#3richu

It’s a noble idea, and I appreciate the sympathy for our roadblocks with Fandom, but talking about it internally with the other staff today there’s a number of reasons that it would ultimately backfire on us.

The first thing TS checked was a page that apparently used to be for exporting a whole wiki, but now apparently can only export individual pages. Considering our volume of content that would. Take some time.

The next question would be then where we import those exported pages to. The only other major wiki system I could think of is gamepedia - aside from the fact that we don’t primarily document videogames, gamepedia has an upcoming merger with fandom anyway. Which is further proof of the existing broad observation that Fandom certainly seems to have a monopoly on pop culture wikis.

If we were to make our own mediawiki, the server would necessitate money to host and ability to maintain that none of us really have. Bulbapedia may have the kind of resources to pull that off, but we do not. If we did, Fandom would also actively suppress any announcements we made on their site about migrating. We could post it on the tumblr and discord here, sure, but not every user checks these places. This also leads to a tanked Search Engine Optimization, I think, possibly making our new wiki harder to find.

All of that aside, even if we smoothed all that over and made the move, all existing user accounts would be useless - everyone including probably staff would likely have to make new accounts just to edit the wiki at all, and the old user links on the page history and talk pages would be a mess.

I like that Clefairy look the same regardless of gender, but if there were to be a difference, I can see the male Clefairy being a subtle nod to Red’s Clefairy from the Pocket Monsters manga.

Here she is!