Category:Ex-Wikia due to censorship: Difference between revisions

Category:Ex-Wikia is filled with wikis, groups, and people that were once a part of the behemoth that is the commercial Wikia wiki farm (now known as Fandom), but have since left – for a variety of reasons. The most common issues which have forced communities to fork involve Wikia making decisions which harm the project, such as a long series of ad-heavy reskins. Wikia/Fandom staffers have deleted content from many individual wikis (such as Uncyclopedia, where a "content warning" posted on the entire site led to a community fork in 2013).

Any original Wikia wikis which remain after the move or fork (known as "spoons") would be edited or censored by staff to prevent users from mentioning that the community had left to go elsewhere. These abandoned wikis would remain as competitors to the new projects, harming that project's search engine ranking through duplicate content penalties.

In the worst cases, Wikia/Fandom would simply flip from eagerly hosting a project (complete with glib but ultimately misleading claims that "we'll host you for free") to outright shutting the same projects down because their corporate decision makers no longer like the content. Spanking Art was an early example (in 2008, after a troll forum threatened to have its users complain to Wikia advertisers) but many more have followed - especially after the rebrand of Wikia to Fandom in 2018-19 meant that many longtime Wikia communities no longer fit the target theme and demographic. The affected sites display not an explanation of what happened to the community, but just "This wikia is closed", misleading the public to believe that the project is defunct.