Fandom Wiki

**Fandom** (also known as **Wikia** before October 2016) is a wiki hosting service and domain operated by **Fandom, Inc.** (formerly known as **Wikia, Inc.**), a for-profit Delaware company founded in October 2004 by Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley. Fandom was acquired in 2018 by TPG Capital and Jon Miller through Integrated Media Co.

## About Fandom Wiki

Fandom uses MediaWiki, the open-source wiki software used by Wikipedia. Fandom, Inc. derives its income from advertising and sold content, publishing most user-provided text under copyleft licenses. The company also runs the associated Fandom editorial project, offering pop-culture and gaming news. Most Fandom wikis are hosted under the domain *fandom.com*, but some, especially those that focus on subjects other than media franchises, are hosted under *wikia.org*.

This is the current wiki you are on!

## History

### 2004–2009: Early days and growth

Fandom was launched on October 18, 2004, at 23:50:49 (UTC) under the name **Wikicities** (which invited comparisons to Yahoo's GeoCities), by Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley Starling—respectively Chairman Emeritus and Advisory Board member of the Wikimedia Foundation. The name of the project was changed to Wikia on March 27, 2006. In the month before the move, Wikia announced a US$4 million venture capital investment from Bessemer Venture Partners and First Round Capital. Nine months later, Amazon.com invested US$10 million in Series B funding.

By September 2006, it had approximately 1,500 wikis in 48 languages. Over time, Wikia has incorporated formerly independent wikis such as LyricWiki, Nukapedia, Uncyclopedia, and WoWWiki. Gil Penchina described Wikia early on 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.

### 2010–2015: New management

Fandom was launched on October 18, 2004, at 23:50:49 (UTC) under the name **Wikicities** (which invited comparisons to Yahoo's GeoCities), by Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley Starling—respectively Chairman Emeritus and Advisory Board member of the Wikimedia Foundation. The name of the project was changed to Wikia on March 27, 2006. In the month before the move, Wikia announced a US$4 million venture capital investment from Bessemer Venture Partners and First Round Capital. Nine months later, Amazon.com invested US$10 million in Series B funding.

By September 2006, it had approximately 1,500 wikis in 48 languages. Over time, Wikia has incorporated formerly independent wikis such as LyricWiki, Nukapedia, Uncyclopedia, and WoWWiki. Gil Penchina described Wikia early on 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.

### 2016–2018: Fandom brand

On January 25, 2016, Wikia launched a new entertainment news site named Fandom. On September 26, 2016, Wikia announced that Wikia.com would be renamed "Fandom powered by Wikia" on October 4, 2016, to better associate themselves with the Fandom website. Wikia, Inc. would remain under its current name. At the time, the homepage of Wikia.com was moved to *wikia.com/fandom*.

On December 4, 2016, Wikia announced the hiring of Dorth Raphaely to be their Chief Content Officer. Previously Raphaely had worked at Bleacher Report as their General Manager. In mid-2018, following an investment by private equity firm TPG Capital, Craig Palmer was replaced by Andrew Doyle who assumed the role of Interim CEO.

On August 15, 2018, Wikia announced it would fully change its domain name into *fandom.com* in early 2019. Various Wikis were tested with the new domain during 2018, with Wikia confirming that the process would be completed by February 4, 2019, with the exception of wikis that focused on "more serious topics", which would instead have their domains changed to *wikia.org* instead of *fandom.com*. The process was delayed by a few weeks due to issues with Google adverts, but was properly completed on February 22, 2019.

### 2018–present: New acquisitions and inclusivity

On July 2, 2018, it was announced that Fandom had purchased Screen Junkies from Defy Media.

On December 12, 2018, Fandom announced that they had acquired the media assets of Curse LLC, including wiki services Gamepedia, D&D Beyond, Futhead, Muthead, and Straw Poll.

On June 20, 2019, Fandom announced that it would rewrite its core platform in order to use a newer version of MediaWiki software. Fandom previously used a modified build of MediaWiki based on version 1.19, which was outdated by several years.

In June 2021, Fandom began to rollout *FandomDesktop*, a redesigned theme for desktop devices. Two months later on August 3, Fandom rolled out a new look, new colors, and new logo, and introduced a new tagline, "For the love of fans."

## Service

Fandom communities consist of online encyclopedias, each one specializing in a particular subject. Although Fandom allows almost anything to be the main focus of a wiki, the most common interest of its users is in popular fiction franchises of films, games, books, and other media, due to the considerable limitation of such detailed information by Wikipedia's notability policies. This contributed to the service being renamed to *Fandom*.

The main purpose of articles in a Fandom community is to cover information and discussion on a particular topic in a much greater and more comprehensive detail level than what can be found on Wikipedia articles. For example, Spiteful Crow, an enemy character in *EarthBound*, may have its own article on the *EarthBound* Fandom, whereas the character may not be considered notable enough for a Wikipedia page. Also, the writing style is mostly directed to those familiar with specific vocabulary and terminology rather than to the lay and general public of Wikipedia; the *Harry Potter* wiki, for example, is written from the perspective of everything in the franchise universe being real, thus the article about the character Ronald Weasley starts by describing the subject as "a pure-blood wizard, the sixth and youngest son of Arthur and Molly Weasley" instead of "a character in the Harry Potter series".

Other examples of content that is generally considered beyond the scope of information of Wikipedia articles includes Fandom information about video games and related video game topics, detailed instructions, gameplay details, plot details, and so forth. Gameplay concepts can also have their own articles. Fandom also allows wikis to have a point of view, rather than the neutral POV that is required by Wikipedia (although NPOV is a local policy on many Fandom communities).

The image policies of Fandom communities tend to be more lenient than those of Wikimedia Foundation projects, allowing articles with much more illustration. Fandom requires all user text content to be published under a free license; most use the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, although a few wikis use a non-free licence with a noncommercial clause (for instance Memory Alpha, Uncyclopedia and others) and some use the GNU Free Documentation License. Fandom's Terms of Use forbid hate speech, libel, pornography, or copyright infringement. Material is allowed, as long as the added material does not duplicate Wikimedia Foundation projects.

Wikis are also not owned by their founders, nor does the founder's opinion carry more weight in disagreements than any other user's opinion. Consensus and cooperation should be the primary means for organizing a community. However, Fandom may take decisions affecting the community even if there is no consensus at all.

## Notes

1. **^** Stylized in all lowercase from 2016 to 2017 and stylized in all capital letters from 2017 to 2021.
2. **^** Most content on Wikia was licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License until June 19, 2009, at which point most wikis were relicensed to CC BY-SA.
3. **^** The name was derived from the Hawaiian word for "quick" and asari, Japanese for "rummaging search".[*citation needed]*