In early December 2021, wikis currently on the Wikia.org domain will move to the Fandom.com domain. This process will be done on the backend, meaning no action will be needed by any communities currently on the Wikia.org domain. A banner should inform communities of this change about two weeks before the move begins.
Other than the domain and resulting global navigation and footer change, there should be no notable differences to the Wikia.org communities. All content, editing, and other functionality will behave normally. Wiki designs will also remain the same.
Background
In early 2019, as most of our communities were being moved to the fandom.com domain, Fandom elected to migrate a select set of communities to an alternate domain called “wikia.org”. Wikia.org wikis were communities narrowly focused on academic or other serious real-world matters.
Our rationale for creating this separate brand of wikis was that the name “Fandom” may not properly apply to these communities and that there may be an opportunity to create a second brand to represent these niche but important topics. Fandom, at the time, also remained largely undefined. It was easier to say what it wasn’t than it was to say what it was.
However, we have always believed that people can be fans of any topic, from gaming and movies to history and advocacy. In August 2021, we launched a major new Fandom brand refresh that clearly defined what the Fandom is and how it’s based on For the Love of Fans. That was true whether communities existed on the Fandom domain or not.
Why Retire Wikia.org
When Fandom revealed our new brand story and logo in August, we decided that was a good moment in time to assess our plans for Wikia.org.
Most of the communities that had migrated to Wikia.org remained small. Quite a few had gone inactive. Additionally, communities on that domain ranged a gamut of topics. In other words, there was no clear story to tell about what made a wiki a “Wikia.org” wiki. And as we stated previously, with the growth of the Fandom brand we genuinely believed that most Wikia.org community could do just as well on the Fandom domain as the Wikia.org one.
As such, there was no clear path forward for continuing to build the Wikia.org brand out. The only options were to either let it remain in a state of salutary neglect or fold these wikis back into the primary domain where they would receive more brand support and have a better chance of continuing to grow.
Additionally, with Wikia.org wikis receiving the same FandomDesktop designs, there was barely any visual difference between a Fandom.com wiki and a Wikia.org one. That meant extra technical lift for little gain.
With all of this in mind, we decided now is the time to retire the Wikia.org name. As we head into 2022, we look forward to all of Fandom’s communities to exist together under one roof.
Preparation Work
Before this decision was finalized, Fandom’s community team did additional investigations in order to confirm our hypothesis that migration of domain was a good decision.
This meant Fandom:
- Reviewed each Wikia.org wiki to ensure that the wiki was still active and that its content fit our Terms of Use and Community Creation policy.
- As is standard procedure, very small and inactive wikis that had been long abandoned were closed. This is done to ensure active communities have more community and technical resources allocated to them.
- Certain URLs were reframed to be more advocacy focused in order to flow better with the Fandom name (for instance, the
sfhomelessdomain on Wikia.org will becomesf-homeless-resourceson Fandom.com) - Our SEO team was made aware of the forthcoming change and found negligible risk to moving forward.
This all was done in service to making sure a domain migration could be quick, effective, and beneficial to all.