WoWWiki

» see wowwiki.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

World of Warcraft shipped on 23 November 2004 and i was not in it. My mmo years ran on ultima online private servers out of Turkey, a smaller and much more improvised world where the documentation was whichever forum thread somebody kept editing. WoWWiki started the next day, 24 November, and did the same job at a scale i had no reference point for.

The thing worth understanding about a game wiki is that it is not really about the game. It is a shared answer sheet for a system too large to hold in one head. Where this quest chain actually goes, and which of the four things the tooltip implies is the true one. Blizzard published none of that, so a few thousand people wrote it down for free, and kept writing it down through every patch that invalidated what they had written.

By September 2009 WoWWiki was the largest wiki Wikia hosted. In November 2010 Jimmy Wales put its readership at four to five million people a month, which made it the second largest wiki in the English language behind Wikipedia itself. Not the second largest game wiki. The second largest wiki.

It had also, by that point, already lost every person who wrote it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the cracks ~

WoWWiki moved to Wikia on 2 May 2007, which was the deal on offer to any wiki that had outgrown someone's hobby server: free hosting and free bandwidth against advertising the community did not control. For three years that trade held. Then in late 2010 Wikia rolled out a new default skin called Oasis across everything it hosted.

Oasis was fixed-width. On a game wiki that is not a cosmetic complaint. The pages were dense reference tables and item lists built to use whatever screen you had, and a locked column width broke the layout on most of them. It also broke the javascript tooltips, which on a wiki about a game whose entire interface is tooltips is close to breaking the product. Editors reported eye strain from the reduced text size on wide monitors. Wikia shipped it anyway, because the skin was about ad placement and the ad placement was the business.

~ the day it forked ~

On 20 October 2010 the content and the full article history were copied to a new site called Wowpedia, hosted by Curse, and the official launch followed on 25 October. Almost every administrator went, and so did most of the active contributors. This is what a wiki license is actually for: the text was free, so the people who wrote it could take it and go, and there was nothing the host could do except keep serving the copy it still had.

What Wikia kept was the traffic. That is the part nobody predicted. Google had spent six years learning that the answer to a Warcraft question lived at wowwiki.com, and a rank like that does not move because the writers did. So for the next decade WoWWiki sat at the top of search results, mostly frozen, quietly wrong about a game that had shipped four expansions since anyone updated it, while the site with the correct answer ranked below it.

~ the long tail ~

The reunion took ten years and a vote. In February 2020 a handful of current and former WoWWiki people agreed to merge back into the fork, and on 12 May 2020 WoWWiki locked itself to editing. The archive is still readable at a fandom subdomain with the word archive in it, and wowwiki.com redirects to what its own editors built after they walked out.

The fork kept moving. Wowpedia went to Gamepedia in July 2013, Fandom bought Gamepedia in December 2018, and on 12 October 2023 the whole community left again, to wiki.gg, over the same class of grievance that started it. Fifteen hundred people wrote an encyclopedia about an imaginary continent and spent two decades carrying it from landlord to landlord.

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