For Other: If you aren't migrating to wiki.gg please head to Help:New Wiki.
This a Community Guide, nothing Official nor Endorsed by wiki.gg.
Migration is also known as "forking." It's when a group of people want to split or part ways from one wiki to their separate wiki, creating your own branch.
Frequently asked questions
- Do I have to pay?
- No, getting hosted on wiki.gg is completely free.
- Do wikis need to be official in order to be hosted?
- No, they don't need to be official.
- How much can I customize?
- You can customize mostly everything expect for hiding ads and changing colors/content in the wiki.gg header/footers. We have a Customization Policy on what you can/cannot do on the wiki.
- What transfers over?
-
- Articles/pages
- Templates
- Images
- Users
- Edit/revision history
- How long it takes to transfer?
- All your content from the wiki gets transferred over; for example, it took roughly 1 day for wiki.gg to transfer all 200k pages for Hearthstone, while an average wiki with a few thousand pages like Ace Combat only took a few hours to move over. All this content is roughly transferred between a few hours and a day, depending on the size of the wiki.
Process
Questions
Let's start off by asking a few questions.
- Is your wiki about content revolving around Roblox?
- Is your wiki about hacking, ROMs, or anything illegal?
- Is your wiki about content revolving around porn games?
If you answered Yes to any of these questions then sadly you can't apply for the migration, as Roblox wikis are not accepted due to drama, the platform can't host any ROMs due to legal implications, and pornographic content is not allowed due to the minimum age to use the platform being 13.
Did you answer No to all of these questions? Congratulations, you can apply and move onto the next section.
Moving
Let's start by talking to your community in your wiki Discord server and seeing if everyone comes to the same consensus.
- Are you an admin? You should conduct a vote and see what everyone would like to do.
- Are you an editor? Show the admins the pros/cons in leaving the platform.
- Are you a developer? Just submit your request in.
If everyone agreed, let's now start off by doing the simple process: applying for wiki.gg.
Apply
1) Apply for the migration/fork via the new wiki form.
The application can take a while depending on how many wikis submitted a request during that month. Join the wiki.gg Discord for more information.
Review
2) If you submitted your wiki for review. Pause all edits, wiki overhauls and any additions on your old wiki. This will make the wiki you're leaving outdated, and visitors will come to your new wiki instead.
If you don't pause edits, SEO and search engine caching goes a long way and you'll be doing more damage than good by keeping the older wiki updated with new information.
Take your time
3) Take your time making your wiki look great before having the team publish it to make it live for everyone.
Now that you've been accepted, it's time to get access to your wiki. The wiki will be very barebones; the wiki.gg staff will help you along the process to make it pretty and even make it a 1 to 1 copy from the previous platform you migrated from. Make sure all your styles, functionality, and sidebar information looks great before saying Yes to be published.
Please note that they style wikis based on when the wikis have been accepted into the fork process. So, when your time has come, they will let you know when it's time to style it. Until then, please edit the wiki with updated content, fix any dead-end pages, fix any double redirects and more to improve your wiki experience for your editors and readers.
While in your styling period, be sure to test the wiki on mobile thoroughly to see if it functions properly. If not, inform your Wiki Curator to fix it. Wikis are normally visited by 70% of your readers on mobile devices; give them a good experience to view and read content.
Did your wiki come from Fandom? In these next steps is a guide on how to inform your community about the migration.
After you completed #2 in 'Moving Platforms,' do note that Sitenotices and links on the main page will be removed by Wiki Representatives/Fandom Staff per Forking Policy; Fandom only allows the URL of the new wiki to be linked in the migration discussion/announcement.[1]
Note: During all of this there will be a chance a Fandom Wiki Representative will come and leave a message on your Message Wall. If you reply, keep it short and sweet: 'Yes, we've moved on from Fandom.' No further explanation is needed.
After your onboarding experience has been completed, we will guide you on proper steps on how to announce your fork to your community.
See Help:Onboarding#Checklist
You've done it, you successfully migrated to wiki.gg.
The End
Feel free to read below on how to grow your wiki and then head on over to Getting Started to see which add-ons/extensions to install/use to best optimize your wiki for both your editors and readers. Wikis are always a work in progress, so never feel like your wiki isn't good enough. You will always have time for improvements.
Growing your Wiki
After you successfully migrated, it's now keeping up and outpacing competitors.
To surpass other wiki competitors in search results you legitimately need a few things...
- Time
- A lot of it, it won't happen overnight or even in the first year or two.
- Goodwill in the community
- If people like you a lot, it will never hurt.
- People linking you over other competitors on places on the net.
- This shows to Google you are used.
- Keeping your site up to date content wise and keeping ahead of competitor version.
- This does two things;
- 1) gives you the initial SEO of being first.
- 2) means your content isn't the same as the competitor version.
- Don't keep your content as stubs, stubs may eventually lead to the site gaining an unreliable rep.
- THIS ISN'T REQUIRED BUT HELPS: Get developer support. It goes the longest way if the developers support your wiki.
- Partner or befriend content creators, these folks will get people to your wiki.
- Try and partner with a subreddit community on Reddit. Have them link the wiki in either the sidebar or menu links.
See Also
References
