Dovedale Wiki:Moving From FANDOM

While FANDOM provides excellent support and uptime, the company is a for-profit that cares very little about its communities. We have decided to make a move away from them. The Fandom version of the wiki was started in September 2023. There were multiple incidents which will be listed below which ultimately led to our move, which you can read about below.

Creative Restrictions

There were too many restrictions on what we could and could not do, and we did not have full power onto the site. Simple things like theme colours are highly restricted. We also have rules on how things work on the wiki, such as styling, which can restrict our creative power.

Power

We have very little control of what goes on on the site. Recently, Fandom staff gave former staff bureaucratic powers on the wiki maliciously, without consultation to current site admins. It was a massive headache for all staff when this happened, as we had to constantly ensure the wiki was not getting vandalised. Fandom also has a notorious reputation for using wikis for their own intrests, and not the community. Fandom has also taken decisions in the past that have negatively impacted other communities, such as changing skins forcefully, requiring tons of community effort to re-style. Each wiki has a complicated amount of CSS code (code that helps style the wiki and makes it look pretty!) and is usually suited to one theme.

Advertising

Fandom also has very aggressive advertising, which can ruin the experience for logged out users. NSFW advertising (warning, slight NSFW) is also not uncommon, and this is unacceptable for our community. There is no reporting and so far no mitigation ive seen for these advertising. In addition, FANDOM promotes irrelevant wikis in the 'Fan Feed' section leading to confusion. This can be especially concerning when the wiki is of a similar nature (rail simulators for example), but of a different game. While we many need to implement advertising in the future to cover hosting costs and domain fees, these are very low, and profit is not on the table for us. We will ensure we will do this in an ethical and in a conducive way if so.

FANDOM as a corporation profit off fans' unconditional work and interest, done for free for other fans, while putting them into this poor environment. While profits are not a bad thing exclusively, the way that fandom is doing it is poor.

Help Us!

FANDOM's forking policy is also very restrictive, and only allows us to do very limited things to promote our new site. In addition, it will be **forced** to stay up.

While the move is a really big challenge, the biggest challenge is what happens after a move. The company has licensed content such that we cannot take it down, and is notorious for optimising search engine results to be the top.

Thanks to advertising, data tracking and due to the sheer size of Fandom, search engines will *always* prefer them.

Please help us by:

• Using our new site https://dovedale.wiki !
• Ignoring the old wiki. Don't **visit **it, don't **edit **it, don't **vandalize **it, don't post in comments or discussions – don't contribute to its activity in any way.
• Click on our wiki instead of FANDOM in Google and other search engines. This helps us build up SEO (search engine optimization) and can help us rank higher in searches.
• Spread the word and post links to the new wiki around, be it social media, Steam, YouTube comments, etc. Any publicly posted link boosts our visibility, even more than search results clicks.
• And last but not least – join us and help the wiki to grow with your contributions!