Tardis:Forking announcement

"It changed! Oh, you clever thing!"

We are pleased to announce that Tardis Wiki has forked from Fandom. This means that we have a new website (https://tardis.wiki), separate from Fandom, but with all of the same articles and content that already exists. Being self-hosted will put us beyond the reach of Fandom's increasingly authoritarian tendencies when it comes to forcing undesired features and design changes on communities. Moreover, forking from Fandom gives us editors more control over the features the Wiki has enabled, and will mean less adverts and other intrusive elements for our readers! In fact, as we launch, we will be completely ad-free — and will aim to stay that way, subject to donations.

Whatever the wishes of the editing community, Fandom will not remove the old wiki. However, we expect it to end up being edited substantially less and so may fall behind on covering the latest releases, particularly for non-televised material. Therefore, if you would like to support the new wiki, we ask that you make a conscious effort to go here instead of Fandom. You can also help by sharing this announcement and changing any old links that you have pointing to Fandom's Tardis Wiki to instead point to the new wiki. You can also install the Indie Wiki Buddy extension which will automatically redirect all links to the old Fandom wiki to the new wiki!

We've already touched on some of the reasons for this fork, but there are more. Tardis was founded in 2004 on a platform called WikiCities. Over time, WikiCities became Wikia and Wikia became Fandom, and the platform changed a lot. Many of these changes were for the better, but some have been for the worse. Fandom, as a relatively large company, has profit margins to hit and so needs to boost revenue with ads and other choices that may have a detrimental impact on the reading and editing experience. By becoming independent, we will gain more control over our Wiki, ensuring that we can focus on meeting our goal on providing a comprehensive reference resource on Doctor Who and the wider universe it inhabits.

If you would like to support the long-term success of this Wiki in a direct way, you can donate here! (See our list of public benefactors.) We're currently being funded by Kate from the Independent Fallout Wiki, allowing us to make the Wiki ad-free. We'd like to keep it that way.

If you're an editor, please see our editor-specific announcement as well.