Fandom (website)
 | This page needs some cleaning up to be presentable. This article needs to be re-written to provide a more balanced view of the site. Also, many tropes need to be explained to show how they apply to Wikia. |
Wikia, later known as Fandom, is a wiki hosting service founded in late 2004 by Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley as Wikicities. It is notable for hosting many fanwikis, such as WoWWiki and Wookieepedia. However, many wikis have left the site due to discontent over policies such as advertising and the (at the time) new "Oasis" skin, implemented against the majority of the community's will.
Tropes used in Fandom (website) include:
Disclaimer/Apology: Many of these tropes are written from an anti-Wikia perspective. Please remember that this wiki tries to keep multiple points of view, and other perspectives are both welcome and requested.
- Ad Nauseam: A long string of forced reskins, which crowd out content to make room for more paid display advertising and more advertising for other Fandom projects. Unwanted Internet Ads for Real Money Trade (such as "buy gold", if placed against Guild Wars or World of Warcraft content as an invitation to cheat at these games) has been an issue in the past.
- Anthropomorphic Personification: These folks used to be fine with the Furry Fandom and others, back when they were still small and needed the traffic.
- Author Existence Failure: Can happen to smaller wikis with only a few contributors. Of course, this is true on any small site.
- Was a more widespread idea for the site back in 2008, according to this piece in The Guardian.
- Awesome Personnel Carrier[context?] [1]
- Big Brother Is Watching: According to Terms of Service; Didn't Read, Fandom may use tracking pixels, web beacons, browser fingerprinting, and/or device fingerprinting on users."
- Broken Base: There's a long list of communities which have voluntarily left. In most cases, Fandom leaves the old project open as a direct competitor, permanently fracturing the community.
- Content Warnings: Especially the spoiler warnings.
- Deal with the Devil:
- Fandom's sneaky fine print. One of the many disclaimers on Memory Alpha's main page says "Community content is available under CC-BY-NC unless otherwise noted." but the clickable link points not to the original "CC NonCommercial-Attribution" licence but to a fandom.com page in which Fandom contracts themselves out of the "non-commercial" terms of the Creative Commons licence.
- The backroom deals in which Fandom secretly induces one individual who controls a domain name to sell it out from under an existing independent community. In the usual pattern, this individual (usually one of the founders) secretly agrees to delete data, agrees not to speak out publicly and agrees not to relaunch a competing wiki.
- Don't Make Me Destroy You: Admins.
- Even Evil Has Standards: Fandom retaliates in various subtle ways against communities who try to leave, but they're utter angels compared to Internet Brands, who sued their own users for trying to leave Wikitravel for Wikivoyage in 2012.
- Everyone Is Gay: May come up in certain communities. [context?]
- Fair Use: Stretched pretty much to its limits or beyond. Most of the wikis are commentary on well-known copyrighted entertainment franchises, which use large numbers of images from the original work.
- Grammar Nazi: Yes.[context?]
- Hot Linked: Particularly with deleted images
- Inn of No Return: A group of wikis, including WoWpedia, left Wikia for a competitor (Gamepedia, which ended up part of Curse Media) – largely due to intrusive advertising. Wikia then bought Curse Media, so ultimately "they check in, but they don't check out".
- Insistent Terminology: Wikis hosted on Wikia are not wikis, they are wikias.
- Law of Wiki Expansion[context?]
- Moral Guardians: The boring reality of producing content acceptable for advertisers to increase returns in a for profit business. As a result there is staff censorship of content within individual projects, plus a long list of wikis shut down outright as a result. Aggravated by Fandom's use of SEO and duplicate content penalties to prevent the affected communities from leaving and their blocking users for pointing out that the community has moved elsewhere.
- Post Count: The editcount.
- Reading Your Rights: Admins and Bureaucrats.
- Rule of Cautious Editing Judgement[context?]
- Screwed by the Network:
- Fandom can and has deleted whole wikis out of the blue. Among the communities thrown under the bus, some of whom were with Fandom almost from the beginning: Spanking Art (2008), Anime Bath Scene (2018), Fetish Fuel Wiki (2019) and roughly twenty-two languages of Uncyclopedia (2019).
- Stillborn Franchise: Wikia Search.
- Someday This Will Come in Handy: Has been known to cause attempts to invoke this trope.[context?]
- The Wiki Rule: Helps promote this. Fandom is one of the biggest wiki farms on the Internet. Given its large size and promotion of other Fandom wikis from a hosted Wiki, it does offer a number of genuinely handy tools for newcomers, even if it can be Power At a Price.
- Vitalizing Edit[context?]
- Walkthrough Mode: Especially in gaming wikis.
- Fandom Will Ruin Your Life: Of course, the same can be said for other wiki hosts (such as Shoutwiki or Miraheze).[context?]
- Wiki Magic[context?]
- Wiki Curator[context?]
- Wiki Vandal[context?]
- ↑ MOD: Whoever added this really needs to explain it. I can't figure out how a list of motor vehicles apples to a website.