Draft:Wiki.gg

wiki.gg

Logo since March 2022
Type of business	Subsidiary
Type of site	Wiki hosting service
Available in	Multilingual
Founded	March 16, 2022 (2022-03-16)
Headquarters	U.S.
Founder(s)	Patrick Johnston
Products	Wiki hosting
Employees	8+ (2024)
Parent	indie.io
URL	wiki.gg
Advertising	Direct and advertising networks
Registration	Optional
Launched	March 16, 2022 (2022-03-16)
Current status	Active
Content license	Creative Commons Attribution/ Share-Alike 4.0
Written in	PHP, JavaScript (Node.js)

Wiki.gg ) is a wiki hosting service that hosts wikis about video games. The privately held, for-profit company was founded in March of 2022 by Patrick Johnston (PCJ), former staff at Gamepedia.

Wiki.gg uses MediaWiki, the same open-source wiki software that is used by Wikipedia. Unlike the MediaWiki Foundation, the nonprofit organization that hosts Wikipedia, Wiki.gg operates as a for-profit company and derives its income from advertising video games, sponsorships and their Steam Store video game bundles that are curated by their parent company indie.io, it publishes all user-provided text under copyleft licenses. Wiki.gg wikis are hosted under the domain wiki.gg'.

Freedom Games the owner of wiki.gg is founded by former Gamepedia, Ben Robinson (Wiki Director) and Donovan Duncan (Vice President of Curse).

History

2022 - 2023: Early days and growth

Wiki.gg was first launched on March 18, 2022, by Patrick Johnston (PCJ) and Freedom Games, they started with the Terraria Wiki, the Dark Deity Wiki and the Coromon Wiki as their first curated wikis that were initially used to promote the release of the service, eventually Wiki.gg grew partnerships with the developers and publishers of ARK, Undermine, Deadcells and Deep Rock Galatic, to name a few.

Wiki.gg was founded with the culmination of various situations, with the most notable being the unfortunate demise of Gamepedia, it was the largest private wiki hosting service in the early 2010's rivaling that of then Wikicities in features, staff support and being the most up-to-date MediaWiki wiki-farm, in late 2018 Curse Media was bought by Fandom from the previous owners Twitch, this package deal included the Gamepedia service. Fandom would leave Gamepedia alone to be run by its staff until 2021, when they announced that they had absorbed the entirety of the Gamepedia platform and their wikis into the Fandom brand and platform, this coincided with the introduction of the Unified Community Platform rework that saw Fandom updating to MediaWiki version 1.33, some Gamepedia wikis retained their gamepedia.com subdomain until late 2021 when the last of the domain changes were completed, sunsetting the usage of the gamepedia.com domain. Following the merging of Gamepedia wikis into the Fandom platform, the first set of employee layoffs were set to occur, where the only surviving Gamepedia staff were moved over to the Fandom staff team, before eventually each one of them would be fired under different circumstances over the coming years.

Alongside the Fandom turmoil with the Gamepedia merger, in 2023 the unstable nature of Miraheze was also a stir in the wiki community, where it was announced that Miraheze Limited would be shutting down Miraheze for various reasons, one being the foundation of WikiTide after a subset of employees forked away from Miraheze to form their own wiki hosting service.

2024 - 2025: Rise in popularity

The aftermath of wikis forking from both Fandom and Miraheze, Wiki.gg grew in size with regards of how many wikis were moving over to the platform, the Hearthstone Wiki had over 200,000 articles, the World of Warcraft Wiki (formely called Wowpedia on Fandom). During this time the Minecraft Wiki was having an in-depth discussion of forking from Fandom due to the recent decline in popularity and trust within the userbase of the wiki, Wiki.gg was the first choice for moving platforms to, however Weird Gloop the hosting company of the Runescape Wiki offered them a better deal which resulted in them not going with Wiki.gg.

See also

• Comparison of wiki hosting services

External links

• Official website

Category:Free-content websites Category:MediaWiki websites Category:Wiki farms Category:American companies established in 2022 Category:Internet properties established in 2022 Category:Wikis