Hollow Knight Wiki:Moving from Fandom

As of October 31, 2023, the Hollow Knight Wiki has moved from Fandom to a new wiki host: ABXY. The new wiki can be found here: hollowknight.wiki.

All pages have been migrated without change, and all editors have moved to the new wiki. We will not be working on this wiki any longer, and we will not add any Silksong info here. If you do want to edit or continue editing, please use the new wiki.

Why did we move?
Our reasons mainly have to do with the lack of freedom Fandom has given us regarding the Hollow Knight Wiki. Subsequent paragraphs will further elaborate on the following three topics: excessive ad placement, limited page customization, and severe difficulties faced in opting out of Fandom’s features.

Ad Placement
Fandom is quite extreme with ad campaigns. Without ad blockers, readers have to witness up to three or more large, intrusive ads being affixed on a page. Along with the generic ads, auto-playing videos, reviews, surveys, and other bloat entirely unrelated to the topic may also pop up, thus creating a distracting, frustrating, and slow experience to editors and readers alike. Additionally, we’re aware of situations like that on Grimace's wiki page, in which pages are entirely edited by Fandom staff in order to promote a product, completely replacing the community’s contributions in the pages and not letting even administrators edit them. Situations like these made us aware of how little control we have over the articles we write, and the site we manage. This is not a positive precedent, as it shows that Fandom does not care about the effort put into content, and will erase hours of work without a second thought.

With ABXY, we will still have ads, but they are much more limited and significantly smaller, with as little as one to two ads per page. We know they will not distract users as much as the ones in Fandom.

Page Design
Monotony in design has been kept throughout all pages in Fandom. This mostly pertains to skins, as FandomDesktop and FandomMobile became established and kept, with little opportunity for page redesign, along with the complete removal of any alternative skin.

Our team was rather quick to change skins once the forking was assured. Another freedom we can afford is to not require any and all Javascript updates to undergo Fandom review. With this, we can also further customize the appearance and functionality of our pages at higher speeds.

Poor Additions
Last, but certainly not least, is that the Hollow Knight Wiki was forced into using unhelpful features. The most recent example - as well as what triggered our leave - was the “Quick Answers” feature. Not only were the questions themselves festering with improper grammar, but the answers themselves had details that were slid in from entirely unrelated video games and/or stories. The fact that we were not able to remove or edit them made it even worse. Fandom did not bother to test the AI that made these answers, and after this “feature” was added, we decided it was time to move from Fandom.

An earlier example is the “Discussions” feature, which was finally taken down after two requests. Due to several unnecessary, unproductive altercations with random community members, the feature had become of little use to us. In neither case did we have the power to disallow these features in our Wiki. It was all in the hands of Fandom. Thankfully, given widespread backlash from several Wiki communities, the Quick Answers feature was removed swiftly, in comparison to Discussions.

Now, we do not have to deal with any unnecessary additions and features. We basically have full control over what we want to do with the wiki.

Conclusion
It may hopefully have become apparent that our relationship with Fandom wasn’t very fruitful as the years went by. We have weighed the benefits and drawbacks and thus decided to fork over to ABXY. As prior paragraphs have laid out, the restrictions imposed by Fandom were far too numerous to stay with them. You may be interested in helping us out, and some very easy ways to do so are the following:
 * Do not use any of the Fandom Hollow Knight Wiki’s pages from now on: we won’t be maintaining the Fandom wiki any longer, and all Silksong information will be added to the independent wiki instead.
 * Do not click on any links or pages that will lead to it, or continue editing it: You can also try out the Indie Wiki Buddy browser extension, which will automatically redirect any Fandom wiki links to the new wiki.
 * Update your bookmarks: and clean up your search history in hollowknight.fandom.com as that decreases the chances of you getting suggestions from that site when typing in your browser’s address bar.

We aim to overtake the Fandom wiki in search results, but we can only do it with your help. We are grateful for having a community so committed to drawing information from our content, and supporting us as the years go by.

Whatever information you need to find for Hollow Knight or Silksong, we have it all available and up to date here: hollowknight.wiki.

Migrating your Fandom account to the new wiki
If you have a Fandom account and wish to continue editing on the new wiki, please refer to this account migration guide. Migrating your account will not delete your account on Fandom and will only copy over your edit history and watchlist.

- The Hollow Knight Wiki Team