff. You don't have to do it, but it helps

other than that, I learned some SEO stuff like google search console ...]

[This is by the way VERY VERY easy to setup: you enable an extension, that lets you authenticate the site with google, miraheze gives you periodically updated sitemaps that you give the links to google search console and....that's it! ...]

[There are even stuff that can measure SEO with the most useful one I found being PageSpeed: https://pagespeed.web.dev/

We do actually show up on google thanks to these! Not over Fandom, but there's a reason we registered on indie wiki buddy: it acts as a stopgap ...]

[Registering on them is super easy. While I ended up opening a pull request directly, they accept google forms or submitting an issue on their github. Still if you can, I recommend sending a pr if you know how git works: it's mostly data entry ...]

[The whole thing took about a month of work and most of it was waiting, but I assure you: it's WAY WAY easier than you think it is

And for what you get, I honestly cannot believe people put up with fandom: I would NEVER willingly make a wiki there given everything I saw ...]

[So is it worth to migrate?

YES FUCKING WHY AREN'T YOU DOING IT? (Plain text: Yes fucking why aren't you doing it?)

I seriously cannot believe so many are still stuck on it. Even their forking policy are garbage and this vid also might convince you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcfuA_UAz3I

I am telling you: the grass is greener outside!]

The Bug Fables Wiki has Migrated to Miraheze!

TL;DR: If you're looking for the Bug Fables wiki, please use the Miraheze version instead! The Fandom wiki's maintenance is no longer being actively supported, and it should not be even visited.

The longer notice: The Bug Fables wiki is off Fandom for good! This has been a long time in the making, and it is overall a positive change. The Miraheze wiki is fully functional and better than the Fandom wiki was previously, with no ads, better formatting, and an active team helping to maintain and correct information. If you're reading this and would like to help out, by all means! You can always join the official Bug Fables Discord server and ask around in the wiki-spoilers channel, but it's also possible to simply use the Talk pages to communicate with wiki editors.

Now that the wiki is on Miraheze, the Fandom wiki will receive only very minor edits where necessary, if ever. However, do not vandalize the Fandom wiki. Beyond vandalism generally being unhelpful, any visitation to the Fandom wiki improves Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of the Fandom wiki, pushing it higher in search results and thus burying the Miraheze wiki. We want the new Miraheze wiki to be higher than the Fandom wiki in search results so traffic gets directed there, so even vandalism benefits Fandom in the end. Simply do not engage, do not click, pretend it doesn't exist.

The Bug Fables wiki has also been registered in Indie Wiki Buddy, an extension that automatically redirects away from Fandom wikis to indie wikis or a wiki mirror. It's recommended to click on the indie wiki directly yourself, but in case the indie wiki has poor SEO, this can help direct you to it. To reiterate: do not engage with the Fandom wiki. Fandom's monopoly over the wiki scene contributes significantly to the SEO of Fandom wikis, and every click counts, so spend them elsewhere.

Regardless, the migration has completed, but there's always work to be done. Whether you're just a wiki user or looking to help out with editing, I hope to see you on the new Miraheze wiki :)

[adventurezonewiki]

Welcome to the blog for the independent The Adventure Zone wiki!

We are a fan-run encyclopedia hosted by Miraheze, a free, volunteer-run ad-free wiki hosting platform, based on MediaWiki, the same software Wikipedia runs on.

The Adventure Zone wiki was started on Fandom.com in 2015, and was edited as the show started airing. In April and May of 2023, the active users migrated all data to the new platform.

We currently stand as a HUGE work in progress. Virtually every page needs extreme edits, and we are working on setting up several editing guides and making those accessible. You should see a lot of changes in the coming months.

In the meantime while we wait for these organization techniques to come together, and for style guides to be updated, you can peruse the pages and add any missing information you notice.

Make sure to follow this blog for all wiki updates-- and feel free to send any questions you have to our inbox! And if you want to be involved in this community endeavor (including collaboratively creating these guides), join us in our discord!

[hans-garden]

thoughts on Miraheze

from someone who runs a small wiki by themselves (the autistic characters wiki). I figure this kind of info can be useful for other people looking to start a small wiki.

I started out on Fandom, then moved to Miraheze. I wanted to get away from Fandom because I didn't feel good about it being a for-profit company when I was very much not doing for-profit work. I also don't agree with Fandom's ban on nsfw content. There was enough documentation on Miraheze to do the migration by myself. The folks on the Discord server helped me smooth out some things that got borked in the move.

I know there are a lot of negative reviews about the reception wikis but I've never had any problems with that because I just never visited those wikis. It is also my understanding that Miraheze is going to close them.

Since I did most of the basic set-up of my wiki on Fandom, I don't know how the process is on Miraheze. It helps to have some basic knowledge of things like namespaces, how talk pages work, syntax, category structure, and basic template stuff. If I didn't know something, either Miraheze has documentation or I'd look at the guidelines on Wikipedia.

For the more technical stuff like extensions and such, it was tricky at times but I could get by with reading the documentation on MediaWiki.

The volunteers and other folks are more Wikipedia than Fandom vibes. They're very helpful but more reserved, which was a bit of a culture shock since I'm used to the very open and relaxed vibe from wikiHow and Fandom. I feel that there are less children on Miraheze, or at least most people are a bit more mature than on Fandom.

The one thing that Miraheze doesn't really have is support for the "running a wiki" side of things, like how to grow your community, how to attract editors, or how to promote your wiki. I usually refer back to Fandom's guides for that, because it's something they heavily focus on.

[autizta]

U can always encourage your favourite wikis to consider migrating to hosting a mediawiki! You can host through Miraheze for free ^^

I just realized I didn't answer a few asks I got for a while now! So sorry.

Thank you so much for this information! Hm, for others unaware this is about Fandom, the thing responsible for all the -wikis, Warriors Wiki, Animal Crossing Wiki, everything with a .fandom.com. They're israel supporters apparently but lord I can't find the information on it anymore, and looking it up just sends me to wiki pages explaining what Israel is :'D I'll definitely need that if I want to convince the big wikis I enjoy to migrate to somewhere else.

From what I've understood, Miraheze is a "website hoster" and you can use them to create mediawikis, mediawiki is a software to create wikis and part of the Wikimedia Foundation which is behind Wikipedia. So uh you could create a -wiki from it.

I uh, have never hosted a wiki before I joined with some brazillian friends to try and work on the Wiki Gatos Guerreiros, which is a brazillian version of the Warriors Wiki. None of us have done this before and have very scattered HTML knowledge and I'm like just now learning CSS, I have no idea how migrating to mediawiki would work! So uh if anyone out there has any clue of how and any tips in general that'd be great! I imagine the people with the wikis going on for a while maybe would know how?? But it's a big decision, I'll need to go after information to convince them supporting fandom is a bad call :'o I am having some busy weeks right now but eventually when working on stuff for the Brazillian Warriors Wiki (I'm making pixels!) I'll try researching more again, hopefully migrating will be easy and possible!! :D

Thank you again and uh wiki people share this around it's not that much info but it could help some already and maybe others could add more? :P idk!

[mspaintadventureswiki]

Have you thought of migrating the wiki outside fandoom? Honestly they seem to be more trouble than they worth it

It’s a noble idea, and I appreciate the sympathy for our roadblocks with Fandom, but talking about it internally with the other staff today there’s a number of reasons that it would ultimately backfire on us.

The first thing TS checked was a page that apparently used to be for exporting a whole wiki, but now apparently can only export individual pages. Considering our volume of content that would. Take some time.

The next question would be then where we import those exported pages to. The only other major wiki system I could think of is gamepedia - aside from the fact that we don’t primarily document videogames, gamepedia has an upcoming merger with fandom anyway. Which is further proof of the existing broad observation that Fandom certainly seems to have a monopoly on pop culture wikis.

If we were to make our own mediawiki, the server would necessitate money to host and ability to maintain that none of us really have. Bulbapedia may have the kind of resources to pull that off, but we do not. If we did, Fandom would also actively suppress any announcements we made on their site about migrating. We could post it on the tumblr and discord here, sure, but not every user checks these places. This also leads to a tanked Search Engine Optimization, I think, possibly making our new wiki harder to find.

All of that aside, even if we smoothed all that over and made the move, all existing user accounts would be useless - everyone including probably staff would likely have to make new accounts just to edit the wiki at all, and the old user links on the page history and talk pages would be a mess.

Fandom has its problems, as does YouTube for example. But when you’ve hosted something in the same place for 10 years and don’t have the best resources to move, it’s easier to leave it where it is and hope/ask for improvements.

[agallimaufryofoddments]

In the wee hours of August 20, I noticed and thus confirmed that Baccano! Wiki has been migrated to the United Community Platform [UCP], meaning that it now runs on the much more modern 1.33 version of MediaWiki as opposed to the (soon to be legacy) customized 1.19 version of MediaWiki that FANDOM (Wikia) has been running on for years.

Now, the migration has caused problems on the wiki already; it broke the polls on the homepage (UCP platform, which is in development, still doesn’t support polls), the new class selectors briefly broke our parchment background (have since fied); the player for .ogg audio files (relevant to the composite stitch of Fermet laughing from the NDS game that I uploaded) doesn’t display, Special:Community has not yet been enabled on UCP...

...but putting aside all that which is broken or messed up on the wiki right now (portable infobox tabs have been partially fixed), the editor experience on UCP wikis is also very different. I had wondered what would be the first Baccano! Wiki article created post-UCP, and well, I’ve just noticed that an anon created the 504th article yesterday...

...that’s right. The first article to be created on B! Wiki post-UCP migration was an article for Ronny Schiatto the First...............................but the only thing this anon actually wrote for the article was “YOOOOOOOOOO”. That’s it. That’s the content.

Welp. On the one hand it always bothers me when anons or users do this sort of thing--create an article with a grand total of one sentence in content, 50/50 on whether the sentence is nonsense (see above) or an actual attempt at a ‘subject description’. Either way it’s usually left up to me to either delete the article or spend the time setting it up properly.

On the other, hey, I’ve low-key wanted the wiki to have an article on Ronny Schiatto I (aka Ronny the metallurgist) for months, so. Crafty way to spur me into action. Just wish it wasn’t during thesis crisis time; I have little self-control.

Anyway, I really ought  to make a post that’s just focused on the wiki migration--a post that explains what this means, goes into more detail as to what the migration has broken/affected on the wiki--but for now, you can visit the wiki and click on the link in the announcement banner to read one of FANDOM’s write-up on the move.

(Do I have a tag for Ronny I? I can’t remember.)