Tilly ^^

As you may be aware, I’ve been involved with the Critical Role wiki on Fandom since last summer. This therefore may seem surprising, but: several dedicated former editors of the Fandom wiki, myself included, have made a new, ad-free wiki at https://criticalrole.miraheze.org. It contains much of the same material of the Fandom wiki (as is legal per the CC-BY-SA license, with full attribution), with a number of improvements made over the past month.

You may consider this our vote of no confidence in Fandom as a platform, and in the administration of the Fandom-hosted wiki.

We are doing this because the administrators of the Fandom wiki have repeatedly ignored the wishes of the community, shutting even experienced editors out from nearly all decisions, resisting even minor changes, and ignoring simple requests and basic admin tasks for months on end. They are also knowingly using fan art without artist permission* despite the strong and repeated urging of at least six experienced editors to remove it.

A recent formalization of the path to administrator roles explicitly limits new admins to people the current administration - all of whom were appointed by the wiki founder, with no input from the community - chooses. The leadership position on the wiki is now held by the person who started edit wars, protected pages, and blocked users to support presumptive and ultimately false narratives in favor of a particular ship, and who has shut down or deleted any criticism of these actions as being “bad faith.” The wiki administration has openly condoned plagiarism as a valid means of updating pages, and have consistently refused to take feedback seriously.

We are also dissatisfied with Fandom as a hosting site. In January, Fandom attempted to require an extensive and poorly handled rebranding of the wiki to promote TLOVM on behalf of Amazon (which was, to the credit of both the administrators and the editorship, unanimously resisted). I and others have additionally made repeated complaints about the administration to Fandom, none of which we believe have been taken seriously.

Despite the efforts of a passionate community, I believe the current administration will forever oppose most efforts to change or improve the wiki, and that Fandom is only interested in getting eyes on ads. We intend to provide a better option on an ad-free, open-source platform. If you share any of these frustrations or concerns, I invite you to join us.

Finally, I would be remiss if I did not thank multiple collaborators, including Ellis (not on Tumblr) for their tireless efforts. This would not have been possible without them.

Social media handles for the wiki will be forthcoming over the next few weeks. In the meantime feel free to ask me any questions you might have.

If it gets what it wants, I don’t think much of Percy will be left.

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Percy: