Fandom

Fandom (formarly WikiCities, Wikia, and FANDOM) is a free wiki hosting platform where anyone can create a wiki and collaborate with others.

Fandom hosts over 385,000 wikis and over 50,000,000 total pages.

History

Fandom was launched on October 18, 2004 under the name Wikicities by Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley Starling, who were involved with the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikicities was renamed Wikia on March 27, 2006. Before and soon after the rename, Bessemer Venture Partners, First Round Capital, and Amazon invested in Wikia. By September 2006, it had approximately 1,500 wikis in 48 languages. Wikia incorporated formerly independent wikis such as LyricWiki (shut down in 2019), Nukapedia, Uncyclopedia (migrated from Wikia in 2019), and WoWWiki (forked from Wikia in 2010 and was archived in 2020). Early on, Wikia was described as "the rest of the library and magazine rack" to Wikipedia's encyclopedia. The material has also been described as informal, and often bordering on entertainment, allowing the importing of maps, YouTube videos, and other non-traditional wiki material. By 2010, wikis could be created in 188 different languages.

In October 2011, Craig Palmer replaced Gil Penchina as CEO. In February 2012, co-founder Beesley Starling left Wikia to launch a startup called ChalkDrop.com. By August 2014, the total amount invested in Wikia was $39.8 million.

On March 4, 2015, Wikia appointed Walker Jacobs to the new position of Chief Operating Officer. In December 2015, Wikia launched the Fan Contributor Program. On January 25, 2016, Wikia launched an entertainment news site named Fandom. Later that year, Wikia was renamed "Fandom powered by Wikia", to better associate itself with the Fandom website. Wikia, Inc. remained under its current name, and the homepage of Wikia.com was moved to wikia.com/fandom. In December 2016, Wikia appointed Dorth Raphaely, former General Manager of Bleacher Report, as Chief Content Officer.

In February 2018, former AOL CEO Jon Miller, backed by Private equity firm TPG Capital, acquired Fandom. Miller was named Co-chairman of Wikia, Inc. alongside Jimmy Wales, and TPG Capital director Andrew Doyle assumed the role of interim CEO. In July 2018, Fandom purchased Screen Junkies from Defy Media, and in December of that year, they had acquired the media assets of Curse LLC, including wiki services Gamepedia, D&D Beyond, Futhead, Muthead, and Straw Poll. In February 2019, former StubHub CEO Perkins Miller took over as CEO, and Wikia fully changed its domain name to fandom.com. Various Wikis had been testing with new domain during 2018, with some wikis that focused on "more serious topics" instead having their domains changed to wikia.org instead.

In June 2019, Fandom began an effort to rewrite its core platform (which was written based on MediaWiki version 1.19) to base it off a newer version of the software. On March 11, 2020, Fandom released the Unified Community Platform (UCP), based on MediaWiki 1.33, for newly created wikis.

In November 2020, Fandom began to migrate Gamepedia wikis to a fandom.com domain as part of their search engine optimization strategy, with migrations continuing into 2021. In February 2021, Fandom acquired Focus Multimedia, the retailer behind Fanatical, an e-commerce platform that sells digital games, ebooks and other products related to gaming.

In late March 2021, Fandom updated its terms of use policy to prohibit deadnaming transgender individuals across their websites. This policy was in response to a referendum on the Star Wars wiki Wookieepedia to ban deadnaming, which triggered a debate around an article about the non-binary artist Robin Pronovost. In response to the deadnaming controversy, Fandom also introduced new LGBT guidelines across its websites in late June 2021 which include links to queer-inclusive and trans support resources.

In June 2021, Fandom began to rollout FandomDesktop, a redesigned theme for desktop devices, with plans to retire its legacy Oasis and Hydra skins once the rollout was complete. Two months later on August 3, Fandom rolled out a new look, new colors, new logo, and introduced a new tagline, "For the love of fans." In late November/early December 2021, all remaining wikis under the wikia.org domain migrated to the fandom.com domain.