User blog:Subsourian/Fandom and Gamepedia Merge and Musings

Never written one of these, but can't really talk about it anywhere else. But hey let's get into it.

For those that heard the news, Gamepedia just got bought by Fandom. Now all Gamepedia wikis will have the option of merge with Fandom ones. Then again this isn't really a problem for us since our "sister" wiki, Starpedia, wholesale rips our content and doesn't even have articles for essential things like "zerg" and still expects Gamepedia to link to their non-articles.

That does bring me to one thing I'm happy is over: the stupid Gamepedia/Wikia rivarly. Having two wikis with differing information, especially on something like story and lore, was always awful, especially when they conflicted and you wouldn't know who to believe. I firmly believe the aforementioned Starpedia is a product of that whole dumb "we have to have our own closed circuit" mentality, which to me always just felt like abuse of people who just want to spread knowledge to a greater community. Thankfully the HotS Gamepedia was always chill about letting me link here, and I've made a point of trying to link to the wikis I find more consistently accurate, Gamepedia for WoW/OW/Hots, and Fandom for Diablo.

But, on the flipside this does worry me. Fandom now has no competition, and can now enact what they please because, hey, nobody can leave now. We've already seen some Fandom mettleing in our infobox changes for mobile (which by the way, most of Fandom's mobile site is borderline unusable. In front of a Blizzard dev this BlizzCon I had to help someone navigate to the desktop version of our site because our mobile site wasn't working, but I digress). Now we're seeing it in automatic links to trending videos on the top of articles which wiki admins can't change, Zeratul's base page has it instead of his Co-op article where it'd be relevant. I'm really hoping, since we're a franchise who doesn't get massive influxes of lore anymore, that we'll avoid a lot of this, but I fear blanket changes down the line may be more intrusive.

So things are a bit uncertain in my eyes, thankfully we won't have to deal with much in the way of the big ramifications I feel, but it's an interesting time to be active on a wiki.