A fan wiki is a wiki [lower-alpha 1] that is created by fans, primarily to document an object of popular culture. Fan wikis cover television shows, film franchises, video games, comic books, sports, and other topics. [1] They are a part of fandoms, which are subcultures dedicated to a common popular culture interest. The digital humanities scholar Jason Mittell stated in 2013 that fan wikis were "[o]ne of the most popular and widespread uses of wikis". [2]
Fan wikis usually operate according to internal policies. Editors reach decisions through discussion andFan wikis were first published in the early 2000s. Many fan wikis formed out of Wikipedia over disputes among editors about the level of detail that should be provided in articles. [4] These included fans of the television show Battlestar Galactica [5] and the Star Wars franchise, who founded Wookieepedia after facing complaints about the "overabundance of minutiae related to Star Wars appearing on Wikipedia". [4]
In 2004, the Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales and the former Wikipedia board chair Angela Beesley founded Fandom under the name WikiCities, a for-profit wiki hosting service that hosted regional wikis for cities. In 2006, the company attracted venture capital funding and changed its name to Wikia. [6] Wikia then began to assimilate independent fan wikis, such as Memory Alpha (a Star Trek fan wiki) and Wowpedia (a World of Warcraft fan wiki). [7] In the late 2010s—after Fandom and Gamepedia were acquired and consolidated by the private equity firm TPG Inc.—several wikis began to leave the service, including the RuneScape , Zelda , and Minecraft wikis. Those wiki communities cited Fandom's advertising methods, issues with security and outdated software, and corporate control as reasons for migrating. [8]The following list summarizes fan wikis with articles on Wikipedia.
Wiki | Date launched | Status [lower-roman 1] | Founder(s) | Most recent wiki hosting service | Subject | Notes | Ref(s). |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Heroes Wiki | October 2006 | Defunct (2020) | Fan community | Independent | Heroes (American science fiction television series) | [9] | |
Lostpedia | 2005 | Live | Kevin Croy | Fandom | Lost (American drama television series) | [10] | |
Memory Alpha | 2003 | Live | Dan Carlson and Harry Doddema | Fandom | Star Trek (American science fiction franchise) | [11] | |
Nukapedia (a.k.a. Fallout Wiki) | 2005 | Live | Paweł Dembowski | Fandom | Fallout (American video game franchise) | Moved to Fandom in 2007; forked to The Vault by Dembowski in 2011 after he joined Curse LLC as an employee | [12] |
Supernatural Wiki | 2006 | Live | Fan community | Independent | Supernatural (American horror television series) | [13] | |
The Vault | 2011 | Archived | Paweł Dembowski | Fandom | Fallout (American video game franchise) | Forked from Nukapedia in 2011 after Dembowski joined Curse LLC as an employee; hosted by Curse LLC to early 2019, when Curse's Gamepedia wiki hosting service was acquired by Fandom; archived by Fandom | [14] |
Wookieepedia | March 2005 | Live | Chad Barbry and Steven Greenwood | Fandom | Star Wars (American science fiction franchise) | [15] | |
Warcraft Wiki | October 2023 | Live | Fan community | Wiki.gg | World of Warcraft (American massively multiplayer online role-playing game) | Forked from Wowpedia (hosted by Fandom) in October 2023 following community vote | [16] |
Wowpedia | October 2010 | Live | Fan community | Fandom | World of Warcraft (American massively multiplayer online role-playing game) | Forked from WoWWiki (then hosted by Fandom) in October 2010 following community vote; hosted by Curse LLC from founding to early 2019, when Curse's Gamepedia wiki hosting service was acquired by Fandom; forked to Warcraft Wiki following community vote in October 2023 | [17] |
WoWWiki | 2004 | Archived | Fan community | Fandom | World of Warcraft (American massively multiplayer online role-playing game) | Forked to Wowpedia in October 2010 following community vote; archived by Fandom in May 2020 | [18] |
Memory Alpha is a wiki encyclopedia for topics related to the Star Trek fictional universe. Created by Harry Doddema and Dan Carlson, it uses the wiki model and is hosted by Fandom on the MediaWiki software. As of September 2023, Memory Alpha contains over 56,000 articles and 62,000 images in its English edition. The site is also available in several other languages.
Wookieepedia: The Star Wars Wiki is an online encyclopedia for information about the Star Wars universe—including information on all the films, books, television series, the Star Wars Expanded Universe, any upcoming Star Wars material, and more. It is a wiki with some articles reaching up to 60,000 words, and is written almost entirely from an in-universe perspective. The name is a portmanteau of Wookiee and encyclopedia, a pun on the name of Wikipedia. The logo, too, is a visual pun showing the incomplete second Death Star as opposed to Wikipedia's incomplete "jigsaw logo".
Kotaku is a video game website and blog that was originally launched in 2004 as part of the Gawker Media network. Notable former contributors to the site include Luke Smith, Cecilia D'Anastasio, Tim Rogers, and Jason Schreier.
Jimmy Donal Wales, also known as Jimbo Wales, is an American Internet entrepreneur, webmaster, and former financial trader. He is a co-founder of the non-profit free encyclopedia, Wikipedia, and the for-profit wiki hosting service Fandom. He has worked on other online projects, including Bomis, Nupedia, WikiTribune, and WT Social.
LyricWiki was an online wiki-based lyrics database and encyclopedia. In March 2013, it was the seventh largest MediaWiki installation with over 2,000,000 pages including 1.5 million songs. Prior to its shutdown, users on the site could view, edit, and discuss the lyrics of songs, which were also available for purchase from links on the site. Users were told to be mindful of copyright while contributing, and copyright violations were removed upon request. All the lyrics on LyricWiki were licensed through LyricFind.
Lostpedia is a wiki-powered online encyclopedia of information regarding the American television drama Lost. Launched on September 22, 2005, by Kevin Croy, the site uses MediaWiki software to maintain a user-created database of information. The site's content is under a Creative Commons license (by-nc-nd), which means that it is available free to the public, but cannot be used for commercial purposes and should not be modified by people who are not part of the community of the website. As of April 2019, the site contains an estimated 7,380 articles. On December 18, 2008, the site became a part of Wikia.
Wikia Search was a short-lived free and open-source web search engine launched by Wikia, a for-profit wiki-hosting company founded by Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley. Wikia Search followed other experiments by Wikia into search engine technology and officially launched as a "public alpha" on January 7, 2008. The roll-out version of the search interface was widely criticized by reviewers in mainstream media.
Uncyclopedia is the name of several forks of satirical online encyclopedias that parody Wikipedia. Its logo, a hollow "puzzle potato", parodies Wikipedia's globe puzzle logo, and it styles itself as "the content-free encyclopedia", parodying Wikipedia's slogan of "the free encyclopedia" and likely as a play the fact that Wikipedia is described as a "free-content" encyclopedia. Founded in 2005 as an English-language wiki, the project spans more than 75 languages as well as several subprojects parodying other wikis. Uncyclopedia's name is a portmanteau of the prefix un- and the word encyclopedia.
The history of wikis began in 1994, when Ward Cunningham gave the name "WikiWikiWeb" to the knowledge base, which ran on his company's website at c2.com, and the wiki software that powered it. The wiki went public in March 1995, the date used in anniversary celebrations of the wiki's origins. c2.com is thus the first true wiki, or a website with pages and links that can be easily edited via the browser, with a reliable version history for each page. He chose "WikiWikiWeb" as the name based on his memories of the "Wiki Wiki Shuttle" at Honolulu International Airport, and because "wiki" is the Hawaiian word for "quick".
TV Tropes is a wiki that collects and documents descriptions and examples of plot conventions and devices, which it refers to as tropes, within many creative works. Since its establishment in 2004, the site has shifted focus from covering various tropes to those in general media, toys, writings, and their associated fandoms, as well as some non-media subjects such as history, geography, and politics. The nature of the site as a provider of commentary on pop culture and fiction has attracted attention and criticism from several web personalities and blogs. Users of the site's community are called "Tropers", which primarily consist of 18-34 year olds.
A wiki hosting service, or wiki farm, is a server or an array of servers that offers users tools to simplify the creation and development of individual, independent wikis.
Fandom is a wiki hosting service that hosts wikis mainly on entertainment topics. The privately held, for-profit Delaware company was founded in October 2004 by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley. Fandom was acquired in 2018 by TPG Inc. and Jon Miller through Integrated Media Co.
Warcraft Wiki is a fan wiki about the Warcraft fictional universe. It covers all of the Warcraft games, including the MMORPG World of Warcraft. It is both a specialized wiki built around the Warcraft universe and a collaborative space for players to develop and publish strategies for Warcraft games. It was officially announced on 25 October 2010.
Nukapedia, also known as Fallout Wiki, is a wiki about the Fallout fictional universe. It covers all of the Fallout video games, as well as all Fallout related content. The Fallout Wiki runs on MediaWiki and is currently part of the Fandom network. The site is also available in several other languages, including Bulgarian, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish and Ukrainian.
VisualEditor (VE) is an online rich-text editor for MediaWiki-powered wikis that provides a direct visual way to edit pages based on the "what you see is what you get" principle. It was developed by the Wikimedia Foundation in partnership with Fandom. In July 2013, it was enabled by default on several of the largest Wikipedia projects.
Curse was a gaming company that managed the video game mod host CurseForge, wiki host Gamepedia, and the Curse Network of gaming community websites.
Goldie & Bear is an American animated fantasy children's television series created by Jorge Aguirre for Disney Junior. The series is produced by Milk Barn Entertainment and Titmouse, Inc in its first and second seasons respectively. Inspired by the fairy tale "Goldilocks and the Three Bears," the show focuses on Goldie and Bear, who become best friends following an incident at his house.
Desmond Daniel Amofah, known online as Etika, was an American YouTuber and live streamer. Amofah became known online for his enthusiastic reactions to Super Smash Bros. character trailers and Nintendo Direct presentations and for playing and reacting to various games. He resided in the Brooklyn borough of New York City, and his father is the Ghanaian politician Owuraku Amofah.
A fan wiki is a wiki created by fans of a popular culture topic. Fan wikis, which are a part of fandoms, cover television shows, film franchises, video games, comics, sports, and other topics. The primary purpose of a fan wiki is to document its topic area through collaborative editing. Fan wikis document their subjects at varying levels of detail. They also serve narrative and creative functions. Some present analysis, fan theories and fiction, and video game strategy guides and walkthroughs, while others only document official canon. Media and cultural studies scholars have studied fan wikis as forms of participatory culture that enable fans to build community.