Warcraft Wiki:About

Warcraft Wiki
2023 logo
Formerly called	WoWWiki (2004-2010) Wowpedia (2010-2023)
Type	Online encyclopedia
Statistics	285,565 articles. 168,133 files. see more statistics...
Hosted by	wiki.gg
Website	warcraft.wiki.gg
Other media	Discord server Twitter: @Warcraft_Wiki Facebook: Warcraft Wiki YouTube: @Warcraft_Wiki

Warcraft Wiki is a wiki dedicated to cataloging Blizzard Entertainment's Warcraft universe, with a focus, though not priority, on World of Warcraft. It covers the entire Warcraft series of games, RPG reference books, strategy guides, novels, comics (manga and otherwise), and other sources.

About Warcraft Wiki

The wiki is a flexible, user-editable web-based database of information made up entirely of user contributions, and uses MediaWiki software. All the text in the wiki is released under the Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license and to be able to edit the articles, visitors must register with the website.

So why a Warcraft wiki? As you are going through looking for information, if you see something that is incorrect, you can correct it. If you see any information that is missing, you can add it. This way, the information here should be as up to date as possible, instead of having to wait for a small group of people to update the information as the world changes. The more people that use the Warcraft Wiki, the more up-to-date the information will be!

• Warcraft Wiki is not a copy of Wikipedia — we do many things differently.
• The WoW community often uses slang terms, which is in part reflected here. In addition, you may occasionally find information here on some articles that is decidedly not NPOV.
• Wiki is not a religion here, it is a way of editing.
• We strive to be as "lore-neutral" as possible. We do not decide what is "official" and what is not — that is Blizzard's job. We record the known information and try to present all sides of any valid controversy. Check our lore policy for further details.
• We do not flag spoilers — if new information has come out it will be added to the wiki.
• We aim to produce easily navigated, high quality articles.

Background

Originally named WoWWiki, the site was launched on 24 November 2004 by Rustak, in conjunction with AlexanderYoshi, as a source of information pertaining to World of Warcraft and the interface modification suite Cosmos. After its launch, WoWWiki expanded massively to cover the entirety of the Warcraft universe, including the real-time strategy games, novels, the RPG reference books, manga, and other written sources, along with the World of Warcraft expansion packs.

It was also a primary and popular source for World of Warcraft interface customization and addon information as Blizzard Entertainment themselves did not release documentation on the programming interface.

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  The original site logo.

• 

  WoWWiki icon.

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  WoWWiki wordmark.

Wikia acquisition and first split

On 2 May 2007, it was announced that WoWWiki would be moving to Wikia. This move occurred two weeks later and legal rights for the "wowwiki.com" domain were transferred.

Three years later, Wikia implemented visual interface changes across its platform that broke some of WoWWiki's functionality and was poorly received by some of WoWWiki's community. As such, on 29 September 2010, discussion began on whether to leave Wikia due to irreconcilable differences with the administration. However, Wikia still owned the domain name wowwiki.com and intended to keep a copy of the site running even if it moved. As a result of that discussion, a fork of WoWWiki was created as Wowpedia (wowpedia.org), with the new site being hosted by Curse and the new wiki becoming usable on 17 October 2010. The site was created by duplicating the wowwiki.com database, including edit histories and user pages. Thus at the launch of Wowpedia.org, the two wikis had identical content. A cohort of non-employee admins and active users left for the new project, but some remained on WoWWiki instead.

On 4 December 2010, the new World of Warcraft community site was announced on Battle.net including mention that direct links to Wowpedia would appear on many pages along with Wowhead links.

Wowpedia merged with Curse's Gamepedia wiki-hosting platform in July 2013 in order to unify logins with the rest of the Curse network and simplify maintenance workloads on the backend. In December 2014, Wowpedia's URL changed to wow.gamepedia.com, though links to Wowpedia in other channels (like the @Wowpedia Twitter handle) continue to refer to the site using the old address.

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  The 2010 Wowpedia logo.

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  The 2019 Wowpedia logo.

From 2010 until 2020, WoWWiki continued to operate albeit with a slower pace of contributions than its pre-fork state. Individual editors continued changing the two wikis independent of the other. Changes were not automatically reflected in the other wiki, although some editors participating in both wikis made concurrent edits or mirrored changes from one to the other. As part of the CC-BY-SA license used by both Wowpedia and WoWWiki, copying content between the two sites remained permitted so long as proper attribution was given.

Fandom acquisition and WoWWiki archival

In December 2018, parent organizations Fandom (formerly Wikia) acquired most of Curse Media, including Gamepedia (and Wowpedia with it). This sparked a discussion on whether the community should fork now or not but ultimately a decision was not made and the community remained with Fandom.

In 2019, after Fandom and Curse Media (owner of Gamepedia) joined through a corporate merger, discussion began at WoWWiki toward possibly reuniting the two communities. Concerns initially arose about the following topics:

• technological issues, such as Wikia/Gamepedia's plans for developing a single-sign-on between the platforms
• interpersonal conflict, from reuniting two sub-cultures amid grievances and mistrust accumulated over a decade apart
• safeguarding portions of WoWWiki content that were possibly superior
• inter-wiki links between different language formats on either platform
• search-engine optimization

Beginning in February 2020, a vote by five former and current members of WoWWiki concluded the two communities should indeed reunite using Gamepedia/Wowpedia infrastructure. On 12 May 2020, WoWWiki locked itself to further editing. Although prior content remained in a read-only state, Fandom employee Mira Laime published announcements inviting users to Wowpedia and announcing the closure:

“Just as Fandom has joined forces with Gamepedia, this wiki has joined forces with our Gamepedia equivalent. The wiki has been archived and we ask that readers and editors move to the now combined wiki on Gamepedia.”

— Banner atop each page

“This wiki has been archived. Please contribute on Wowpedia from now on! There are two major World of Warcraft communities within Fandom's network, and we are merging them into one definitive resource on the game, so players and editors are no longer split between them. This wiki here still remains open for readers, but can no longer be edited. No new Discussions posts can be created. Please join us here on Wowpedia!”

— Main announcement

Flight from Fandom

The Wowpedia domain was changed to wowpedia.fandom.com on 23 March 2021 which immediately raised concerns over being brought back under the same entity that Wowpedia had forked from eight years earlier. However, a decision was not made and the community remained with the platform. Over the next two years, the community remained at Fandom but overtime during these two years, the community started pointing out issues that has crept up. The community voiced concerns of multiple issues which the platform has brought to the wiki, some issues consisted of:

• File page redirects for guests. An account was required to read and digest information for any particular file page. This also caused issues on other platforms such as Discord as linking a file would instead show the wrong image.
• The skin during the first year was defaulted to the small-width which brought back one of the fork reasons from WoWWiki over the Oasis skin.
• Feature bloat and forced features; features that the community did not want were forced on the community.
• The platform was slow and was getting worse overtime.
• WoWWiki existed alongside Wowpedia. Although archived, it was still live, available and remained up due to receiving large amounts of pageviews instead of being closed and redirected to Wowpedia.

With Dragonflight placing the game in a better position and having two years of nothing improving on the platform, on 18 September 2023, a vote was once again called to leave Fandom, due once again to irreconcilable differences. As before, Fandom owned the wowpedia.org domain name and intended to keep a copy of the site running. As a result, the wiki once again voted to change the name.

The new wiki opened its latest iteration on 12 October 2023, now called Warcraft Wiki, on the wiki.gg platform at warcraft.wiki.gg. The announcement of the move and rename would be announced at other Warcraft-related community sites, including MMO-Champion, r/wow, r/warcraftlore, and later from Wowhead just before BlizzCon 2023.

Trivia

• Warcraft Wiki currently runs on MediaWiki 1.39.4 (271be2b); see Special:Version for further details.
• Warcraft Wiki uses two unique extensions that were specially made for the wiki, UsingData and DefaultLinks. There was a third extension called VideoLink but its functionality was merged into a larger extension known as EmbedVideo.

Ownership and administration

Warcraft Wiki is hosted by wiki.gg and ably supported by its admin staff.

Active administrators:

• • Berenal
  • Dark T Zeratul
  • Eithris
• • Kaydeethree
  • Pcj
  • PeterWind
• • Sandwichman2448
  • Surafbrov
  • xporc

See also

• Community portal
• Warcraft Wiki FAQ
• Category:Warcraft Wiki
• The policies and guidelines