Forum:General Discussion of the Fork: Difference between revisions

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Index → The Panopticon → General Discussion of the Fork

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General discussion

Just wanted to say thank you to everyone who has worked on this fork. A huge achievement. FractalDoctor ☎ 20:31, 25 February 2024 (UTC)

I agree. I think if we can just get our SEO in a good place, this is the start to a new golden age of this Wiki. OttselSpy25 ☎ 23:26, 25 February 2024 (UTC)

I mean I found out about this after seeing an admin's talk page not knowing anything about it so I'm sitting here insanely curious CodeAndGin ☎ 23:54, 25 February 2024 (UTC)

It only launched properly today I believe, and has (so far) only really been publicised on social media. I'm not sure if we're allowed to advertise over on the Platform We No Longer Mention. FractalDoctor ☎ 23:58, 25 February 2024 (UTC)

Given That Platform's proclivities, yeah that tracks. Also, big in favour of this, I've been privately hoping for an indie fork to happen for ages, because That Platform's usability has always been Not Great (TM) CodeAndGin ☎ 00:13, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

We're not supposed to, no. I should bring up here, as I did elsewhere, that IndieWikiBuddy is useless for SEO, afaik. If you click on a fandom link you click on a fandom link, still counts. It does redirect you, but we want to encourage people to go out of their way to click on links to the new wiki and to never ever click on fandom links. Najawin ☎ 00:15, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

You can set IndieWikiBuddy to simply *hide* Fandom results from search pages, instead of using them as redirects, so in that sense you can use it to prevent accidentally going to one of their wikis. Hannah GBS ☎ 21:45, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

I also want to add that I'm childishly amused by all the talk of forking today. About forking time. FractalDoctor ☎ 00:18, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

Why can't we mention this new wiki on the old one? What are Fandom going to do? Delete the old wiki? 172.69.43.208^{talk to me} 02:15, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

It's against their forking policy (point #2), possibly maybe. Not entirely sure tbh. Maybe a short announcement can be made, but we also don't want to piss Fandom off. Not worth it. — Fractal Doctor • 02:21, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

They'll just remove it and block anyone that tries. There are some subtle ways you can leave breadcrumbs to the new wiki, but any large notification would be impossible. Najawin ☎ 02:23, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

I'm impressed, surprised, and slightly annoyed because I was in the middle of a big category editing spree that didn't get carried over, but I'll live. I did want to ask about a few things:

Are the CAPTCHAs going to stay forever? I understand why you have them, but they're driving me nuts.
Can we get a "create page" button somewhere?
~~Can we get the categories made visible on the pages? Right now there's no way to see what categories a page is in and that's not super helpful for navigation.~~

Also, congratulations on the work. SilverSunbird ☎ 05:01, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

Never mind that last question. I just noticed where the categories are now. SilverSunbird ☎ 05:07, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

Another thing: I noticed that if a redlink is created as a page, the link stays red on other pages unless the new page is saved, and that might need a fix. SilverSunbird ☎ 05:33, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

Interesting! We'll look into it. And we plan to most likely move categories in desktop back to their more traditional location, on all browser widths.

Welcome to our new home!
× SOTO (☎/✍/↯) 06:09, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

Also, when there's time (and I realize this is low on the priorities, don't worry), putting a link to Guides under Community in the sidebar might be nice. Might increase work in that area. I've thought about a guide for new editors, for one. Najawin ☎ 07:23, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

Welcome all!

I assume @FractalDoctor's references to "the Platform We No Longer Mention" were in jest, but for the avoidance of doubt, I'd like to note that we're keeping the high ground over Fandom over this one i.e. it's perfectly allowed to discuss or link to the old host directly if relevant.Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 10:58, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

Jest confirmed! The new fork is great. — Fractal Doctor • 10:59, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

Hi everyone. This has been a long time in the works. Sorry about the lack of prior warning: this was the best way to avoid retaliation from Fandom. Also sorry about the lost week of edits. The plan was to launch with minimal (maybe a few hours) of edit loss, but we had to push back the launch for various reasons.

I've added the guide index to the sidebar. I will look into a create page link, but it won't be as smooth as on Fandom. I will speak with our tech team about the CAPTCHAS.

With Indie Wiki Buddy, I would like to point out that Fandom's SEO is only improved if clicking on a link in a search engine: clicking a link from elsewhere, as far as I know, will not count towards there SEO. On search engine's themselves, if you're using Indie Wiki Buddy, the Fandom results are crossed out and replaced with links to the fork. We definetly want to encourage use of the extension.

Bongo50 ☎ 16:16, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

I've seen some people question why the homepage is a little outdated. Just wanted to share the ongoing discussion about it here, if anyone wishes to join in. Changes and updates will be along in due course - and hopefully 15/Ncuti/Ruby/etc will be well established on the main page in time for Series 14/Season 1/Season Fnarg II. — Fractal Doctor • 20:54, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

Chipping in (a bit late) to send a massive congratulations to the admin team on the fork. Never edited much with this account on the old wiki but as an on-and-off user of the site back when it was still called Wikia I'm painfully aware of the anti-user, ad-revenue-driven antics that have been plaguing the company for far too long. For a wiki as large and as prominent within the FANDOM banner as TARDIS to pull off a successful fork is both a massive undertaking and a tremendous morale boost for other large wikis looking to take the jump. Wookieepedia next? ;) Diplotomodon ☎ 02:12, 5 March 2024 (UTC)

Ah, thinking about it. A policy that Fandom had that we were forced to follow should probably be addressed. There was an "anti harassment" policy that would allow users to insist that other users couldn't interact with them. It never came up on here except when DiS/Corrie weaponized it to prevent other people admonishing him for his edits. Obviously harassment is bad. But we should probably make clear that, as Scrooge said at the time,

a user sending you objective messages about editing the Wiki is not harassment. Belittling you or claiming you're willfully ignoring the rules, yes, all these things are covered by T:NPA or at least our rules on assuming good faith. But you do not have standing to demand that he stop messaging you at all, provided the messages were to-the-point about editing the Wiki, were polite, and assumed good faith. [...] the spirit of [anti harassment policies are] for more intently malicious sustained messaging

(Just in case DiS cares to join us here, or someone with a similar disposition.) Najawin ☎ 06:23, 30 March 2024 (UTC)

Bugs/fixes/etc.

Do we have anywhere currently that we can collectively share any kinks/bugs/things that may need resolving? If no, is it worth at least having this section so people can post anything they feel may need changing? — Fractal Doctor • 20:38, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

Tabbed galleries in infoboxes

I believe this is already known to admins/in the pipeline, but figured I'd note it anyway - the tabbed galleries in infoboxes need tweaking so they're either larger or work as a scrollbar, similar to how they were on the other site. And I believe a visual editor is also in the pipeline for release at some stage? — Fractal Doctor • 20:40, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

Tabbed infoboxes will be improved, yes. Visual editor should be coming at some point. That blocking thing should just be a caching issue. Let us know if it happens again. You should be able to edit your own talk page when blocked. It's not ideal, but it'll do while we think of a better solution. In my eyes, feel free to add those categories. Protection settings should have carried across. Odd. I'll run a bot to fix it when you're done. Bongo50 ☎ 14:39, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

Unexpected "you're blocked" message

I just encountered a bug while trying to edit that gave me a "you're blocked" message intended for an IP that definitely doesn't belong to me (one of the two that got blocked yesterday I think?). It went away after a couple refreshes. BlueSupergiant ☎ 23:22, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

Weirdly, I had that too this morning. I posted on Bongo50's talk page about it. What it did alert me to, however, was the fact that when I was blocked I couldn't even post on an admin's talk page... so if someone gets a block, is there just zero way for them to contact admins now to discuss it? — Fractal Doctor • 23:29, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

Every thread in the Panopticon Archives is editable by anyone. This is, incidentally, a chance to solve a small problem we've had for years, where there are ~150 threads that are unsorted in the categories in the existing archives. Doing so is largely just a matter of busy work, and I'm willing to do this tomorrow if admins are fine with letting regular users fiddle with it, check their work, and then lock the threads afterwards. I've spent enough time staring at the archives to have a rough idea of what should go where. Najawin ☎ 09:32, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

Okay, so, interestingly, some of them were protected, even if most weren't. There are 15 at the bottom, primarily, though, not entirely, from the 2023+ era, that I can't add the categories to. There are another 1-2 that don't really belong in any section. And I would, of course, greatly appreciate anyone to check my work. Not being an admin in some instances this does feel a little too like deciding on consensus for my liking, even if the threads in question have already been closed, sometimes for over a decade. Some of those were really messy to categorize. Najawin ☎ 08:05, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

I am also running into the "blocked but on an IP that doesn't belong to me and it goes away after a few refreshes and I can't even edit my own user page or others' talk pages before it goes away" bug - CodeAndGin | 🗨 | 22:44, 5 March 2024 (UTC)

View recent changes links to FANDOM

The "View recent changes (for all boards)" link in the forums homepage links back to FANDOM atm - CodeAndGin | 🗨 | 01:35, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

Button to easily add categories

Will there be a way to more easily add categories? On Fandom, it was possible to click "+Cat" in the categories section at the bottom of the page to add them without having to go into the full page editor. I can see we now have a categories box at the side of the page, but there doesn't appear to be a way of adding to these without editing the page. Just wondering if that's something that might be implemented? (Congratulations on the work that's been done with the fork. This new site looks great!) 66 Seconds ☎ 16:55, 1 March 2024 (UTC)

Yes, I intend to set something up in the near future. Bongo50 ☎ 21:31, 1 March 2024 (UTC)

Desktop/mobile view

I really don't like the new desktop look. It just looks like a slightly different version of the mobile view. I'm an old-fashioned weirdo who prefers to do his phone-based edits on what looks like a desktop monitor because he finds the mobile view too constricting. WaltK ☎ 14:50, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

Can you elaborate on what you don't like? Mobile and desktop should look quite different, so it's possible you're getting served the mobile skin on desktop by mistake. Bongo50 ☎ 15:28, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

Hi WaltK, I accidentally clicked on to mobile view while I was on desktop and it puzzled me for a minute. You can scroll to the very bottom of the page where, on the right, it should simply say "Desktop". You can click this to revert it back to the desktop theme. It's a toggle. Desktop: https://tardis.wiki/w/index.php?title=Doctor_Who_Wiki&mobileaction=toggle_view_desktop / mobile view: https://tardis.wiki/w/index.php?title=Doctor_Who_Wiki&mobileaction=toggle_view_mobile — Fractal Doctor • 19:27, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

Just to add to the above, Bongo, maybe it would be helpful if the "Desktop" link in the bottom right of desktop was made a little clearer by saying "Desktop view" or "Toggle: Desktop version" if this can be edited? Or maybe even two extra links on the left hand sidebar that say "Desktop view" and "Mobile view" under an "Accessibility" heading? Just a thought. — Fractal Doctor • 19:29, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

Changing that text is easy. The link now says "Mobile view" on desktop and "Desktop view" on mobile. Bongo50 ☎ 19:37, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

So it turns out, in order to get the new desktop view to more closely resemble the old one, I just have to turn my phone to landscape. Which is… not ideal (I'm very much used to doing everything in portrait), and even this new iteration isn't perfect; the contents box now takes up the entire space between the pages intro and first section. WaltK ☎ 20:22, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

Assuming I've read you correct, WaltK, you're using your phone but using "desktop view"? If this is the case, I've attached a screenshot (right) of what I see. Is this not what you're seeing? / Is this not what you're wanting? — Fractal Doctor • 20:30, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

Have some images:

Old desktop, in portrait and landscape.
New desktop in portrait.
New desktop in landscape. Looks pretty close to the old…
…but then it gets wonky. Here we have a bunch of blank space below the intro for the remaining duration of the infobox.
Followed by the big honking contents box.

Oh! I see what you're saying, WaltK. In order to get it to look like it does in my screenshot above, I had to change my browser setting on my phone itself to "desktop site", rather than just hitting "desktop view" on this Wiki, if that makes sense. Does your phone browser have that option, as it may work better for you? — Fractal Doctor • 20:36, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

Is anyone else having it that cite links are going haywire at the bottom of the pages? Like on the Second Doctor page after the "Habits and quirks" subheading. BananaClownMan ☎ 20:35, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

I think I get what you mean, Fractal. But alas, it just doesn't want to play ball. WaltK ☎ 20:47, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

To BananaClownMan: yes, I'm aware of this issue. I fear that there may be no good fix other than to either:

spend more money to upgrade our hardware
split these longer pages and enforce harsh page-length limits on any page using {{cite source}}

To WaltK: I can probably make an option to not have the desktop version adapt to smaller screens. I will see what I can do in the next few days. Bongo50 ☎ 20:48, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

Hey, switching off "Enable responsive mode" in Special Preferences > Appearance already does this. Only thing is, it applies to mobile and desktop, with no distinction made.
× SOTO (☎/✍/↯) 12:05, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

Cite links

Is anyone else having it that cite links are going haywire at the bottom of the pages? Like on the Second Doctor page after the "Habits and quirks" subheading. BananaClownMan ☎ 20:35, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

Ah yes, me too. Just a small screenshot, but it's throughout more of the page/s. — Fractal Doctor • 20:52, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

Yes, I'm aware of this issue. I fear that there may be no good fix other than to either:

spend more money to upgrade our hardware
split these longer pages and enforce harsh page-length limits on any page using {{cite source}}

Bongo50 ☎ 21:57, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

Is this an issue of page length, or of number of instances of using {{cite source}}? If the former, we can try to do the biography subpage trim sooner rather than later. If the latter, we can enforce strict policies on number of sources to be cited for each statement. Najawin ☎ 22:21, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

Just tested on Forum:Rule 4 by Proxy and its ramifications: considered in the light of the forum archives, one of the longest editable pages I know of that doesn't have a substantial number of instances of {{cite source}}. It worked fine, so it seems that the issue comes from number of calls to {{cite source}}. My suggestion: If a page has a substantial number of citations on it, when citing a statement that has multiple sources that could be listed, use one of each prefix type at most for that particular statement, then say ("et al" or "etc", depending on Forum:Etc. vs et al.). The exception to this rule being when it requires two sources together to imply the statement we've written, so neither source in isolation actually shows the thing we're saying. Call this policy "T:CLEAN CITE" or something, and whenever we trim things down use that as the edit summary, so if we ever get better servers people can go back through the history and put back in the info by just looking for that policy. Najawin ☎ 03:02, 3 March 2024 (UTC)

Yes, the problem is very much the number of {{cite source}} uses. That solution would probably do the job. Other solutions would be to trim the main page biography so that some sources are excluded (controversial, I know), or to split other sections that use citations into their own subpages. We could also consider combining multiple of these solutions if none remove enough uses by themselves. No solution is ideal. Bongo50 ☎ 13:56, 3 March 2024 (UTC)

I mean, my view on the first option is very well known. But that was on Fandom, this is here. Different restrictions for different hardware. If it's necessary to do that, and the other options don't work, you'll have no complaint from me. But I'd like to try the other options first. (Note:I feel the same way about image storage. We increased size limits on images b/c of Fandom's ability to handle them. If we need to decrease it again, I think that's fine.) Najawin ☎ 04:01, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

If the problem is the number rather than the length, that won't fix it for articles that require listing stories, liker List of appearances or timeline theory pages. Sure, subpaging is an option, but it's a rather short term solution. I think the best two ways to solve this particular conundrum would be to either A) Pay up for upgraded hardware and accept the cost as the price of independence, or B) go back to the old citing and cease using {{cite source}}, which continuous to course more problems than it fixes, despite the advantages it has. BananaClownMan ☎ 09:46, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

Appearance lists don't use {{Cite source}}, though. Aquanafrahudy 📢 🖊️ 09:51, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

Also, let's just note here, Peri Brown has most of its citations converted (331) and it's working fine. Second Doctor has 941 calls to the template. There are only a handful of timeline pages that are on that level, and they really can be dealt with on a case by case basis. Najawin ☎ 11:14, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

Is it within policy to split off the "Psychological profile" and/or "Appearance" sections into their own subpages, cause I reckon that would really help. Aquanafrahudy 📢 🖊️ 11:40, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

"Physical appearance" certainly is — see Tenth Doctor/Physical appearance. I don't recall "Psychological profile" being covered in that thread but seems of apiece, so I'm not opposed to making a small addendum to cover it as well. --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 12:01, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

With image file sizes, we're actually fine, for now at least. We massively overestimated how much we'd need and we have plenty of storage. This may change in the future but, by then, hopefully we'll be able to afford better hardware. (For the record, all of our hardware is currently being payed for by 1 person out of her own pocket. Donations will offset that, but it feels unfair to push for further hardware upgrades unless we can support those with donations, or potentially small numbers of ads in the future). Bongo50 ☎ 19:17, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

(I quite agree, and think a limited number of ads are the way to go when we can set that up. Give it a few months to a year to be more established, maybe run some randomized surveys about purchasing habits of people coming to the site - if they've bought audios / books / DWM, if they've even heard of them, etc, then use those to pitch to people in the space.) Najawin ☎ 21:55, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

I already love the separate subpage tabs created on the Second and Tenth Doctor pages. Helps fix the bug, and also makes the incarnation pages much less of a beast to wade through. × Fractal • 21:07, 7 March 2024 (UTC)

[edit conflict]

The recent edits to Tenth Doctor have solved that page nicely (I found the limit that the CS usage has been violating. It's "Lua time usage" which is limited to 7 seconds. Tenth Doctor is now down to 4.120 seconds). Doug86 tried fixing Last Great Time War by splitting half of the page into a template. This didn't work as there is a limit to how much text on a page can come from a template and having half of the page's text come from one was way over the limit. I think the solution here might be to create more pages like Origins of the Last Great Time War. I don't know what these pages would be called, but I do think it would be the most effective way to solve this issue on that page. Other pages with this issue (along with some other, unrelated, issues) are collected at Category:Pages with script errors. Some potential solutions:

Eleventh Doctor could probably be solved in a similar way to Tenth Doctor (and it's probably worth doing this for all other incarnations as well, regardless of whether it's needed immediately).
The Doctor could probably be solved by shortening the biography. Perhaps we could {{main}} out to the incarnation page's #Biography sections? Alternatively, and this is a little more out-there, we could move it all into a new page called something like Biography of the Doctor and {{main}} to that? Either way, I don't think that section serves much purpose being that long when each incarnation has their own biography.
World War II could probably receive some of the same treatment as Last Great Time War, perhaps with pages like Origins of the World War II? We could also probably shorten sections that already have their own, {{main}}ed, pages.

They are it, for now. Bongo50 ☎ 21:14, 7 March 2024 (UTC)

(whispers in hushed tones) We could just use it selectively, instead on every link ever. I'd hate for the Wiki to lose its sense of fun and instead just resemble a college essay littered with clunky eyesore-ish "+" signs akin to an essay trying to meet reference requirements. Also, IMO, some of them just provide extra information that seems unnecessary and would be easily gained anyway by clicking on the link to begin with (eg. those that cite writer/network/year, etc.) But anyway. Just throwing that into the ether, and I suspect I'll be in a minority here. (vanishes into the void) × Fractal • 21:44, 7 March 2024 (UTC)

I feel strongly we should make a sibling policy to T:OVER-WIKIFY, which states that you should only {{cs}} a particular story once per section.

I'm also opposed to simply removing the Doctor's general biography section from the wiki. Given how in-depth each Doctor's biography is, and the unique possibilities from describing the Doctor's timeline from this POV.

Looking at it now, it does seem more bloated than when we originally created it, though. The Fifth and Sixth Doctors have far too much content, I think.

We could always trim it down, seeing as the reason behind it is only to follow details which inform the Doctor's overall arc/growth or to highlight unique periods in the Doctor's life, like their time with UNIT (as well as giving a broad summary to help readers understand how different periods fit together).

A subpage could work, so long as the overview section isn't shunted off into it.
× SOTO (☎/✍/↯) 02:56, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

I've wondered ever since I first came to this wiki if maybe the citation policy shouldn't be completely overhauled. If we shifted to using ref tags with a reference list at the bottom, then we wouldn't need to use {{cs}} more than once per page for every story referenced. SilverSunbird ☎ 03:08, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

I wondered similar if we could perhaps reference a source via cite once and then used regular links for further references to it. Would seem a shame to compromise our coverage of large topics to fit around cite limits. --SherlockTheII ☎ 11:13, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

I visited the Last Great Time War page earlier and this has so many broken links down the page. We might have a simple fix for Doctor pages (maybe splitting into biography/etc) but what of pages like the Time War where it's essentially one long timeline? × Fractal • 10:46, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

Faded infobox fields

Hopefully just a minor one that can be easily fixed; infobox fields are now really faded and hard to see, at least on my end. WaltK ☎ 09:37, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

This was a temporary issue which is now resolved.
× SOTO (☎/✍/↯) 12:10, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

I've found something similar on Big Ben, where some of the text (next to text with a link in it) is displaying as grey in the infobox. Cookieboy 2005 ☎ 14:37, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

Grey text in the infobox of Big Ben.
Pale text (bottom) while highlighting an image on Big Ben.

I've found another instance of pale text on a white background, after clicking an image on an article. (For which I have again used Big Ben as my example page) Cookieboy 2005 ☎ 01:12, 5 March 2024 (UTC)

I'm aware of this issue and will be fixing it soon. Bongo50 ☎ 20:56, 5 March 2024 (UTC)

Some broken videos?

The videos in the right hand sidebar appear to be broken on the Regeneration page. Not sure if this is an isolated case, but thought it was worth mentioning. × Fractal • 20:32, 5 March 2024 (UTC)

That's because that page uses an infobox not used by any other page, User:OncomingStorm12th/Sandbox 3, so I forgot about it when setting up the new video system. I'll fix it now. Bongo50 ☎ 20:57, 5 March 2024 (UTC)

Excessive sources / neatening up

Was reading through a couple of the notable pages and this in particular stood out to me as being potentially user-unfriendly (see screenshot on the right). I recognise that we like to source things but this seems very excessive. Combined with the new feature which allows you to hit the "+" symbol, this at first glance not only looks like an impenetrable wall of text but is also just plain hard to read. It's more source than actual text. Is there a way to neaten things like this up, so it's easier on the eyes and less intrusive when it comes to multiple/excessive sourcing? × Fractal • 20:36, 5 March 2024 (UTC)

Oh, that's just outside policy as it stands. It's very much Wiki policy that you shouldn't have more than three or four sources in a single citation at most — hence the "etc." or "et alt." thing.) --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 23:21, 5 March 2024 (UTC)

Infobox header font styles

Is there a reason for different font styles in some episode infobox titles?

The_Mind_Robber_(TV_story) has its title in italics and underlined.
The_Mind_Robber_(TotT_TV_story) has its title standard with no underline.
Earthshock_(TotT_TV_story) has its title in italics with no underline. × Fractal • 10:45, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

I believe the difference there is that the OG Mind Robber is simply using the automated function that turns a "X (TV story)" page-name into the title of the infobox, while the others, due to the non-standard "(TotT TV story)" dab term, make use of the |name= variable. The automated thing automatically italicises and underlines, while |name= gives neutral formatting by default and you have to actually write ''Earthshock'' to get it italicised. This was done at Earthshock but forgotten at TotT!Mind Robber. That much can be fixed manually. The issue remains that the automated title is automatically underlined, which the manual titles won't replicate, though… but then do we want infobox titles underlined? Hmm. --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 19:27, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

Terms of use

I just noticed that the information on the edit page about sharing personal info still links to Fandom's Terms of Use, which should probably be changed soon. SilverSunbird ☎ 04:54, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

Yeah, and a fair bit of our [[HELP:]] pages link to Fandom as well. We should get on this at some point. Najawin ☎ 05:05, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

Good spot. We don't (yet) have our own terms of use so we may be best off creating local policies for anything we want to keep from Fandom's ToS and linking to those instead. (Also note that me, Scrooge and SOTO have agreed to a hosting agreement which will also need to be written into policy at somepoint (although it's nothing particuarly new or unexpected)). Bongo50 ☎ 19:54, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

Forum main page

For the last week or so the forum landing has looked like… this.

WaltK ☎ 16:46, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

On my end the box that says "The forums are back, baby!" is in front of the text, but it's definitely not formatted properly. Najawin ☎ 19:59, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

For me, on the page Forum:The Panopticon, in the light theme, the headers of the columns are colored white on beige, which is very hard to read. To clarify, the headers in the table in the section Thread list are "Begun", "Topic", "Last edit", and "Last author". —⁠andrybak (☎) 15:54, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

Bold text

Is it just my imagination, or does bold text not stand out nearly as much as it should anymore? WaltK ☎ 22:08, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

Looks fine to me. Aquanafrahudy 📢 🖊️ 22:13, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

Disambiguation links

{{Dab page}} is making the links in it unclickable right now, defeating its reason for existence. SilverSunbird ☎ 22:35, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

H2 headers in light theme

It is hard to read H2 headers in non-Real World articles. For example, Russell T Davies (a Real World article) is fine, but on Fifteenth Doctor in the light theme, "Biography" appears in color rgb(60, 72, 84) on top of background-color rgb(46, 64, 116), which looks like this: Biography. —⁠andrybak (☎) 17:11, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

General questions about the Tardis Wiki fork

Adding this section for any questions about the fork/the new version of Tardis Wiki that people may have.

I was curious - is the "topical pages" on the sidebar hand picked by admins? Or is it like the old host whereby it'll update with regularly visited pages, etc? (I'd also like to note that I think it might be worth adding "Cybermen" to "Other useful pages", so the "big three" of Daleks/Master/Cybermen are together. Maybe even "TARDIS" too?) — Fractal Doctor • 20:38, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

The entire sidebar is handpicked and can be updated by admins at MediaWiki:Sidebar. I'm very open to suggestions. I will add Cybermen now. Bongo50 ☎ 14:40, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

Good to know. I like that it's completely customisable - especially the topical pages. — Fractal Doctor • 18:36, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

What does this mean for swear words? I know Fandom was quite strict and censored articles like f*ck and f*ck buddy where they had previously been uncensored. Now that this wiki is independent, will these articles be uncensored? Other words like shit remain so afterall. 172.70.85.26^{talk to me} 04:21, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

Are we still planning on doing the whole Rassilon/Visionary/Atropos archives split on the forums? I spent like 20 minutes trying to find an archive forum thread (that I didn't 100% remember the exact name of) that ended up being in the "Atropos archives", which aren't set up / the category was never created, so I can't get to it without using search. Najawin ☎ 23:05, 1 March 2024 (UTC)

I believe that SOTO is going to go back to working on forum archives soon. Bongo50 ☎ 09:57, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

Sure, I just meant that categorization scheme/split. Just curious! Najawin ☎ 10:05, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

It seems you can now only add categories to pages via the source editor, as opposed to just adding them directly into the category bar at the bottom… WaltK ☎ 14:57, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

That's correct. A replacement for that feature is planned. Bongo50 ☎ 19:18, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

The JS Wiki was working a few days ago, but isn't anymore. Did something happen to it, and what can we do to fix it? Doug86 ☎ 23:00, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

Oh, odd. I'll look into this. Bongo50 ☎ 17:30, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

I think I have found the cause of the issue and I've raised it to our volunteeer sysadmins. I'll let you know when I hear back. Bongo50 ☎ 18:57, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

Is the Fandom site going to be shut down at some point? There's still quite a bit of activity going on there from people who have no idea that their contributions are basically worthless now. WaltK ☎ 19:15, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

I don't think it can be. Fandom don't allow sites to be removed, I don't think? Best to just let it gather dust and sadly leave any editors who choose to stay thee just remain. × Fractal • 19:37, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

Won't that just cause some serious brand confusion? "Come to the TARDIS Wiki! No not the Fandom one that's way more likely to come up first in search results". WaltK ☎ 20:08, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

It's just a case of time. We can try and persuade people to come to this one, readers and former/new editors alike, but Fandom won't take down their Wiki because, hey, it still gets them clicks. We just have to hope that this, eventually, becomes the go-to one, the more dominant one, and the most updated one. × Fractal • 20:13, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

@WaltK, for dealing with search results, I recommend browser extension Indie Wiki Buddy. It does multiple things to redirect the user to a FANDOM-less wiki when possible. It is configurable to be less or more aggressive: e.g. banner vs forced redirect on the actual pages of the wikis. Another feature is removal of FANDOM from search results. It supports a lot of different wikis and search engines, and because of that the extension's permissions can be scary. —⁠andrybak (☎) 16:20, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

March 12 updates

Block bug

I've also started being randomly blocked when I edit. WaltK ☎ 16:17, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

I've had this multiple times and reported it previously. Today, I've battled with it multiple times, to the point where I've given up trying to make a couple of edits because I had to refresh so many times. Is this a fixable bug on each users' end, or is it something server-side? × Fractal • 20:29, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

This is being investigated. --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 02:00, 13 March 2024 (UTC)

Design glitches

The Navigation and Wiki Tool icons have, at least on my end, suddenly shifted to the bottom of the page and look all glitchy. WaltK ☎ 15:53, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

Now it's glitched out differently. LOL. WaltK ☎ 16:11, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

I'm also seeing a very glitchy "Categories" section (see screenshot on the right hand side, down a little), unless this is all a bit of a design work in progress? (Plus the whole site seems to scroll slower than usual unless that's an issue on my end?) × Fractal • 19:40, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

(Thought I'd add a new section because it's getting a little messy above.) There are a few bugs and glitches that have come with the March 12 design update. I assume these can and will be ironed out. I've also shifted WaltK's comments into this section so all the newer bugs/glitches are together for ease. A small gallery of weird issues: × Fractal • 19:52, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

Random blocks (multiple users)
Toolbar glitch
Toolbar glitch 2
Spacing issue
Spacing issue 2
Blue highlights on light mode
Categories section glitch

I'm a bit disappointed that the page creation thing on the right is now gone. Would anything like that be returning? SilverSunbird ☎ 03:31, 13 March 2024 (UTC)

Do you mean the box where you can enter a title and click "create page"? If so, that appears to be in place - on the left, under "Community" but before "Wiki Tools". × Fractal • 17:22, 13 March 2024 (UTC)

I'm not seeing it anywhere on my computer. SilverSunbird ☎ 18:01, 13 March 2024 (UTC)

Depending on my monitor size, I see it in two places (see right). Probably also worth mentioning that the desktop layout on my smaller monitor made it so "Navigation", "Wiki Tools" and "Page Tools" appeared at the top but, as my screenshot shows, they look weird. × Fractal • 18:59, 13 March 2024 (UTC)

SOTO has been completely redoing the desktop skin. There are a lot of bugs. They will be fixed soon, if not by them, but by me when I have time to do more extensive edits in a few days. Bongo50 ☎ 19:01, 13 March 2024 (UTC)

Light theme

The light theme has a completely transparent background for me now, so all the text is displayed across the roundels and is impossible to read or view the Wiki. I've had to flick to dark mode for now. (Also, thanks for the update, Bongo.) × Fractal • 15:17, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

I believe SOTO has fixed this. Bongo50 ☎ 17:10, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

Page Sizing

For the last couple days, I think, the wiki looks zoomed in (like I'd changed my browser zoom settings), but only when it's being rendered in a window roughly bigger than 1080p. At first, I thought it was just for readability on larger monitors but I noticed that the spacing between elements gets all messed up by it, like on the forums Index page - CodeAndGin | 🗨 | 19:02, 21 March 2024 (UTC)

how the forums page looks in a maximised window
how the forums page looks in a floating window

Calling out

Okay, I've let this stand far longer than I should of, but I think it's time the real discussion took place now that there's talk of pirating editors and viewers from the Fandom wiki. This independent wiki's doomed to fail! It's underfunded, you can't deny it's got glitches and bugs, there's no advertisement for it so all links and searches head straight to the Fandom wiki, and now you're asking people for cash donations in an age where giving money to unknown parties online is advised against. Why would people pay to keep this wiki up and running when there's a free alternative? And to bring in adverts for revenue just brings in what many are citing as the main beef with Fandom. You'd essentially become what you fought against. Speaking of beef with Fandom, the only reasonable explanation given for this split is the absence of forums and one Fandom staff member not doing anything about it, as highlighted on JDPManjoume R's Twitter thread, even though Forums were replaced with an alternative and most the topics on that Twitter thread (the splitting of the Master page) where resolved with an old fashioned Talk page. It looks like the few made a drastic decision that effected the many over a pitiful, and frankly embarrassing, slight that didn't have much an effect on everyone else.

Now before talks of poaching editors and viewers takes place, I recommended you all take a good look at the situation and consider whether you were all just caught up in an act of passion and revolutionary fervour spurred on by some anti-Fandom statements, which for all we know is just a scam to get our money through PayPal, and stop dismissing the Fandom wiki as it's doing very productive editing when you lot are just adding death dates and birthdates to character templates, which really goes against the templates with holding ambiguous information (even the show pokes fun at its ambiguous dating!).

Think about how independent you'll be when you they ask for your money in order to keep their power going. BananaClownMan ☎ 21:01, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

Sorry, but this just comes off as very bitter (particularly your closing remark about us dismissing the Fandom Wiki and then saying that's doing productive editing whilst this one isn't - I think that's highly unfair and inaccurate on both sides). I think this fork has been a long time coming. Fandom is increasingly implementing crappier policies. More and more Wikis are going independent (frankly, I feel it took way longer than it should've done, but I'm glad it's finally happened). Sure, the Fandom Wiki shows up first, of course it does, and it will for probably a long time to come, but we're happy to take on that battle because independence from Fandom is so worth it. Time will, of course, tell. Nobody's taking the old Fandom Wiki away, and nobody is stopping as many people as they want from editing it and using it either. There are many reasons that many Wikis are moving away from Fandom.

We would advertise on Fandom itself but, quelle surprise, they don't allow it. Fair enough, so we rely on social media, word of mouth, and a slower uptake of people discovering us. Other wikis started from the ground up and are now thriving. Yes, we have some bugs and glitches, but what new site doesn't? We have a lot of people working hard to resolve stuff. Many of them are fixable, and some of them are simply design tweaks to be corrected. And if we do rely on adverts eventually, at least we'll be able to take some control over them, and I'd reckon that at least they won't be intrusive the way Fandom's are. YMMV. × Fractal • 21:10, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

"No advertisement", also known as a stickied thread on the /r/doctorwho subreddit, announcements on prominent Doctor Who Discord servers, several widely-shared social media posts, etc.? No advertisement? Come on. Nor was this a decision taken by "a few". Dozens of long-time editors, including a majority of the admin team, participated in lengthy discussions off-Wiki, for months, before we reached this point. And indeed, whatever your personal feelings, it seems a majority of the active userbase has come to agree with us.

And as Fractal said: there are many, many advantages to being independent, which go well beyond any individual issues with the way CzechOut used to run things, though that certainly didn't help matters. The sheer, and ever-growing hostility of Fandom towards forking attempts was also a major factor in this move; "however nice the cage, when you see the doors closing, get out" is pretty good advice to live by. Moreover, your summary of the Forum issue is overly simplistic. In the first place, the main offence was not the loss of the discussion platform itself, but the loss of the archives, so the existence of alternatives like Discussions and Talk pages was of minimal relevance. In the second place, no, the Master-split was not resolved on a talk page — it was resolved in the Temporary Forums.

The truth is that for many years, Fandom have been growing more and more interventionist, reducing design options for Wikis, forcing new features upon them without leaving them a choice, even interfering with actual coverage in some limited respects. I don't even hold them to be particularly nefarious; that's just the reality of a profit-driven company optimising for high numbers and brand unity. One can't really morally object to them not prioritising the wishes of communities. But we deserve better, and independent, crowd-funded hosting is the way to get it.

The infobox dates thing is a complete non sequitur. It was a routine talk page proposal, which I would have just as quickly enacted at the old host as I did here; it has nothing whatsoever to do with the move. (And for the record, only uncontroversial dates are meant to go in those fields, as per the broader policy you cite. Just like uncontroversial species, planets of origin, and so on. Why should birth and death be singled out?)

And crikey, that there have been some minor glitches is only to be expected when we've only just started. It has little to do with being "underfunded", and everything to do with smoothing out unexpected problems as we discover them.

Finally, your attempt to paint crowdfunding as somehow sinister is equal parts offensive and laughable. Many, many great websites are funded, partially or totally, through donations, starting with, you know, Wikipedia. It's not some outlandish, untrustworthy concept we've introduced out of nowhere. Nor are we exactly talking big bucks here — you must remember that, unlike Wikipedia or the Internet Archive, we have no staff to pay or the like. It's all going towards server costs, which are significant, but ultimately limited. The current monthly costs… specific figures are subject to change, but they're nothing that the admin team alone couldn't put together by ourselves if outside donations came up short someday. Heck, I could pay them myself. I wouldn't like it, but I could if I had to. Running ads is a very distant possibility — and even then, they would be in a much less obtrusive concentration than what we see at Fandom; "no ads vs. so many pop-ups you can hardly see the page on mobile" isn't a binary.

In short we are by no means as precarious as you seem to think we are; we're being as transparent as possible with the donation process as we can; this was a community decision, prompted by a number of carefully-weighed pros and cons rather than any one issue; and I do not appreciate your accusatory tone. (T:NPA is as valid here as on the old host, you know.) You're entitled to wishing the move hadn't happened, but it has, and it's here to stay, whether you like it or not. There is nothing cliqueish or factional about this move — it isn't, and never was, about old grudges. You yourself are perfectly welcome here — and so is User:CzechOut, should he join us by some miracle! Join us, or do not, as you wish — but we are not scammers, we are not a minority, and we are certainly not "doomed to fail". --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 21:32, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

Just to weigh in as a regular editor who had no role in the migration; I’m quite happy here. I have seen the move advertised (wouldn’t have known otherwise) and the reaction to said news has seemed overwhelmingly positive, no-one has asked me for money, and I like to think my edits so far including updating the somewhat neglected Time Lord timeline have been fairly significant. Each to their own I suppose. --SherlockTheII ☎ 22:02, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

Also, may I note that you're not an uninterested party here, BCM. You've applied to be an admin on the old wiki. Surely it's a conflict of interest to try to interfere with the operation of this wiki while trying to gain permissions on the other? (And might I note, for future reference, that while I'm in favor of Shambala, Czech, etc, retaining their perms should they decide to join us, I'm decidedly against any new admins chosen on the detritus over at Fandom then gaining those permissions here. And if they continued to edit here from time to time as a regular user while being an admin there post fork, well, I don't think that's technically against Fandom's forking policy, but it is something we should probably discuss.) Najawin ☎ 22:25, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

I agree that anyone who becomes an admin on the Fandom site in the future shouldn't automatically gain admin rights on here. × Fractal • 23:26, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

As directly named in your concerns, BCM, I would start by again reminding you - as I did clarify upon your Talk page on this wiki - that I am a regular editor. A frequent one in times before the incident which I related on X/Twitter. A long-running matter. Not to mention that there was also, for my part of concerns, a separate thread of general concerns about FANDOM that I could also draw your attention to.

But let me take this one bit at a time... "the real discussion took place now that there's talk of pirating editors and viewers from the Fandom wiki." - there is absolutely nothing within FANDOM's Forking Policy to stop myself, as a regular editor, contacting by any means other editors to allow them to be aware of the fork. Especially in light of the 'tightening' of discussions allowed on FANDOM spaces in relation to this (changes made in November), I have exercised a personal freedom to contact people. People have been informed, but nobody has been forced, and indeed - admins and rightsholders aside - nobody here has actually been outright prohibited from editing on their Wiki and ours.

"you can't deny it's got glitches and bugs," - nobody is. And those have been getting logged and fixed as things progress.

"Speaking of beef with Fandom, the only reasonable explanation given for this split is the absence of forums and one Fandom staff member not doing anything about it, as highlighted on JDPManjoume R's Twitter thread," - a several years issue, I would like to remind you. And one in which I will say, for all I only noted my own frustrations, there are other regular editors here who shared this same feeling. I merely did not feel it correct to in such a public manner name other fellow regular editors (and even tried to evade names of the admins, beyond Czech).

"a drastic decision" - I would take issue with saying that this was at all done drastically.

"stop dismissing the Fandom wiki as it's doing very productive editing when you lot are just adding death dates and birthdates to character templates" - I will take this in good faith of you having perhaps not checked the Recent Changes log, but speaking just for myself:

I have completed a page on Colin Jones, and uploaded a exclusively-negotiated picture for him.
I have done an entire Events Rotation subpage for Lost in Time.
I have done a list of contributors to DWFC issues from 1-81, as I begin to improve our coverage in that regard.
I have begun a proper detailing of issues on the fanzine page for Celestial Toyroom.

I cannot say that this is not productive. And beyond myself, I am not in agreement that others are being unproductive in their edits either, whether large or small in size.

To round this off, editors still present on the FANDOM Wiki have relayed to me that you are currently putting yourself forwards for an administrative position there and looking for support; which does slightly raise my concerns as to both why you would continue to be here (given their Forking Policy rules for admins), and in terms of coming here to present such a perspective on the situation.
JDPManjoume Regular Editor ☎ ✍ 22:14, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

To pre-empt...

"Since then I've been absent from the Independent Wiki, and I choose not to go there, so there is no threat of breaking the forking policy from me, though I do plan to leave a farewell message of sorts on their forking discussion page, since I've only just noticed that my warning about their glitches has been misunderstood. ... In any event, that message has been misconstrued and plan to reply to it to explain what I was trying to say them after they talked of working to get the Fandom Wiki shut down, an equally personal attack against the editors who have chosen to remain."

BCM. You titled this section "Calling out". Don't be silly. You devote one sentence to talks of glitches. This is revisionist. Come now. Najawin ☎ 07:08, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

None of BCM's message was misunderstood by me. I still see it as resentment or bitterness. And, ultimately, whatever goes on over on Fandom - between him and admins/editors there now - is nothing to do with this independent Wiki. × Fractal • 22:25, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

IP/Email

Alright, after like 9 days of anxiety I've gotten around to dealing with this issue and I just need to bring it up now that I've personally gotten past it. Why are we requiring email verification/not allowing IP users to edit? Surely this is precisely what we don't want to do while we're growing the wiki, as it's just a hurdle for prospective editors. Najawin ☎ 21:53, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

Not sure what's happened there; temporary security measure I assume. Definitely not supposed to be permanent, especially as far as blanketly banning IP edits goes. (Email confirmation I'd like to do without, but while your personal struggles with it are noted, it is something that Fandom also requires when creating an account, so t seems less urgent to scrap it if it comes to that.) --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 17:15, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

Yeah, yeah, I get the email verification. Not thrilled with it. But I fundamentally understand it, you know? The blocking off IP edits is just weird to me though. Najawin ☎ 20:30, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

IP editing should be enabled again. Bongo50 ☎ 19:50, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

Notification emails

Does this wiki have an email notification feature, like what Fandom has, that I need to activate somewhere? WaltK ☎ 22:46, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

I don't think so, unfortunately. Our email infrastructure is temporary and doesn't really have the capacity for much more than email confirmations and password resets. This is a priority to improve. Bongo50 ☎ 19:52, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

Subpages on "Doctor" pages

I've noticed that the Fandom version of the Wiki has now started splitting their Doctor pages so that "Biography", for example, has its own subpage. This would reduce the amount of walls of text massively, and may even help any issues with source codes/bugs. Implementing this would also help readers stay active and clicking around the Wiki, to different pages, etc. I wouldn't ordinarily suggest point-blank copying somewhere or something else, but I have noticed that our Tenth Doctor page has been split so that "Physical appearance" and "Psychological profile" have their own subpages, and I feel this was an inevitable change anyway. Would it also be worth doing this across all Doctors, and maybe even doing similar for "Biography"? (Figured I'd discuss this here to save doing it across multiple Talk pages, and because a lot of traffic is already here for big decisions and discussion. If an admin feels this deserves its own forum page, please feel free to move it. But I also feel it shouldn't be a huge discussion as I think it has more pros than cons? × Fractal • 11:25, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

As per the current form Tardis:Subpage policy, "Physical appearance" and "Psychological profile" can certainly be split for all Doctors.

The /Biography split is one which the Forum thread which established our current policy put strict conditions on: it could only be split off if we retained a version of the biography on the main page that is shortened, but still included every source. This was done because some among us, such as User:Najawin, felt that to permit a "highlights"-based main-page biographical summary would encourage breaches of T:NPOV.

(BananaClownMan never agreed with this ruling, and is basically just breaking T:BOUND on the Fandom one by implementing his preferred version now that there are no admins to stop him.)

Of course, this was all before we had to deal with the too-many-CS-calls bug. Under the circumstances, other options (such as biting that bullet so long as we agree that "the highlights" doesn't necessarily include every TV story-of-the-week, or simply not having a biographical summary on the main page) could certainly be discussed, and/or the basic objection revisited, but that would take a thread.--Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 14:40, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

I'm not even sure it's that BCM didn't agree with the ruling so much as he didn't understand it. Like. I pointed him to Forum:Temporary forums/Subpages 2.0 right before the fork and he actively claimed that his trimming of pages was compatible with the ruling there. But it's not. It's in clear violation of it. (And, of course, it's in clear violation of T:NPOV.) Najawin ☎ 23:58, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

Just to highlight / illustrate the pages with excessive size there's the useful Special:LongPages. While it can be skewed by the amount of images on the page, it is largely useful to narrow down which Doctor (or other pages) might benefit from targeted editing. --Tangerineduel / talk 14:07, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

T:DON'T COPY and Fandom

So some work is being transferred back and forth between this wiki and the Fandom one, and I think we should clear up our stance on this. Generally, I've understood the wiki's view of T:DON'T COPY to mean that even if we have a right to copy stuff as it's Creative Commons, unless it's our own work we should avoid doing so and we should endeavor to write our own content. Some edits on the Fandom wiki have been copied over here, saying "from editor such and such, on the Fandom wiki". I believe this technically violates the spirit of T:DON'T COPY, if not the hard and fast rule. (Note, I do not mean importing work that another user has done as they've migrated their account. I mean someone copying over another user's work when that user has not migrated their account.) I'm of the opinion we should put an end to this.

Moreover, while I believe this is technically allowed, under Fandom's policy on attribution, which says that by contributing to Fandom you agree that a list of contributing authors counts as attribution, I don't believe we've set up any policy on how to handle the reverse situation, where someone is copying information and edits from this wiki and using it on Fandom. Per the strict text of the license, I'm pretty sure they actually have to link here, and the people currently doing so are not, they're just referring to "the forked wiki". Albeit, while noting the users in question. Should we consider this sufficient? Should we require any edit summary to have a link here? I certainly think that if the edits simply refer to "the forked wiki" and there's no discussion on the Fandom wiki of what that means (because they've forbidden it), they're in clear violation. But I think it's best to have this discussion before taking any hard line stance. Najawin ☎ 06:40, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

Yes I agree, I too would like to see a blanket ban on taking any content from the Fandom wiki. Anyone remaining on the old site has now had notice of the fork and ample time to move, and I think it's a safe assumption to make that they've chosen to stay and we should respect that. Not to mention the negative SEO implications - scraped content violates Google's spam policies and worsens this site's uphill battle to appear in the search results. Guyus24 ☎ 10:20, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

I did get a bit of amusement that the same user who in a discussion on this very page was criticising the quality of edits here is now duplicating some across to Fandom. Nice to know my edit to Seventh Doctor met their standards I suppose. But more seriously I support the idea here. We’ve gone our separate ways to Fandom so should focus attention here rather than keeping half an eye on what’s going on over there. --SherlockTheII ☎ 11:11, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

I've just had a nosey and seen what you're referring to, SherlockTheII. I laughed at the hypocrisy and the audacity. I'm all for saying we should make it so anything directly copy/pasted from here should be linked, but realistically how can that be enforced? We can't force anybody on Fandom to link here, and Fandom won't care if it's one of our own policies? But I do think it should be done as common courtesy - if you copied stuff elsewhere, whether online or in physical media, you'd source it directly (just putting "from a website" wouldn't cut it, so should "from the forked Wiki" cut it? I don't think so). I also agree we shouldn't directly copy/paste stuff from Fandom to here - or if we do allow it, it should be with the original editor's consent and a proper link? • Fractal • 17:50, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

I strongly disagree with the view that we should not be copying edits over from the Fandom host.

In terms of T:DON'T COPY, my view is that it should not apply here, because the Fandom Wiki is not another website. It is Tardis Wiki — it is part of us — it is the ungainly husk left behind when we shed our skin. In terms of style guides, we have yet to diverge to such an extent that copying edits from there will "stick out" once transplanted here, so there's no risk of dilution. In terms of courtesy-to-not-hoover-up-oxygen-from-another-resource… we owe them none of that.

Insofar as we are trying to overtake them in SEO, sucking up oxygen from the Fandom Wiki is precisely what we are trying to do. We should certainly keep everything above-board and practical — no vandalism, no petty vendettas — but that is all. While people have the right to keep an offshoot of Tardis Wiki up at Fandom, as much as we had to move — for that is what Creative Commons means, and it matters — it is nevertheless our hope that their duplicate will decay into non-existence — or at least into irrelevance — over time. Letting them build up exclusive, productive material that we would be forced to recreate from first principles is inimical to that end.

Until such a time as the Fandom husk goes down, the least we can do is give ourselves the freedom to transport what few good edit misguided editors might make to the husk onto the live version of the site. I view this as equivalent to, say, moving edits over to the main-namespace page if someone accidentally made productive edits to somebody's sandbox duplicate thereof, and (for whatever reason) could not be reached to dispel the misunderstanding personally. --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 19:27, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

I agree with you Scrooge MacDuck. What is the process for importing good edits from the Fandom husk to the real Tardis Wiki? Should everyone do it with a standard edit summary template or should the admins do it with admin tools? If it is the latter then what is the process for requesting a transfer from the admins? I assume of course that the same process would apply albeit less often to other wikis such as Wikipedia or say the Hitchhikers wiki. WarDocFan12 ☎ 20:00, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

So to clarify, while the user in question is the most prominent person doing this, they are not the only person doing this. I've seen others.

As for what can be done, again, I believe as things currently stand, the way people on Fandom are approaching this it's a violation of copyright. Since they're not providing proper attribution, it seems. Clarifying what this wiki would consider proper attribution is, I believe, the best first step.

While people have the right to keep an offshoot of Tardis Wiki up at Fandom, as much as we had to move — for that is what Creative Commons means, and it matters — it is nevertheless our hope that their duplicate will decay into non-existence — or at least into irrelevance — over time. Letting them build up exclusive, productive material that we would be forced to recreate from first principles is inimical to that end.

Surely this is precisely what they'd say about doing the same with our work, no? If this is what we want, I mean, so be it. I think this is a bad idea, and I think that the better approach is trying to convince Shambala and Czech that T:DON'T COPY applies to our work here. (I think Shambala would be amenable to this, personally. Though I could be very wrong.) But at the very least we need to clear up the attribution issue, because the way people are handling things on Fandom is very much not sufficient. Najawin ☎ 20:40, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

Oh, I absolutely agree regarding the attribution. But as others have said, we can't actually sanction Fandom users for things done on Fandom. They have no incentive to listen to us; there is nothing we can do to threaten them, short of literally threatening legal action. So I'm sort of unsure how to proceed.

If we find that we can alter their behaviour, though, I think requesting links to the specific original pages is a reasonable and indeed desirable outcome as something that we could standardise to "on both sides". It covers the legalities; it asymmetrically incentivises Fandom against copying from us (because they'd have to spread awareness of us to do so, while obviously people using tardis.wiki know about Fandom already); and it has benefits for us even if they bite that bullet (i.e. increased visibility of the fork to the remaining Fandom users). --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 21:26, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

I think we should change the license of Tardis Wiki to CC-BY-SA 4.0. Creative Commons says on its page for 3.0 that "Compared to previous versions, the 4.0 versions of all CC licenses are more user-friendly and more internationally robust. If you are licensing your own work, we strongly recommend the use of the 4.0 license instead." So it is common sense. Also this would not affect our ability to transfer from Fandom since Fandom uses 3.0 which is compatible with "BY-SA 3.0, or a later version of the BY-SA license".

However I bring it up in this discussion because this change would have an adversarial side effect which we might not want. 4.0 is only compatible with "BY-SA 4.0, or a later version of the BY-SA license." So Fandom would not be able to take edits from this wiki.

I am still interested in knowing how to transfer edits from Fandom to this wiki or whether these requests must go through an admin and if so how. WarDocFan12 ☎ 21:53, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

That's something that's been on my agenda to look into for a while. There's a good breakdown of the differences between the 2 versions at metawiki:Terms of use/Creative Commons 4.0/Legal note which includes some stuff we'll ned to consider. Bongo50 ☎ 22:43, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

I just glanced at the issue, and would suggest people read here and here (there's a lot in that second link related to CC, too much to link to specifically, but not all of it). Not everything is transferable to our situation, but a lot of it is probably helpful to glance at. Najawin ☎ 22:52, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

Fundamentally different approach to the fork it would seem. I actually think it is misguided to say that the Fandom Wiki is on its way to becoming a husk. It's not going anywhere. Why? For the simple reason that hardly any major forked wikis shrivel up and die. They all keep chugging along, eventually attracting new editors over time and remaining prominent in search results. It's a common dream that I think every fork goes through, but it simply doesn't line up with history, and I think the quicker we all realise that the better. Like I said, we just have to assume at this stage that those editing the 'old' site have chosen to do so, i.e. have chosen not to edit here, and we should respect that. If I began copying over edits here en masse to the Fandom version there would, rightfully, be outrage. From their point of view the same holds. As far as I see it, you need to commit to the move and you can't keep ducking back and pinching the "good edits" when you feel like it. As an aside, it's not misguided to not want to be here either - personally, for me, I just want to edit where people will find and read my work, and have fun while doing so, and at this stage the Fandom site actually serves me better in that regard.

In case you don't believe me about forked wikis finding new life, let's have a look at some of the more prominent recent forks and see how the Fandom site is doing. Yes, ok, it's looking at the problem a bit backwards to define a wiki's success by how many editors it has, but it's an indication - if you believe that about 1% of readers make edits, which I believe is the usual conversion rate. I'm using the active users stat from Special:Statistics on the relevant wikis. Terraria: 78 editors; Minecraft, 245 editors; Fallout, 224 editors; Wowpedia, 53 editors; Zelda Wiki, 107. The only wikis to have really shrivelled up with no editors are the Runescape ones. Hell, I know it's still fresh but we're now past the 30 days mark for this fork, and the Fandom wiki has 204 active users. This version actually only has 136! Maybe we're the misguided ones!

I think you should take Google's spam policies seriously though. Would certainly explain the wiki's continued absence from any non-branded search terms. Google takes spam seriously, and by violating that there is a non-zero chance that tardis.wiki just gets deindexed entirely. I don't want to see that happen. Now, yeah, sure, we can't help most of it - that's just the nature of forking. But we can choose what happens from now. Guyus24 ☎ 07:50, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

To be fair, the metric you're looking at here is unhelpful. Since for each of them it includes Revan, who's one edit for each is to migrate his account here. Also, "active users" include editors who have simply made an account. The act of making an account places you on that list, even if you do nothing else. And given how much emphasis Fandom places on this, the metric is useless. Not even largely useless, just completely useless. If we limit it to users who've contributed 50 times or more in their entire user history, we get 105 on Fandom, and a substantial number are people who transferred over. Now, by no means should we consider everyone in the list here an "active user" under this sort of standard, looking at >50 lifetime edits. (Not that we can easily filter that here.) But it's far more nuanced when we do any sort of analysis. (And, again, I agree that we shouldn't take edits from there, but for other reasons than that.) Najawin ☎ 08:15, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

Well it's not really the point I'm trying to make, I just thought it was an interesting stat (and I very strongly disagree with tying a wiki's community to just how active its editor-base is). But, for the most part, when wikis fork the original one doesn't shrivel up and die, and so it's baseless to assume that this wiki's Fandom counterpart will. Just a cursory glance at RecentChanges on those wikis will tell you that. Guyus24 ☎ 09:06, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

I didn't necessarily mean that we should expect the Fandom husk to actually shrivel up and die any day soon (not unless Fandom itself goes down, anyway), merely that, like, we want it to. It would be good if that happened. So our relationship to it is always going to be fundamentally different from our relationship to the unrelated Who fansites that T:DON'T COPY was originally written about, with whom we are interested in long-term, happy coexistence. You know?

Either way, I fundamentally do not understand the idea that we should "respect" continued Fandom editor's choice by not copying their edits. Not in the sense that we should disrespect them, just in the sense that I don't think there's any disrespect in copying (quite the opposite, since we're paying their edits a de facto compliment!). They are, again, working under Creative Commons. They are releasing work under an open-source license, in the full knowledge that it can be copied by anyone at any time for any reason, provided they give proper credit. It is simply not a thing that you write things on a CC-BY wiki under the expectation that it's only ever going to appear on that Wiki; it's not a betrayal or an outrage to copy it somewhere "else". If people dislike it, they have only themselves to blame — their feelings are no more sensical than someone giving money to a homeless person, seemingly with no strings attached, then trying to police what they do with it. You've donated your work, it's Part Of The Commons now, it belongs to the people. You don't get to dictate where it goes or does not go!

And, as I said, I wholeheartedly bite the bullet that the Fandom holdouts have an inalienable right to copy our work (so long as our licenses remain compatible and they give proper attribution). Creative Commons is a beautiful thing, and I just can't help but view this kind of hand-wringing as antithetical to its information-wants-to-be-free ideal.

With all of that said, SEO impact is concerning and worth discussing. I just don't think T:DON'T COPY as it stands, or the idea of "respecting Fandom users' choices", really stand up to scrutiny in this matter. --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 09:33, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

(To be clear, my position here is not that we should "respect these users choice". I think it's a tactically bad idea, as the editor asymmetry means that they'll be incentivized to copy from here far more than vice versa.) Najawin ☎ 09:38, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

I'm sorry, Scrooge, but no you don't get to have your cake and eat it too without getting pushback. You got your own little group together and decided to fork without a community discussion, and now you say that copying said community's edits is fine and dandy? Nope, not having it. You wanted separate from Fandom? That means doing the work that Fandom has done and attracting your own editors to do make their own edits. You do not get a grace period while you wait for the Fandom site to shrivel up, not when you are already befitting from years worth of their marketing and other people's edits. You don't get to call us misguided simply because we don't want to join you or because we don't think an independent fandom wiki will be sustainable long term, and you certainly don't get to act like you are paying us a compliment. Sure, you are right that you are allowed to copy edits with the right credit, no one can stop you, but the amount of disrespect and disregard for the people who, not so long ago, you were an admin of is very worrying. LauraBatham ☎ 11:52, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

We didn't "decide to fork with a community discussion". The discussions were had — but we had to have them off-Wiki, with as many editors as we could coax into such off-Wiki spaces to discuss the matter, because Fandom's parameters on how to have such a discussion are worse than nonexistent.

(To wit, there is an absolute two-weeks time limit with no possible repeats; and that's a real damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't situation. Two weeks is nowhere near enough time to get a functional fork going, put funding together, etc., so you'd need to have done it all in advance before you presentd the thread; yet this stuff costs money and considerable effort, and who would pay for that without prior assurance that the community will actually go for it? There's no good option, and there never will be until Fandom allows unlimited discussion of the possibility of forking on-site.)

Moving was not my idea. Many can testify I was initially sceptical, as were others. We were won over by a community consensus of participants to the discussion, over considerable time. This was a move, not a schism; or at least, to the degree that it's turning into a schism, that was never our intention.

I really am sorry for the cloak-and-dagger measures we had to resort to; but I never did, and never will, intend any disrespect or ill-will to those editors whom we were not able to make a part of those discussions. It is the nature of every big policy decision that 1° not everyone participated in the discussions, and 2° not everyone likes the final outcome; it's never a comfortable place to be, but please believe that this is, as far as I'm concerned, what has happened here, to you and other Fandom holdouts. Nothing more or less.

Regardless, the point stands that Creative Commons is an ideal, an ethos. Working under Creative Commons isn't just a legal footnote, it means you're participating in a global initiative for free information. I still don't see how you can be part of that, and yet insist it's disrespectful to see it reused. --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 12:07, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

I do understand what Laura's said. I decided very early on not to take it personally, but I've edited Tardis Wiki for nine years and only found out about the forking several days after it went live thanks to a tweet I happened to come across. I've been a regular editor for almost the entirety of those nine years and was easily contactable via Discord.

If I hadn't happened across that Tweet, I would have remained on a wiki that editors here believe is going to die a death and been blithely unaware that my edits were being cherry-picked and transferred over. Legally, fine. Morally, not a good move in my opinion.

It does sometimes feel that there is a divide between your average editor and the Select Few who get to be in the know and add info on each other's spinoffs of spinoffs of spinoffs of Doctor Who here for exposure. Nothing wrong with that, but it does feel like there is a divide there.

But a lot of this is off-topic. I think, as a general rule, we should try to copy and paste edits over from the Other Wiki as little as possible. Jack ☎ 12:18, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

The disrespect is in the way you are talking about us like we are misguided fools and yet still wanting our work (something for which people are rightly calling out BCM for). It's in your open wish for our community space to "shrivel up" in favour of the one that you are controlling. Its not about the edits - those are free information that (provided credit is given) is free to use - it's about your attitude. LauraBatham ☎ 12:50, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

Some responses

@Jack: We did attempt to contact you on Discord, and failed — I think the ID presently still available on your Fandom account is no longer valid following Discord's username format change some time ago. (I retried it just now, and got the same error message.)

I agree that a number of long-term, valued editors having had to find out overnight like this was suboptimal, and that you all deserved better — but I can only repeat that we did our best to reach out to everyone we could. User:Najawin will testify (and talk page messages will bear out) that I went to considerable length to finally get him on the line in a private, off-Fandom space even though his online habits were not at all amenable to it. It was in no way a matter of a deliberately chosen "Select Few" who "got to be in the know", I promise — notwithstanding the obvious exceptions of CzechOut and Spongebob, we wanted as many people to know as possible.

(Indeed, the people who frequent the Doctor Who Discord #wiki chat will be able to testify that it makes a much broader circle than the smaller, loosely-federated faction of writer-editors to whom you refer — and invites for the server had been openly posted on n8's user page for years! Insofar as we creative types amount to a coherent, specific group, we certainly hold no specific knowledge or power in a way that might have impacted the way the move was handled. User:Bongolium500 was the primary actor without whom none of this would have been remotely possible, and he's no spin-off writer — nor do I know him socially in any way outside of Wiki-related matters. I do understand why you would get the impression you gesture at, but truly, I believe you have the wrong end of the stick regarding our intentions, actions, and backgrounds in all of this.)

@Laura, I never called any of you "misguided fools". "Misguided" was meant to be anything but insulting! It's the word you might use to describe someone whom you deeply respect, but who you believe to be making a mistake. And that's just what I believe is happening here. I believe that most editors currently editing the Fandom host are making an unfortunate error of judgement — specifically unfortunate because I respect them and wish they would come over. No contradiction, no hypocrisy, and no intended insult. Granting that I believe that it would ideally have been best if the entire community had migrated over to the new host — and I don't see that I can very well believe anything else under the circumstance — I'm not sure how you would want, or expect me to talk about people who remain at Fandom…? They're doing something which I earnestly think they oughtn't for the long-term health of the Wiki. Again, turnabout is far play, if they believe that we, by editing the forked Wiki, are doing something which is detrimental to the long-term health of the project, then I am entirely fine with them calling us "misguided". I don't think anyone is arguing that having two parallel Wikis is a desirable state of affairs, so each side kind of has to believe that the other one is acting in error. We can and should be polite and respectful about it, but one does have to call a spade a spade…

I also want to make it very clear that I don't "control" this space any more than I controlled the Fandom Wiki. I'm just one of many admins — crikey, I'm not even a bureaucrat! We have bureaucrats; if anyone has 'control' here it's User:SOTO and User:Tangerineduel. They outrank me! I'm not in charge! Or if you want to go one rung up, we are at some level 'controlled by' the server sysadmins — but they're very hands-off about the actual contents of the Wiki (much more than Fandom Staff were), and, again, I'm not one of them. I don't tell them what to do. Not a bit. Don't have that power, don't want it. The fork has not put me any more or less in charge of anything than I ever was.

Nor, obviously, do I wish for the community to shrivel! The community is wonderful! But that's precisely why it is my fondest wish that the entire community would migrate to the new, and, in my view, clearly superior, host. "I wish the Fandom Wiki would go away" is the very opposite of saying "I wish User:LauraBatham (et alt.) would go away"; I keep hoping for all valued editors to move here so that all that's left on the other side truly is an inactive/unmodded "husk", and we can carry on just as we were before, only on a functional platform with no intrusive ads or forced features. A remarkable number of you migrated to help us bring ever closer to that dream; and I am eternally thankful to every single one of you.

Rivalries and factionalism are the very opposite of anything I've ever wanted, and that is why I react so strongly — perhaps too strongly? — to accusations of personal vendettas or favouritism being in play. We are — should be — the same old Tardis Wiki with a new URL. That's all I've ever hoped for. Reality will always fall short of perfection, but I am in favour of anything that brings us closer to that dream. SEO concerns aside, importing good edits for those editors who have not, as yet, come to trust the new host, seems to be one of those things. That's al.

And sure. Perhaps some of you just don't believe we can do it. The practicalities of keeping such a big indie Wiki up indefinitely are daunting; I took some convincing to take the leap, myself, as I mentioned earlier. I hope our hopes and confidence aren't misplaced. Time will tell; it always does. And perhaps, in two, five, ten years, you'll come to see that we're here to stay. God, I hope so.

But in the meantime — even if you still think we're going to fail — please, I beg you, at least don't misconstrue what we're trying to do here. What the dream is. I truly, deeply believe that the best way forward is the "basically everyone moves, things pick up as normal" scenario, and we've gotten wonderfully close to it, perhaps closer than we dared hope at the start. If one believes as I do, then of course people still editing the old host are "misguided" (in an innocent, sympathetic but tragic way). And of course bringing those edits over is a well-meaning move, not an attempted slight. Again, I'm not asking you to believe in that dream; but please understand the mindset. --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 14:07, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

I feel the need to be transparent mention that I actually did have Jack's Discord prior to the fork and could have contacted him about it, but that it entirely slipped my mind. I'm really sorry about that. Bongo50 ☎ 14:15, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

For the record, I've only been importing missing edits from users who have migrated (and from not those who have migrated but continued to be more active on the Fandom Wiki, which is BCM and Laura, as much as we're missing you both).

Other intervening edits necessarily also get imported when I import page histories for specific users' edits, of course (and even if we could get around this somehow, it wouldn't satisfy CC BY-SA 3.0 that way). I don't think anyone else has actively been performing imports.

Those imports are a courtesy to those users (usually directly requested, as well), so incoming users don't need to redo all their edits.

I fully acknowledge that not being able to contact users to announce the fork on the same day was less than ideal. I was personally pushing for a public discussion on Fandom Tardis first... but in the weeks leading up to our announcement, Fandom made their guidelines much stricter, (apparently) seeking to control the local process by requiring the use of a special template you need to put in a private request for.

We were all concerned they would take action to prevent us from enacting consensus and actually fork, unless we did things in this order. Thankfully, we've managed to get through it all very peacefully, with no retaliation (like some of the horror stories we'd heard from other independent wikis).

Anyway, I agree with Scrooge that forging rivalries is very much not on our to-do list, and I was more than a little surprised to see some of the comments here. We certainly didn't fork so that a select group of editors can have "control". It's so that the community can self-govern. And no matter what you choose to do with our new domain, you're still the community, even from afar.
× SOTO (☎/✍/↯) 14:51, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

I can't say that I understand the sentiment that Tardis should "find its own editors", though. I cannot emphasise enough how this is not some cabal that decided to start its own separate thing. Pretty much all admins and two out of three bureaucrats (the third works for Fandom) have migrated, as have the vast majority of active users.

There is no "us versus them" in any of this. We're just hoping to keep this wonderful community together without these conflicts, which seem to me to be arising out of misinformation. (And as for Fandom, they've profiting off all our hard work for 20 years, at least as much as we've benefitted from their branding. It was a good relationship for a while, but now they're prioritising those profits over the communities they claim to serve. Our first priority has always been to the editors... not to a brand.)
× SOTO (☎/✍/↯) 15:14, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

(Just chiming in to say I appreciate the attempt to contact me and that there's absolutely no need to apologise, Bongo.) Jack ☎ 16:23, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

Laura, let me emphasize as well that in spite of you deciding not to edit here, a decision I do not agree with but completely understand, you've been given rollback perms. (tbf, I disagree with the decision to give a bunch of us rollback perms without a forum thread, but that's neither here nor there.) Surely this is incompatible with the idea that you're being condescended to, treated like a fool, rather than simply making a decision we disagree with and hope you'll reconsider, no? I don't love the lack of a two week discussion period, I've made that clear multiple times. But at the end of the day I do understand it, and I can't blame the people involved for Fandom's increasingly dictatorial practices. I worry that there's quite a lot of bad faith interpretations of behavior in how people are treating this split and interactions in it, rather than everyone treating the people involved as rational, motivated (if perhaps sometimes somewhat emotional, let's admit that we can all be so) persons trying to do our best. Najawin ☎ 19:23, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

(And, yes, Scrooge's attempts to reach me were a subject of considerable anxiety on my part. They're still detailed on my talk.) Najawin ☎ 19:38, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

I believe the concerns about 'respect' have mostly been answered by now but I just want to make clear what my thoughts are. For the most part, I don't feel like your average Fandom Wiki editor knows CC BY-SA even is. That's not an insult to be clear - speaking from personal experience, I know I didn't for a long time and I have only really been taking it seriously in the last few years. It's just a site you can edit. And I know, yes, technically you're not really contributing to a particular Wiki and your edits just go to "The Commons", but I really don't think most casual editors know or appreciate that.

I certainly feel that if this wiki wants to continue to copy edits over it should be by properly importing them rather than another user copying them in their own name. Somehow that feels different to me. SOTO's approach sits much better with me with the guardrails that that the user has expressed interest with their edits coming over. But I also note that some users are still coming here with the perception that the Fandom Wiki is the "wrong" one and that their edits have been "wasted", and neither of those things are really right.

On the perceived abruptness of the fork, the whole "discussion can only go for two weeks" thing is actually a myth. The current forking policy makes no reference to time frame at all, mentioning only "the duration of the active discussion" without placing any limit on it. The older pre-November 2023 version of the policy did have two weeks in it, but that was only referring to how long you could leave a link to the discussion on the home page, and not how long the discussion itself could have gone for. So there absolutely could have been an on-wiki discussion about it. But I totally understand if there were concerns with CzechOut playing in to that decision, it's a fairly unique case. Guyus24 ☎ 22:28, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

sysadmin response

Going to cite the forking policy to further clarify on what happened and regarding the secrecy:

The new wiki's URL cannot be added to pages other than the discussion.
The discussion link may stay on the main page for the duration of the active discussion, meaning from when the discussion (or voting) begins until the outcome is decided and any users leaving the community move.
This includes not posting on message walls with notices directing people to the fork.
Sitenotices and Anonnotices referencing the discussion, the fork, or the new URL are not permitted.

Without the sitenotice and being forced to rely on only the main page while fandom staff is fully aware. Yeah have to inform to get the template and can't just use the template from dev wiki. There's relatively 0 point in having an on-wiki discussion when the policy is ambiguous in regards to informing the community at large of the discussion taking place.

choosing to hold a fork discussion on wiki would mean staff is alerted and staff would be overseeing the discussion. The duration of the thread notice on the main page would be subject to fandom staff's determination of when the discussion dies down. Staff choose to not honor the 2 week sitenotice for Zelda wiki, why would anyone trust an even less clear duration period?
since any such discussion space would include a link to the fork or pending new domain, per the rule of "not posting notices that direct to the fork"; there is an implied restriction on informing the community of any such discussion on user talk or messagewalls. Whether this implied and unfortunate ambiguous rule is enforced is unknown. The fact this is ambiguous proves Fandom is not serious about being open or able to respect such a community decision without confusion or uncertainty.
There is no written policy indicating what happens if an admin led discussion were to fail, a big risk.
There is no indication of how many times a fork discussion can be held, another risk factor

A major factor is how Fandom reacted to Minecraft wiki's fork that was completely out in the open and encouraged staff to give their 2 cents, their wiki rep gave up trying to convince. The result was a completely non-involved admin from the Russian wiki got demoted thus triggering 12 wikis leaving in total.

There was an attempt to get Tardis wiki community onto a private discord server to ensure everyone was aware, this was refused. The purpose was to conduct a discussion in secret. Due to Fandom staff's unpredictability of a response, regardless of what Spongebob456 has assured, and the ambiguous unwritten rules that are enforced; the difficult decision was made to only bring in trusted admins and community members whom intended to support the fork. --Tardis sysadmin ☎ 06:20, 8 April 2024 (UTC)

@@ Line 503: / Line 503: @@
 ::::: On the perceived abruptness of the fork, the whole "discussion can only go for two weeks" thing is actually a myth. The [https://community.fandom.com/wiki/Forking_Policy current forking policy] makes no reference to time frame at all, mentioning only "the duration of the active discussion" without placing any limit on it. The [https://community.fandom.com/wiki/Forking_Policy?oldid=3742918 older pre-November 2023 version of the policy] ''did'' have two weeks in it, but that was only referring to how long you could leave a link to the discussion on the home page, and not how long the discussion itself could have gone for. So there absolutely could have been an on-wiki discussion about it. But I totally understand if there were concerns with CzechOut playing in to that decision, it's a fairly unique case. [[User:Guyus24|Guyus24]] [[User talk:Guyus24|<span title="Talk to me">☎</span>]] 22:28, 2 April 2024 (UTC)
+==sysadmin response==
 Going to cite the forking policy to further clarify on what happened and regarding the secrecy:
 * The new wiki's URL cannot be added to pages other than the discussion.
@@ Line 510: / Line 510: @@
 * Sitenotices and Anonnotices referencing the discussion, the fork, or the new URL are not permitted.
 Without the sitenotice and being forced to rely on only the main page while fandom staff is fully aware. Yeah have to inform to get the template and can't just use the template from dev wiki. There's relatively 0 point in having an on-wiki discussion when the policy is ambiguous in regards to informing the community at large of the discussion taking place.
-* since any such discussion space would include a link to the fork or pending new domain, there is an implied restriction on informing the community of any such discussion on user talk or messagewalls. Whether this implied  and ambiguous rule is enforced is unknown. The fact this is ambiguous proves Fandom is not serious about being open or able to respect such a community decision without confusion or uncertainty.
+* choosing to hold a fork discussion on wiki would mean staff is alerted and staff would be overseeing the discussion. The duration of the thread notice on the main page would be subject to fandom staff's determination of ''when the discussion dies down''. Staff choose to not honor the 2 week sitenotice for Zelda wiki, why would anyone trust an even less clear duration period?
+* since any such discussion space would include a link to the fork or pending new domain, per the rule of "not posting notices that direct to the fork"; there is an implied restriction on informing the community of any such discussion on user talk or messagewalls. Whether this implied and unfortunate ambiguous rule is enforced is unknown. The fact this is ambiguous proves Fandom is not serious about being open or able to respect such a community decision without confusion or uncertainty.
 * There is no written policy indicating what happens if an admin led discussion were to fail, a big risk.
-* while there is no indication of how many times a fork discussion can be held, another risk factor
+* There is no indication of how many times a fork discussion can be held, another risk factor
-A major factor is how Fandom reacted to Minecraft wiki's fork that was completely out in the open and encouragement of staff to give their 2 cents, their wiki rep gave up trying to convince. The result was a completely non-involved admin from the Russian wiki got demoted thus triggering 12 wikis leaving in total.
+A major factor is how Fandom reacted to Minecraft wiki's fork that was completely out in the open and encouraged staff to give their 2 cents, their wiki rep gave up trying to convince. The result was a completely non-involved admin from the Russian wiki got demoted thus triggering 12 wikis leaving in total.
-There was an attempt to get Tardis wiki community onto a private discord server to ensure everyone was aware, this was refused. The purpose was to conduct a discussion in secret. Due to Fandom staff's unpredictability of a response regardless of what Spongebob456 has assured and the ambiguous unwritten rules that are enforced; the difficult decision was made to only bring in trusted admins and community members whom intended to support the fork. --[[User:Tardis sysadmin|Tardis sysadmin]] [[User talk:Tardis sysadmin|<span title="Talk to me">☎</span>]] 06:20, 8 April 2024 (UTC)
+There was an attempt to get Tardis wiki community onto a private discord server to ensure everyone was aware, this was refused. The purpose was to conduct a discussion in secret. Due to Fandom staff's unpredictability of a response, regardless of what Spongebob456 has assured, and the ambiguous unwritten rules that are enforced; the difficult decision was made to only bring in trusted admins and community members whom intended to support the fork. --[[User:Tardis sysadmin|Tardis sysadmin]] [[User talk:Tardis sysadmin|<span title="Talk to me">☎</span>]] 06:20, 8 April 2024 (UTC)

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