Fandom (website)

Based on Wikipedia: Fandom (website)

The Encyclopedia That Wikipedia Wouldn't Build

Here's a question that might seem trivial until you really think about it: Where does all the knowledge go that's too detailed, too nerdy, or too obsessive for a general encyclopedia?

Wikipedia, for all its brilliance, has limits. Its editors enforce a strict policy called "notability"—information must be significant enough to warrant inclusion in a general reference work. But what about the intricate family trees of Westeros? The complete weapon statistics for every gun in a first-person shooter? The episode-by-episode plot summaries that would stretch a normal encyclopedia article into absurdity?

That knowledge has to live somewhere. And for hundreds of millions of internet users, it lives on Fandom.

Born from Wikipedia's DNA

The origin story is almost too fitting. On October 18, 2004, at precisely 11:50 and 49 seconds Coordinated Universal Time, Jimmy Wales—the co-founder of Wikipedia itself—launched a new project. Alongside Angela Beesley Starling, who served on the Wikimedia Foundation's advisory board, Wales created something called Wikicities.

The name invited obvious comparisons to GeoCities, Yahoo's pioneering free web hosting service where millions of people built their first personal websites in the 1990s. But where GeoCities gave individuals a plot of digital land, Wikicities offered something different: shared spaces where communities could build knowledge together.

Wales's original vision was almost quaint by today's standards. He imagined people from the same city or geographical region coming together to document local knowledge—a kind of hyper-local Wikipedia for neighborhoods and towns. That vision didn't survive contact with the internet's actual passions.

What people really wanted to document wasn't their hometowns. It was their fandoms.

The Vocabulary of Obsession

The word "fandom" itself deserves a moment of attention. It's a portmanteau—"fan" plus the suffix "-dom," which indicates a state of being or a realm, as in "kingdom" or "freedom." The term emerged in the early twentieth century among science fiction enthusiasts, a community that pioneered many of the practices that now define fan culture: conventions, amateur publications, and exhaustive documentation of beloved fictional worlds.

What makes fandom knowledge different from encyclopedia knowledge? It's partly about depth, partly about perspective.

Wikipedia requires what editors call "neutral point of view," abbreviated as NPOV. Articles must present information without advocating for any particular interpretation or judgment. A Wikipedia article about a video game might note that critics praised its graphics while some players criticized its difficulty—but it won't tell you which weapon loadout is optimal for the third boss fight.

Fan wikis operate under different rules. They can have a point of view. They can include detailed gameplay instructions, comprehensive plot summaries, and speculation about unreleased content. They're not reference works in the traditional sense—they're living documents created by and for people who are deeply, sometimes obsessively, invested in their subjects.

The Money Problem

Wikipedia operates as a nonprofit. It runs on donations, displays no advertising, and treats itself as a public utility for human knowledge. This model works because Wikipedia has a focused mission: be an encyclopedia, not a comprehensive database of everything anyone might want to know.

Fandom, from its earliest days, operated differently.

The company—originally incorporated in Delaware as Wikia, Inc.—was structured as a for-profit venture. In March 2006, shortly before changing its name from Wikicities to Wikia, the company announced it had raised four million dollars in venture capital from Bessemer Venture Partners and First Round Capital. Nine months later, Amazon.com invested ten million dollars in what's called Series B funding.

This distinction matters enormously. Venture capital investors expect returns. They're not donating to a public good; they're betting that a company will grow in value and eventually produce profits. From its founding, Fandom was on a trajectory that Wikipedia deliberately avoided.

By September 2006, Wikia hosted approximately 1,500 wikis in 48 different languages. The company grew by absorbing formerly independent fan projects. LyricWiki, which documented song lyrics. Nukapedia, the Fallout video game wiki. WoWWiki, devoted to World of Warcraft. Uncyclopedia, a parody encyclopedia in the style of Wikipedia.

Gil Penchina, who led the company in its early years, described Wikia's relationship to Wikipedia with a memorable phrase. If Wikipedia was the encyclopedia, Wikia was "the rest of the library and magazine rack." It was the informal stuff, the entertaining stuff, the material that would never pass Wikipedia's notability guidelines but that millions of people desperately wanted to find.

Growth and Growing Pains

The 2010s brought explosive growth and constant change.

By 2010, wikis could be created in 188 different languages. New leadership cycled through: Craig Palmer, formerly of the music metadata company Gracenote, took over as chief executive in October 2011. Co-founder Angela Beesley Starling left in February 2012 to launch an education startup called ChalkDrop.

The money kept flowing in. Series C funding in November 2012 brought $10.8 million. Series D in August 2014 added another fifteen million. By that point, total investment had reached $39.8 million—a staggering sum for what was essentially a platform hosting free content created by volunteers.

But here's the tension that would define Fandom's future: the company needed to make money from content it didn't create. The articles, the character databases, the detailed episode guides—all of it was written by unpaid fans. Fandom's role was to host this content, organize it, and monetize it through advertising.

This model isn't unique to Fandom. It's the business logic of much of the modern internet: platforms provide infrastructure while users provide content, and the platforms capture the economic value. Social media works this way. So do video hosting sites. The question is always how aggressively the platform extracts value, and how much it gives back to the community that makes it worthwhile.

The Rebranding Wars

In January 2016, Wikia launched a new entertainment news site called Fandom. Later that year, the entire platform was rebranded as "Fandom powered by Wikia," an awkward construction that satisfied no one but signaled the direction of travel. The parent company kept the Wikia name until 2019, but the transformation was underway.

February 2018 brought the most significant change in the company's history. Jon Miller, the former chief executive of America Online—better known by its initials, AOL—acquired Fandom with backing from TPG Capital, a massive private equity firm. Miller became co-chairman alongside Jimmy Wales, while TPG director Andrew Doyle stepped in as interim chief executive.

Private equity ownership changes a company's incentives. Private equity firms typically buy companies using borrowed money, restructure them to increase profitability, and sell them within a few years for a return. The pressure to grow revenue becomes intense.

Fandom began acquiring other properties. Screen Junkies, the YouTube channel known for its "Honest Trailers" video series, came aboard in July 2018. In December, Fandom purchased Curse Media, which brought Gamepedia (another wiki hosting platform) plus websites like D&D Beyond, Futhead, and StrawPoll.me.

The UCP and the Platform Problem

Underneath all the corporate maneuvering, a technical crisis had been brewing for years.

Fandom runs on MediaWiki, the same open-source software that powers Wikipedia. But while Wikipedia kept its installation relatively current, Fandom had heavily customized an older version—specifically, MediaWiki 1.19, released in 2012. By the late 2010s, this was ancient in software terms.

Old software creates problems. Security vulnerabilities go unpatched. New features can't be added. Integration with modern web standards becomes difficult or impossible. Editors who had learned MediaWiki's newer features on Wikipedia found themselves unable to use those same features on Fandom.

In June 2019, Fandom began the laborious process of rewriting its core platform. The goal was to modernize to MediaWiki 1.33, though this was still several versions behind the current release. On March 11, 2020, the company launched what it called the Unified Community Platform, or UCP, for newly created wikis. Migration of existing wikis would take years.

The technical work was complicated by business decisions. In November 2020, Fandom began migrating Gamepedia wikis—the ones acquired from Curse Media—to fandom.com domains. The official explanation was "search engine optimization strategy," which is corporate-speak for trying to consolidate traffic and advertising revenue under a single brand.

For the communities involved, these migrations were often traumatic. Wikis that had built their identities and their search engine rankings over many years suddenly found themselves wearing new clothes they hadn't chosen.

Acquisition Spree

The early 2020s saw Fandom transform from a wiki hosting platform into something much larger: a media conglomerate focused on fan culture.

In February 2021, the company acquired Focus Multimedia, the British company behind Fanatical, an e-commerce platform selling digital games and ebooks. This gave Fandom a direct retail business, not just advertising revenue.

Then came the blockbuster deal. On October 3, 2022, Fandom announced it had acquired GameSpot, Metacritic, TV Guide, GameFAQs, Giant Bomb, Cord Cutters News, and Comic Vine from Red Ventures. These weren't obscure properties—they were some of the most established names in entertainment and gaming media.

GameSpot had been covering video games since 1996. Metacritic had become the internet's de facto aggregator of critical reviews, with its scores influencing everything from game developer bonuses to consumer purchasing decisions. TV Guide, founded in 1953, predated the internet entirely. GameFAQs, with its vast library of user-submitted game guides, was in some ways a precursor to Fandom's entire business model.

Giant Bomb deserves special mention. Founded in 2008 by veteran game journalists Jeff Gerstmann and Ryan Davis, the site had built a reputation for personality-driven content—long podcasts, irreverent videos, and a community that felt more like a friend group than an audience. Its acquisition by Fandom was met with anxiety by longtime fans who worried about what corporate ownership might mean.

Their worries proved justified.

The Cuts Begin

Early 2023 brought layoffs to the GameSpot, Metacritic, and Giant Bomb teams. January 2024 brought another round, dismissing writers, graphic designers, and video producers who had worked in gaming media for more than a decade.

October 2024 saw approximately eleven percent of Fandom's total staff let go. Among those affected were members of GameSpot UK, the team behind Honest Trailers, and various sales and management personnel. The reason given was the company's failure to hit revenue goals.

In May 2025, Fandom sold Giant Bomb back to its own staff after what were described as "multiple conflicts regarding content regulations." The site's editorial independence, hard-won and carefully guarded over nearly two decades, had proven incompatible with Fandom's approach.

By October 2025, Perkins Miller—who had served as chief executive since February 2019—resigned. Reporting from The Verge described a company struggling to meet revenue targets and undergoing massive restructuring.

The Enshittification Problem

There's a term that has gained currency in recent years for what happens when platforms prioritize profit extraction over user experience: enshittification. The writer Cory Doctorow coined it to describe a pattern he observed across digital platforms.

First, platforms attract users by being good. Then they attract businesses by promising access to those users. Finally, they extract maximum value from both groups, degrading the experience for everyone while capturing the profits. By the time users want to leave, the platform has become so dominant that leaving feels impossible.

Fandom's trajectory fits this pattern uncomfortably well.

The Verge's reporting described the platform's advertising and interface as "quite invasive," causing pages to become "unstable and nearly unusable when loading on certain devices." Technology reporter Ethan Gach, writing for Kotaku, described Perkins Miller's tenure as that of one of the "worst CEOs in gaming media," citing the budget cuts to GameSpot and the platform's suffering from "enshittification policies" aimed at maximizing profits.

Starting in November 2025, Fandom began showing advertisements to logged-in users who had previously browsed ad-free with an account. The implicit bargain—create an account, contribute content, and we'll spare you the ads—had been revoked.

The AI Pivot

Like virtually every technology company in the mid-2020s, Fandom turned to artificial intelligence as a potential solution to its problems.

In 2024, the company announced it was incorporating "much more generative AI" into content moderation, with the stated goal of reducing time and cost spent on human moderation. Image review would be handled by algorithms rather than people.

February 2025 brought a more ambitious—and controversial—product: FanDNA Helix. This was an AI model trained on all the pages hosted on Fandom, as well as users' social media posts. The purpose was to allow advertisers to serve targeted ads based on readers' interests and consumption habits.

Think about what this means. Years of fan labor—millions of articles written for free, driven by passion for fictional worlds and gaming franchises—had become training data for an advertising product. The value created by communities was being monetized in ways those communities had never agreed to and couldn't opt out of.

July 2025 brought another AI initiative: machine translation of entire wikis for non-English speakers. On the surface, this sounds democratizing—making fan knowledge available to people regardless of their language. In practice, machine translation of specialized content is notoriously unreliable. Gaming terminology, fictional proper nouns, and community-specific slang often translate poorly or not at all.

What Makes a Wiki Community?

Throughout all these corporate transformations, millions of people continued to write, edit, and maintain Fandom wikis. Understanding why requires understanding what these communities actually do.

A typical Fandom wiki exists to document a fictional universe, a game franchise, or some other shared interest in far more detail than any general encyclopedia would attempt. The Fallout wiki, Nukapedia, contains articles on every weapon, every character, every location, every quest in a game series spanning decades. The Harry Potter wiki catalogs every spell, every magical creature, every character mentioned even in passing across books, films, and supplementary materials.

This level of documentation serves multiple purposes. For new fans, it's a reference work—a way to understand complex fictional worlds with deep lore. For dedicated fans, it's a form of preservation and celebration—a monument to something they love. For the obsessive, it's a never-ending project, always something more to document, always errors to correct, always new connections to discover.

The image policies on Fandom wikis tend to be more lenient than Wikipedia's, allowing for heavily illustrated articles. The content licenses vary: most wikis use Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike, which allows reuse with credit. Some, like the Star Trek wiki Memory Alpha and the parody Uncyclopedia, use licenses with noncommercial clauses.

Crucially, wikis are not owned by their founders. A wiki's creator has no special authority over its direction. Consensus and cooperation are meant to be the organizing principles, though Fandom itself can make decisions affecting communities even when no consensus exists among editors.

The Avatar Connection

The relationship between Fandom and cultural footprint—the question of whether something truly matters in popular culture—is complex and worth examining.

James Cameron's Avatar became the highest-grossing film of all time in 2009, a position it still holds as of 2025. Yet the film is frequently mocked for having "no cultural footprint"—for being a massive commercial success that left remarkably few lasting traces in public consciousness. People can't name the characters. They don't quote the dialogue. The fictional world of Pandora didn't generate the kind of obsessive fan documentation that less commercially successful properties often do.

Fandom wiki activity offers one way to measure this phenomenon. A property with devoted fans generates thousands of articles, constant edits, endless debate over trivial details. A property that people watch once and forget generates... less.

The irony is that Fandom itself has become a kind of measure of cultural significance, even as the platform has struggled to find a sustainable business model. The wikis that attract the most traffic are those documenting properties with the most passionate fan communities. These are the articles that draw the most readers and generate the most advertising revenue.

But passionate communities are also the most demanding. They notice when page load times increase. They protest when advertising becomes intrusive. They care about the quality of their contributions and resent when those contributions are used to train AI models without their consent.

The Larger Pattern

Fandom's story is in many ways a microcosm of what has happened to much of the internet over the past two decades.

The early web was characterized by small communities, personal websites, and a genuine sense of shared creation. GeoCities, which Wikicities' name deliberately evoked, embodied this spirit—a digital homesteading movement where anyone could claim a piece of the internet and build something on it.

That model didn't scale profitably. What replaced it were platforms: large companies that provided free tools and hosting in exchange for ownership of the space and the right to monetize user activity. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit—all followed this pattern. All eventually faced the same tension between community value and profit extraction.

Fandom shows this tension in particularly stark form because the value it hosts is so clearly created by unpaid enthusiasts. There's no pretense that Fandom's employees write the wiki articles. There's no ambiguity about who does the work. Yet the economic value flows to investors and shareholders while the people who create the content receive nothing but the satisfaction of building something they care about.

For some, that's enough. The joy of contributing to a community project, of seeing your work become part of a shared resource, is its own reward. But as the platform has become more aggressive about monetization, more intrusive with advertising, more willing to use community-created content for AI training, the bargain has come to feel increasingly one-sided.

Where Knowledge Lives

Despite everything—the corporate acquisitions, the layoffs, the advertising, the AI pivots—Fandom remains one of the fifty most visited websites in the world. As of October 2023, about a quarter of its traffic came from the United States, with Russia as the second-largest source at roughly eight percent.

This traffic represents something real: millions of people seeking detailed information about things they care about. The teenager trying to beat a difficult video game boss. The fan catching up on a TV series they missed. The curious person who heard a reference to something and wants to understand it fully.

Wikipedia cannot and will not serve these needs. Its mission is to be an encyclopedia, not an exhaustive database of popular culture. The knowledge that Fandom hosts exists because communities created it, because people cared enough to document every detail of fictional worlds that brought them joy.

The tragedy, if there is one, is that this knowledge now lives in a place controlled by private equity investors and shaped by quarterly revenue targets. The communities that created it have limited say in how it's presented, how it's monetized, or how it's used to train AI systems.

But perhaps that's simply the nature of the internet as it has evolved. The free, open, community-driven spaces of the early web largely didn't survive contact with the economics of scale. What replaced them are platforms that enable community while capturing its value.

Fandom, for all its flaws, still enables something remarkable: the collective documentation of human enthusiasm. Somewhere, right now, someone is adding a detail to an article about their favorite game, their favorite show, their favorite fictional world. They're doing it for free, for the love of it, because the knowledge matters to them even if no one else cares.

That impulse—the need to document, to preserve, to share what we love—predates the internet and will outlast any particular platform. The question is only where that knowledge will live, who will control it, and whether the people who create it will have any say in its fate.