Hello everyone, this is a very important blog post. After weeks of deliberation and countless hours of hard work by our volunteers, we are here to announce our departure from Wikia.
What's next?[]
For the Wikia, as in the Bakugan Wiki hosted by Wikia, we still simply stop editing it. Any new information will be collected and posted on the new wiki.
We have created an independent Bakugan Wiki and have spent the last few weeks merging in updated versions of every single page on the wiki, as well as importing each image from the old wiki. While we've done a lot, we may have missed something, so if you see something we've missed, feel free to let us know!
Now, I know many people are going to have questions, so let's get into them.
Questions[]
What exactly are you doing?[]
We are forking the Bakugan Wiki on Wikia, and moving towards an independent wiki. In doing so, we've created "The Hydranoid Group" in order to manage the wiki and its accompanying features (the Twitter, Discord, etc).
Why are you doing this?[]
Mostly to get away from Wikia. Wikia was fine for hosting at first, but lately, with the growing number of non-optional features, as well as the absolutely bloated number of advertisements and restrictions on what we "can" and "can't" do with the wiki, we've experienced a growing cry to move to a more independent platform. We spent a long time debating, both in private with our admin team, as well as in a public forum, both on a blog post on the wiki as well as on the Discord. The consensus was that, if we had the resources, we should move. And we did.
As for a concise list of reasons why, I'm going to have to defer to the Runescape Wiki, as they summed it up quite nicely.
From their leaving post:
- The state of advertisements on Wikia is horrendous and not improving.
- Wikia's movement away from wiki content to clickbait editorials.
- Wikia's increasing control over our site content, via things like JS review and by pushing their own videos over the actual articles. (Bakugan Wiki Note: the Staff-made videos have not happened to us, but with the new reboot on the horizon, it may be likely that if the wiki grew, it would become something we'd have to face.)
- Wikia's security history is terrible; historically, they haven't fixed a problem until someone abuses it.
- Wikia's software is super out of date. MediaWiki 1.19 is six-and-a-half years old and grossly incompatible with new/updates to extensions. Security fixes and similar have to be backported..
Now how would moving to an independent wiki benefit us? Again, I'm going use sections from the Runescape Wiki's post about it.
- We get to use the latest MediaWiki version, 1.31 (and keep upgrading it as updates are released).
- We get to use new and updated extensions, or even create our own: ...so many opportunities for cool stuff when we’re not limited by Wikia.
- We get HTTPS everywhere by default
- 2FA is available for all accounts
- We use a new full width skin, the same used by Wikipedia, allowing us to display more content on the page, rather than the page being riddled in advertising.
In short, moving from Wikia will allow to expand our content and give us more control and flexibility to better deliver this content to you (the readers). We also won't have to deal with any of Wikia's intrusive ads, which have even contained malicious code (this is not Wikia's intentional doing, but we'd rather it not happen at all). This is not something we want the Bakugan Wiki to be associated with, and the new wiki will allow you access to all of our old content, without annoying ads everywhere, or irrelevant clickbait articles. There's also a lot of ideas of how we can expand even further, so keep your eyes open...
How did this happen?[]
This was an idea that has been floated for years, but it generally came to the same result: People didn't want to put in the work for it, and Bakugan wasn't that popular anyways. As of these last few months, these ideas are demonstrably false. We've seen a huge resurgence in activity now that more and more news about the reboot, Bakugan: Battle Planet is being announced, and again thanks to our volunteers, after many days of work and technical headache, we've manged to migrate the entire wiki (articles and images) over to the new domain.
These decisions came from much deliberation. Our admin team spent a week discussing it seriously, and then after that week, opened the discussion up to the public. The overall consensus was positive to the idea.
Who is running the wiki? Is SpinMaster involved?[]
The current (now old, I suppose) admin team from here will be migrating to the new wiki.
SpinMaster is not involved in anyway, fullstop.
What's next for the Wikia? What's next for the Wiki?[]
For the Wikia, as in the Bakugan Wiki hosted by Wikia, we still simply stop editing it. Any new information will be collected and posted on the new wiki.
Let me know if you have questions, I'll answer as best and as long as I can.
Thanks,